Jim Crow was a system of laws that facilitated segregation and discrimination that excluded African Americans from a status equal to that of white people between 1877 and the 1960s. It was a system that basically said that white people were superior to African Americans in every single way. The Jim Crow laws enforced segregation in nearly all facilities including buses, restaurants, libraries, waiting rooms, etc. The expression “separate but equal” was a term commonly used in references to these laws, however they were differences that made it so they were not truly equal. For example, the schools for African Americans often had hand-me-down textbooks and many of their waiting rooms were not heated while the whites received new textbooks and had heated waiting rooms.
The United States Supreme Court played a decisive role in establishing, preserving, and, finally ending Jim Crow. Homer Plessy, a one eighth African American man from Louisiana decided to ride in the whites section on a train when he was asked to move to the colored car he refused and was subsequently arrested. Civil Rights activists brought the case to the Supreme Court after losing in the lower courts. The landmark case Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) was ultimately the start of racial discrimination. The Court held that segregation did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment as long as long as blacks had access to accommodations equal to whites, and Plessy ultimately won that battle. After the decision in the case Plessy v. Ferguson was made, restrictive legislation continued to steadily expand and its reasoning was not overturned until the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954.
References:
Henretta, James A., Rebecca Edwards, and Robert O. Self. America A Concise History: Volume 2: Since 1865. Fifth ed. Boston/New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2012
History.com, Plessy v. Ferguson. Retrieved December 12, 2014 from http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/plessy-v-ferguson
Pilgrim, D. (2012). Ferris State University. Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia. What was Jim Crow? Retrieved December 12, 2014 from http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/what.htm
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