In the South, electoral politics remained a parade of electoral fraud, voter intimidation, and race-baiting. Just as reformers advocated for business regulations, anti-trust laws, environmental protections, women’s rights, and urban health campaigns, so too did many push for racial legislation in the American South. America’s tragic racial history was not erased by the Progressive Era.[…]
Jim Crow states passed statutes severely regulating social interactions between the races. Jim Crow was the name of the racial caste system which operated primarily, but not exclusively in southern and border states, between 1877 and the mid-1960s. Jim Crow was more than a series of rigid anti-black laws. It was a way of life.[…]
The first real challenge to the constitutionality of state segregation laws came in 1938. Brown v. Board of Education In 1896, the Supreme Court upheld state racial segregation laws based on the “separate but equal” doctrine in Plessy v. Ferguson. The Court ruled that making a legal distinction between races did not violate the Thirteenth[…]
It would take several decades of legal action and years of nonviolent direct action to spark real change. Introduction The segregation and disenfranchisement laws known as “Jim Crow” represented a formal, codified system of racial apartheid that dominated the American South for three quarters of a century beginning in the 1890s. The laws affected almost[…]
It was not until 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education and later 1964 with the Civil Rights Act that these laws were finally abolished. Introduction Jim Crow laws were state and local laws enacted in the Southern and border states of the United States after 1876 requiring the separation of African-Americans from white Americans[…]
Religion was no barrier for Southern lynch mobs intent on terror. White pastors joined the KKK, incited racial violence and took part in lynchings. Introduction White lynch mobs in America murdered at least 4,467 people between 1883 and 1941, hanging, burning, dismembering, garroting and blowtorching their victims. Their violence was widespread but not indiscriminate: About[…]
The South was allowed to go back to their old ways of bigotry. The American Story is not an easy one to tell. As Americans, we have superb war stories, we have stories of major sporting events, and we have the stories that will haunt us forever. I speak of course of the treatment of[…]