These laws denied black Americans the equal rights of white citizens which re-imposed white supremacy and meant they remained as second-class citizens. It wasn’t only the Jim Crow laws but under the Fifteenth Amendment, black people had the legal right to vote throughout America. Nonetheless, the southern states found devious ways to disenfranchise the local black population. For example, some states introduced a grandfather clause, which meant that people could only vote if their grandfathers had been able to vote. Other states introduced literacy tests as criteria for voting.
However, many southern states found ways around the laws to disenfranchise the black populations. They did this by introducing a ‘Grandfather Clause’, which is that only people whose grandfather voted, gave them the ability to vote. Also literacy test was another method used, which in most ways wasn’t made fairly and even well educated people were disenfranchised and not allowed to vote. However, in 1946 President Truman established The President’s Committee on ‘Civil rights’, producing a report examining the experiences of racial minorities in America. The report was called ‘To Secure These Rights’, this report highlighted the problems facing African Americans and proposed radical changes to make American society better.
Jim Crow is “the systematic practice of promoting the segregation of the Negro peoples” (North by South). “Jim Crow was the name of the racial caste system which operated primarily, but not exclusively in southern and border states, between 1877 and the mid-1960s” (Pilgrim). The Jim Crow Movement was a prominent factor that led to the control of the black population in America. It was a system used to obstruct basic rights for African-Americans. Jim Crow was a way of life, not just a set of unjust laws.
After the abolition of slavery in the United States, three Constitutional amendments were passed to grant newly freed African Americans legal status: the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, the Fourteenth provided citizenship, and the Fifteenth guaranteed the right to vote. In spite of these amendments and civil rights acts to enforce the amendments, between 1873 and 1883 the Supreme Court handed down a series of decisions that virtually nullified the work of Congress during Reconstruction. Regarded by many as second-class citizens, blacks were separated from whites by law and by private action in transportation, public accommodations, recreational facilities, prisons, armed forces, and schools in both Northern and Southern states. Second-class citizenship became the pivotal form of racial oppression in the United States, especially in the South, in the decades following the Civil War. The emancipation of slaves in the South posed a serious problem for large landowners who had previously relied almost entirely on slave labor for their incomes.
If Myers novels are written about African-American characters and intended for an African-American audience, why should this literature be denied as African-American? According to Warren, this literature is not African-American for two reasons: First, because the work was created post-Jim Crow. Second, because the work is not written for the same reasons as during Jim Crow. Simply because a novel was not
Race Relations after the Civil War 3 The way white Southerners made it difficult on former slaves in the South was to create what was called “Black Codes”. These codes were laws made by southern states to try to ensure their way of life could not be infringed on in the wake of the passing of the 13th amendment which outlawed slavery. Examples of such codes varied from state to state. However, the message was clear to the former slaves that they were still unequal. Examples of these laws are as follows: 1.
The Portuguese had called the African Americans “Negros” which meant black in Spanish and the Americans then changed that word to “Nigger”. Later on after the civil rights movement, the definition for that word became, “a low life person”. Today, there are two different ways people use this word. The first way is “Nigger” and it is used as a racial slur against African Americans. The second way is “Nigga” and that is used by African Americans when talking to their friend.
As stated earlier, the meaning of the word “race” is merely the categorization of different populations, on earth, among humans. If the “Negro” was really one of the lowest races, that would be considered a different specie, he or she wouldn’t be able to reproduce any offspring with someone of white race or a different race. Even though, Dr. Hunt somewhat agrees “that the offspring of all the mixtures of the so-called races of man are
In the historical court case of Plessy v. Ferguson of 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that Louisiana’s segregation law mandating separate but equal accommodations for both black and whites on intrastate railroads was constitutional. This decision was the legal basis for other state and local governments to continue to legally separate blacks and whites socially until it was overturned by Brown v. Board of education in 1954. Homer Plessy, a shoemaker and native of New Orleans, who was recruited by the Citizens’ Committee of New Orleans to violate the Louisiana’s 1890 Separate Car law that segregated its passengers by race. In 1892, Mr. Plessy, whose skin color and physical features of a white male purchased a first class train ticket to ride in the “white-only” car, when the conductor asked him what was his race, he revealed that he was 7/8 white which meant he was considered a black man and was arrested when he refused to sit in the “black-only” car. Mr. Tourgee, attorney for Mr. Plessy, argued that his Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments had been violated.
For some time, whites had been engaging in many strategies to keep the African American individual on the lower end of the totem pole: sharecropping kept black farmers in a cycle of dependency to their white landlords (H., 453); blacks were disfranchised through literacy tests in the South (H., 567); Jim Crow laws were passed in the late 1880s that segregated the South (H., 568); and in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 the Supreme Court stated that segregation was not discriminatory and thereby created the hypocritical “separate but equal” doctrine (H., 568-569). Therefore, the decision of the NAACP to constantly barrage the government, laws, and courts to create equal rights was rational because of the harsh limitation that these unjust laws placed upon African Americans. The NAACP also utilized the constitutional rights that they already held to further their cause. The Bill of Rights and the great Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution each declared it to be unconstitutional to discriminate against blacks (H., 816). Because of these rights, battling through the court system to force them to uphold them was necessary for the Civil Rights movement to be