After the American Civil War (1861–1865), the government provided protection for the civil rights of slaves. The Thirteenth Amendment was to abolish slavery, except as a punishment for crime. The term "slavery" implies involuntary servitude or bondage and the ownership by human beings of other human beings as property. In the Civil Rights Cases (1883), the Fourteenth Amendment applied only to the actions of government, not to those of private individuals, and as a result did not protect persons against individuals or private entities. The State of Louisiana passed Act 111 that required separate living quarters for African Americans and Whites on railroads.
They ruled that no state had the power to pass a law that went against the 14th amendment of the United States Constitution. The Civil war played a major role as well in segregation as we all well know. In ruling on a Louisiana Law it was a requirement that facilities for whites and African Americans on trains. In a Supreme Court case it was upheld for separate but equal rights. But in 1896 the decision the Court gave permission to segregated services.
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.
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.
Tiffany Robinson Writing Assignment 5 African American History The May 1896 Plessy V. Ferguson case is one of the landmark rulings in the history of American Jurisprudence. It was the culminating legal action of the post-Reconstruction period in American race relations, and made a firm statement that the Federal Government was not in the business of protecting African American. It opened the door to the era of virtual apartheid in the United States that lasted until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s. The Supreme Court decision legitimized legal segregation in the nation. It provided that there could be separate public facilities, like schools and movie theaters as long as the facilities were near equal in equality.
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
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.
But it was all worth it. There have been many benefits of the civil rights act. Opportunities that normally would not have been available, like getting an education, receiving non discriminated employment, and being able to participate in society without fear of reprisal and fear of hate groups. Although there is little discrimination today we are in danger of regressing. We have made great strides in the fact that currently we have a black president.
In 1890, the Louisiana Segregated car act was passed which was a law that required all railroad cars to have a “white patrons only” car and a “Jim Crow” car. This meant that it made it equally illegal for a white to sit in the car set aside for Negros as for blacks to occupy seats in a carriage reserved for whites. This eventually became controversial because of mixed families; white fathers would have to sit in white railroad cars while the black mother and the mulatto children would sit in the black train cart. Tourgeé took it upon himself and his committee to challenge the constitutionality of the Separate Car law. After successfully leading a test case in which the Louisiana district court declared forced segregation in railroad cars traveling between states to be unconstitutional, the committee was eager to test Act No.
3. February 3, 1870----15th amendment: prohibits the federal and state governments from denying a citizen the right to vote based on that citizen's "race, color, or previous condition of servitude. 4. 1896-----Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), was a landmark United States Supreme Court decision upholding the constitutionality of state laws requiring racial segregation in public facilities under the doctrine of "separate but equal." 5.