Jim Crow Laws Research Paper

The name for Jim Crow Laws is believed to be derived from an old minstrel routine. Actor Thomas Dartmouth would perform routines as a clumsy, dimwitted African American slave. “Jim Crow” then became a widely used derogatory term used for blacks. Jim Crow laws were appointed for the reason of power, the power of one race over another. The laws were initiated to create a racial caste system in the south. This era of Jim Crow, which lasted nearly a century, led to a struggle for all African Americans. The Jim Crow Laws affected African Americans by keeping with the “separate but equal” doctrine and by playing a key role in the novel To Kill A Mockingbird.
Many African Americans had to live through the time period of jim crow laws, from them we learn about their hardships and sufferings.
One of the main ways was that becoming employed became a challenge. If they could find a job it was usually an agricultural job, that put them in a economic decline. At this time whites viewed African Americans with “disgust”, to most people they were no higher than animals. This lead to many whites not wanting to higher African Americans. The Jim Crow laws made it to where many blacks became unemployed. The separate-but-equal doctrine let whites keep this in place for so long. The Jim Crow Laws were in place for nearly a century, during that time many factors let whites in the south defend the segregation laws. According to William “The Supreme Court’s landmark Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 established the principle of separate-but-equal in a ruling upholding a Louisiana law that required segregation on railroad cars. The separate-but-equal doctrine would serve as the constitutional underpinning of legal segregation until the mid-1950s.”. The separate-but-equal doctrine was one big factor that let whites and states defend the Jim Crow Laws. Even though some whites and most all African Americans wanted to rid the Jim Crow laws,