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According to americanhistory.si.edu there was a law in Nebraska in 1911 that stated “Marriages are void when one party is a white person and the other is possessed of one-eighth or more negro, Japanese, or Chinese blood.” Laws like these were harsh on African Americans and this law was passed as Jim Crow Laws were coming to an end. These weren’t just laws to the people of that time, they were a way of life. The Jim Crow Laws undermined multiple amendments and through the Unite States into turmoil and riots. The laws undermined the thirteenth, fourteenth,and fifteenth amendments. The thirteenth amendment completely abolished slavery.The fourteenth amendment stated that all people born or naturalized in America were American citizens, even African Americans and former slaves. The fifteenth amendment stated that people could not be denied the right to vote no matter their race, color, or former condition of servitude. States, especially those in the south, started passing laws that pushed African Americans down into second class. Southern states soon made the Grandfather Clause, all voters must pay a poll tax, take a literacy and property test, and an understanding clause. They were able to do this by saying it was to disqualify the the poor and unintelligence people from voting. Even though laws like this undermined multiple amendments they were overlooked by the supreme court after the case of Plessy v. Ferguson. The Plessy v. Ferguson case happened when Homer Plessy sat deliberately in the white car after Louisiana passed their Separate Car Act. He was only ⅛ black but under Louisiana law that was enough to be legally black. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court and Plessy’s lawyer argued that the Separat... ... middle of paper ... ...DuBois, a black civil rights activist, wrote “During that year seventy-seven Negroes were lynched, of whom one was a woman and eleven were soldiers; of these, fourteen were publicly burned, eleven of them being burned alive.” In most of the race riots the problem was started by a white person attacking a black person. However in almost every riot the police force sided with the white people by either participating in the riot and attacking the black people or by failing to stop the fight. One major reason for this is because the black people had no power, the entire police force and justice system was made of only white people. Throughout this political inequality the black people worked hard for their money and to have the same rights as white people had. Finally these harsh laws were overturned by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1865.
Groups of people soon received new rights. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. It gave black Americans full citizenship and guaranteed them equal treatment. Also, it passed the Fourteenth Amendment to make sure that the Supreme Court couldn’t declare the Civil Rights Act unconstitutional. The amendment made blacks citizens of the United States and the states in which they lived. Also, states were forbidden to deprive blacks of life, liberty, or property without due process. Additionally, blacks could not be discriminated by the law. If a state would deprive blacks of their rights as citizens, it’s number of congressional representatives would be reduced. The Civil Rights Act as well as the Fourteenth Amendment affected both the North and the South.
The Plessy v Ferguson case would be overturned, ruling the “separate but equal” law to be unconstitutional. Melba Beals was in school that day and was sent home early with the warning to hurry and stay in groups. Even so, it had been decades since the passing of the Fourteenth Amendment. No much had changed. Melba’s teacher knew that this ruling would cause rage among the citizens of Little Rock and she was right.
This case was brought to the Supreme Court with Plessey’s argument being that his 13th and 14th Amendments was being violated. But Louisiana argued that the 14th Amendment states that everyone is to be treated equally and that is exactly what happened. They said that the cars were separate but equal and that abided by the Constitution while keeping the Jim Crow laws. The Supreme Court decided that no law was violated and took the state’s side. The Court upheld Plessey’s conviction, and ruled that the 14th Amendment guarantees the right to “equal facilities,” not the “same facilities.” In this ruling, the Supreme Court created the principle of “separate but equal,”(“Judicial Review”,
The court case of Plessy vs. Ferguson created nationwide controversy in the United States due to the fact that its outcome would ultimately affect every citizen of our country. On Tuesday, June 7th, 1892, Mr. Homer Plessy purchased a first class ticket on the East Louisiana Railroad for a trip from New Orleans to Covington. He then entered a passenger car and took a vacant seat in a coach where white passengers were also sitting. There was another coach assigned to people who weren’t of the white race, but this railroad was a common carrier and was not authorized to discriminate passengers based off of their race. (“Plessy vs. Ferguson, syllabus”).Mr. Plessy was a “Creole of Color”, a person who traces their heritage back to some of the Caribbean, French, and Spanish who settled into Louisiana before it was part of the US (“The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow”). Even though Plessy was only one eighth African American, and could pass for a full white man, still he was threatened to be penalized and ejected from the train if he did not vacate to the non-white coach (“Plessy vs. Ferguson, syllabus). In ...
