Jim Crow and Segregation How did Jim Crow laws affect the move towards Civil Rights? What were the difficulties in desegregation from the 1870’s to mid 1960’s?

Jim Crow & Segregation At the bus station, Durham, North Carolina, 1940.

Why Civil Rights? The civil rights movement was a political, legal, and social struggle to gain full citizenship rights for African Americans.civil rights movement Segregation- system of laws and customs separating African Americans and whites

Segregation Segregation was an attempt by many white Southerners to separate the races in every aspect of daily life. Many laws were passed upholding “Separate, but Equal” -What is this?

Segregation Segregation was often called the Jim Crow system, after a minstrel show character from the 1830s who was an African American slave who embodied negative stereotypes of African Americans.Jim Crow Southern states following 1877 Reconstruction -What is that?

What were Jim Crow laws? From the 1880s into the 1960s, most American states enforced segregation through "Jim Crow" laws (so called after a black character in minstrel shows). From Delaware to California, and from North Dakota to Texas, many states (and cities, too) could impose legal punishments on people for mingling with members of another race. The most common types of laws forbade intermarriage and ordered business owners and public institutions to keep blacks and whites separated. Loving v. Virginia

Some Facilities that Were Separate:  Bus station waiting rooms and ticket windows  Railroad cars or coaches  Restaurants and lunch counters  Schools and public parks  Restrooms and water fountains  Sections of movie theaters  There were even separate cemeteries Greyhound terminal, Tenn, 1943

Signs

Just a few laws Barbers. No colored barber shall serve as a barber (to) white girls or women (Georgia). Burial. The officer in charge shall not bury, or allow to be buried, any colored persons upon ground set apart or used for the burial of white persons (Georgia). Buses. All passenger stations in this state operated by any motor transportation company shall have separate waiting rooms or space and separate ticket windows for the white and colored races (Alabama).

A rest stop for bus passengers from Louisville, Kentucky to Nashville, Tennessee, with separate entrance for Blacks. 1943

A highway sign advertising tourist cabins for Blacks, South Carolina

Couple more laws Teaching. Any instructor who shall teach in any school, college or institution where members of the white and colored race are received and enrolled as pupils for instruction shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and upon conviction thereof, shall be fined... (Oklahoma). Prisons. The warden shall see that the white convicts shall have separate apartments for both eating and sleeping from the negro convicts (Mississippi).

Drinking fountain on the courthouse lawn, Halifax, North Carolina Movie theater’s "Colored” entrance, Belzoni, Mississippi

Politics The system of segregation also included the denial of voting rights, known as disenfranchisement.

Voting Between 1890 and 1910, all Southern states passed laws imposing requirements for voting. These were used to prevent African Americans from voting, in spite of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which had been designed to protect African American voting rights. What amendment prohibited these requirements? What are these requirements called?

Voting The voting requirements included the ability to read and write, which disqualified many African Americans who had not had access to education; property ownership, which excluded most African Americans, and paying a poll tax, which prevented most Southern African Americans from voting because they could not afford it.

Not just the South Somewhat better voting, but only 10% of Black pop. –No poll tax Denied entrance to best hotels and restaurants More economic discrimination –Competing with large European immigrant pop. –European usually won the job

The West Native Americans –The Lakota Woman The Japanese –WWII The Latino population –Agriculture and mines Even “Okies” and “Texicans” –Depression and Dust Bowl

Colorado -Boulder, 1924 against Jews, Catholics, all immigrants (fizzled by 1929 due to poor management.

Colorado Klan takes time out from the busy demands of racial hatred to enjoy the simple pleasures. Canon City, 1924

Lynching Often public, sadistic (derive pleasure) Hung, shot burned at stake, castrated, dismembered Intimidation tool to “put them in their places” “Lynch Laws” created for Black men in relation with White women

Who did this? 2/3 in southern states Small to medium towns Ego-massage for low-income, low- status Whites Cheap entertainment Uniting point for Whites More frequent in hot summer months

Courts Cases In the 1800’s, African Americans sued to stop segregation One of the cases against segregated rail travel was Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), in which the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that “separate but equal” accommodations were constitutional.Plessy v. Ferguson What is “Separate but equal”?

Organizations In order to protest segregation, African Americans created national organizations. The National Afro-American League was formed in 1890; W.E.B. Du Bois helped create the Niagara Movement in 1905 and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

Organizations In 1910, the National Urban League was created to help African Americans make the transition to urban, industrial life.National Urban League In 1942, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) was founded to challenge segregation in public accommodations in the North.Congress of Racial Equality

NAACP The NAACP became one of the most important African American organizations of the twentieth century. It relied mainly on legal strategies that challenged segregation and discrimination in the courts.

W.E.B Du Bois Historian and sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois was a founder and leader of the NAACP. Starting in 1910, he made powerful arguments protesting segregation as editor of the NAACP magazine The Crisis. W.E.B. Du Bois

Thurgood Marshall NAACP Legal Defense Fund challenged and overturned many forms of discrimination.NAACP Legal Defense Fund Used psychological evidence in cases. Separating by race leads to inferiority/superiority complexes.

School Desegregation The main focus of the NAACP turned to equal educational opportunities. Marshall and the Defense Fund worked with Southern plaintiffs to challenge the Plessy decision, arguing that separate was inherently unequal.

School Degedregation In May 1954, the Court issued its landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, stating racially segregated education was unconstitutional and overturning the Plessy decision.Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, White Southerners were shocked by the Brown decision. Why? Desegregate the schools! Vote Socialist Workers : Peter Camejo for president, Willie Mae Reid for vice-president. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.; LC-USZ

School Desegregation By 1955, white opposition in the South had grown into massive resistance, using a strategy to persuade all whites to resist compliance with the desegregation orders. Tactics included firing school employees who showed willingness to seek integration, closing public schools rather than desegregating, and boycotting all public education that was integrated

School Desegregation In 1957, Governor Orval Faubus defied a federal court order to admit nine African American students to Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Little Rock, Arkansas. -President Dwight Eisenhower sent federal troops to enforce desegregation -9 Children total

Jim Crow and Segregation How did Jim Crow laws affect the move towards Civil Rights? What were the difficulties in desegregation from the 1870’s to mid 1960’s?