Jim Crow Laws
- Eventually, the Court validated state legislation that industrialized the separation of the races.
- Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)
- White southerners were working to strengthen white supremacy and to separate the races to the greatest extent possible
- Black Voting Rights: In some places, black voting continued for some time after Reconstruction because conservative whites believed they could control the black electorate and use it to beat back the attempts of poor white farmers to take control of the democratic party. Many members of the conservative elite began to fear that poor whites might unite politically with poor blacks to challenge them. Two devices emerged before 1900 to evade the fifth amendment to stop blacks from voting. Poll taxes or some form of property qualification. Another was the literacy test. Even those African Americans who could read had difficulty passing the difficult test white officials gave them. literacy tests for whites were sometimes much easier than those for blacks. Some states passed the grandfather laws, permitting men who could no t meet the literacy and property qualifications to be enfranchised if their ancestors had voted before.
- Laws restricting the franchise and segregating schools were part of the Jim crow laws
- Blacks and whites could not ride together in the same railroad cars, sit in the same waiting rooms, use the same washrooms, eat in the same restaurants or sin in the same theaters.
- Blacks had no access to many public parks, beaches, and picnic areas
- Jim crow laws stripped blacks of many of the modest social, economic, and political gains they had made in the more fluid atmosphere of the late nineteenth century.
- Laws served as a means for whites to retain control of social relations between the races int eh newly growing cities and towns of the South where traditional patterns of deference and subjugation were more difficult to preserve than in in the countryside.
- Lynching also rose significantly