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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Jim Crow laws were racial segregation laws enacted between 1876 and 1965 in the United States at the state and local level. They mandated de jure racial segregation in all public facilities in Southern states of the former Confederacy, with, starting in 1890, a "separate but equal" status for African Americans. The separation in practice led to conditions for African Americans that tended to be inferior to those provided for white Americans, systematizing a number of economic, educational and social disadvantages. De jure segregation mainly applied to the Southern United States. While Northern segregation was generally de facto, there were patterns of segregation in housing enforced by covenants, bank lending practices, and job discrimination, including discriminatory union practices for decades.
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.
Jim Crow: A Clever Ruse with Cruel Intent by Nunya Buisness English 151 Professor Weezy 21 April 2013 Racial inequality and segregation was not a new manifestation. Before the Civil War, when slavery had established the status of most blacks, there was no apparent need for statutory measures segregating the races. The initial postwar governments passed a few segregation laws and some restrictive Black Codes, but these did not continue to exist past Reconstruction. What replaced them, however, was not racial integration but an informal code of exclusion and discrimination. (Litwack 8) The Jim Crow system gave Southern whites a legal way to reclaim all-encompassing control over the lives of blacks after the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Abraham Lincoln once said, “I clam not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events controlled me” (Letter to Albert G. Hodges). In agreement with his quote, when President Lincoln distributed the exceptional Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, Lincoln freed slaves in the Southern states, although he and his actions were being controlled by the civil war. On September22, 1862, in the middle of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln put forth a Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation (Tackach 45). The document stated that after January 1, 1863, slaves belonging to all Southern states that were still in rebellion would be free (Tachach 45). Nevertheless, the Emancipation Proclamation had no instant until Thirteenth Amendment was added to the Constitution in 1865, about three years after the Emancipation was ordained.
Civil Rights are the rights give to a citizen by the United States government, such as the right to vote, the Civil Rights Movement was when African Americans and other minorities began to protest and fight for these rights, which at the time was only given to white Americans I the believe the Federal Government has the right to integrate the southern Untied States. The states in the south, like Mississippi, did not have the right to ignore the federal law to set by Congress and the Civil Right Act of 1964. Even with the tenth amendment the laws of the federal government over power the rights of the state. The common good of the southern population was interrupted by the racist laws and regulations set by the “Southern Manifesto”. The common good was affected one way by these because the majority population in the south was African American.