The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project is a university-chartered research center associated with the Department of History of The George Washington University |
Jim Crow Laws
In the aftermath of Reconstruction and the ratification
of the 13th, 14th, and 15 th
Amendments, southern segregationists increasingly turned
to their state legislatures to enact discriminatory legislation
known as Jim Crow laws. In the South, segregation became
the law of the land, a status quo that was upheld in 1896
when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that "separate but equal"
facilities for blacks and whites were constitutional. White
southern legislatures added insult to injury by passing
other laws that made it difficult for blacks to vote, effectively
disenfranchising a significant number of black citizens.
By 1945, most southern states had been so successful in
their application of Jim Crow regulations that the vast
majority of American blacks failed to move beyond
the
second-class status of their ancestors in the early 1880s.
Nonetheless, Jim Crow was not unassailable nor could it
hope to survive the vast social, cultural, and economic
changes that the Second World War had induced. In a landmark
decision in 1954, Brown v. The Board of Education of
Topeka,
the Supreme Court overturned Plessy
v. Ferguson and ordered the integration of southern
institutions with "all deliberate speed," a directive
that met with virulent hostility from many white southerners
who occasionally turned to violence as a means of resisting
the desegregation process. In 1957, President
Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard
and forced the integration of a high school in Little
Rock.
In 1963, President Kennedy compelled the segregationist
governor of Alabama, George Wallace, to integrate
the state's
university system, a move that signaled the beginning of
the end of the Jim Crow era. Over the next five years,
the
Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965,
and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 officially ended
the
ability of any state to discriminate, disenfranchise, or
otherwise restrict any individual on the basis of
race. Sources:Norton, Mary Beth, et al. A People and a Nation: A History of the United States. 6th ed. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001, 856-858. |