Though seemingly rigid and complete, Jim Crow laws did not account for all of the discrimination blacks suffered. Virginia told fraternal social groups that black and white members could not address each other as “Brother.” Atlanta courts kept two Bibles: one for black witnesses and one for whites. In Florida, the books couldn’t even be stored together. In North Carolina, black and white students had to use separate sets of textbooks. Prisons, hospitals, and orphanages were segregated as were schools and colleges. Oklahoma had black and white phone booths. ![]() Signs marked “Whites Only” or “Colored” hung over doors, ticket windows, and drinking fountains. Mobile passed a Jim Crow curfew: Blacks could not leave their homes after 10 p.m. (One could not marry someone of a different race.) By 1914, Texas had six entire towns in which blacks could not live. In Richmond, one could not live on a street unless most of the residents were people one could marry. Many industries wouldn’t hire blacks: Many unions passed rules to exclude them. In South Carolina, black and white textile workers could not work in the same room, enter through the same door, or gaze out of the same window. Jim Crow laws touched every part of life. Eight years later, only 1,342, 1 percent, could pass the state’s new rules. In 1896, Louisiana had 130,334 registered black voters. Given the green light, Southern states began to limit the voting right to those who owned property or could read well, to those whose grandfathers had been able to vote, to those with “good characters,” to those who paid poll taxes. Two years later, the court seemed to seal the fate of black Americans when it upheld a Mississippi law designed to deny black men the vote. Upholding the law, the court said that public facilities for blacks and whites could be “separate but equal.” Soon, throughout the South, they had to be separate. Ferguson, a case challenging the law, reached the U.S. In 1890, in spite of its 16 black members, the Louisiana General Assembly passed a law to prevent black and white people from riding together on railroads. Newspapers fed the bias of white readers by playing up (sometimes even making up) black crimes. Politicians abused black people to win the votes of poor whites. In the depression-racked 1890s, racism appealed to whites who feared losing their jobs to blacks. Jim Crow laws were based on the theory of white supremacy and were a reaction to Reconstruction. It came to mean any state law passed in the South that established different rules for blacks and whites. “Jim Crow” was a derisive slang term for a black man. Worse, denial of their rights and freedoms would be made legal by a series of racist statutes, the Jim Crow laws. Over the next 20 years, blacks would lose almost all they had gained. “The morning light is breaking,” he told his readers. He saw whites casually talk with black strangers. He saw a black policeman arrest a white criminal. True, many rural blacks lived under a sharecropping system little better than slavery. True, terrorism against blacks - lynching, rape, arson - ran unchecked. Would black people’s rights survive?Īfter a few weeks on the road, Stewart decided they would. And now, the Republican Party, champion of Reconstruction and freedmen’s rights, had fallen from national power. However, 10 years later, federal troops withdrew from the South, returning it to local white rule. Blacks voted, won elected office, and served on juries. In 1868, with Amendment XIV, the Constitution had finally given black men full citizenship and promised them equal protection under the law. Stewart had decided to tour the South because he feared for freedmen’s liberties. ![]() Supreme Court and resulted in an infamous decision creating the legal doctrine of “separate, but equal.” (Wikimedia Commons) Consider that he was reporting from South Carolina in 1885 and he was black.Ī marker in New Orleans stands where Homer Plessy was arrested in 1892. “I can stop in and drink a glass of soda and be more politely waited upon than in some parts of New England.” Perhaps Stewart’s comments don’t seem newsworthy. “I can ride in first-class cars on the railroads and in the streets,” wrote journalist T. Ranked-Choice Voting: Choosing One Candidate or Many?.Download the Latest Edition In This Issue:
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