Because of the 13th and 14th Amendments freeing slaves and granting equal protection under the law grants Jon the same rights to ride the train as any other citizen. Santa Clara County v. Southern Public Railroad, Even though the case was not about the 14th Amendment, Justice Morrison Remick Waite made it so by arguing that corporations must comply with the 14th Amendment. Santa Clara County v. Southern Public Railroad, 118 U.S. 394 (1886). Plessy v. Ferguson, Homer Plessy sat in a whites-only train car, he was asked to move to the car reserved for blacks, because state law mandated segregation. The court held that segregation is not necessarily unlawful discrimination as long as the races are treated equally. The impact of Plessy was to relegate blacks to second-class citizenship. Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896). However, this is not equal
Today, more African American adults are under correctional control than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began (Alexander 180). Throughout history, there have been multiple racial caste systems in the United States. In her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander defines a “racial caste” as “a racial group locked into an inferior position by law and custom” (12). Alexander argues that both Jim Crow and slavery functioned as racial caste systems, and that our current system of mass incarceration functions as a similar caste system, which she labels “The New Jim Crow”. There is now a silent Jim Crow in our nation. Mass incarceration today serves the same function as did slavery before the Civil War and Jim Crow laws after the Civil War - to uphold a racial caste system.
The Jim Crow era was a racial status system used primarily in the south between the years of 1877 and the mid 1960’s. Jim Crow was a series of anti-black rules and conditions that were never right. The social conditions and legal discrimination of the Jim Crow era denied African Americans democratic rights and freedoms frequently. There were numerous ways in which African Americans were denied social and political equality under Jim Crow. Along with that, lynching occurred quite frequently, thousands being done over the era.
The passage of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution was a significant event in the history of our country because it made anyone born here citizens, established how representatives each state gets and paid off the war debts for the North. On June 8th and 13th, 1866 the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution was passed by both houses of congress. The stated purpose of the fourteenth amendment was to grant citizenship and to protect and define the civil rights of freed slaves. In reality, the purpose of the fourteenth amendment was to ensure the northern states political and economic advantage over the southern states. Section two of the fourteenth amendment allowed the north to legally deny the right to vote to almost every white man in the south. This was done by using the line "for participation in the rebellion." The north made sure that the word "participation" could mean almost anything. The northern states use section three of the fourteenth amendment to expel almost the entire southern leadership from every level and branch of government. Section four of the fourteenth amendment protected northern politicians, military leaders, and businessmen from being prosecuted for financial fraud and guaranteed that the north would not have to pay for the southern losses from the war. All in all, the significance of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution was that slaves were granted citizenship, and basic civil rights, but also guaranteed that the northern states would have a great advantage over the southern state for years to come.
The societies and aids that contributed to the dawning of the Civil Rights movement in 1955 fought for racial equality and led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, or gender and eventually established the Voting Act of 1965 that banned discrimination against voters (Zoeller 2.) African Americans transitioned into the twentieth century with hopes of overcoming obstacles against prejudice to obtain equality for all Americans.
They arrested Plessy, who claimed that the law violated his thirteenth and fourteenth amendment rights. When found guilty, he brought the case to the Louisiana State Supreme Court, but they confirmed the court's decision. Plessy then took the case “Plessy v. Ferguson” to the United States Supreme Court; however, the United States Supreme Court ruled in favor of Ferguson because they found that the laws attempted to enforce equality before the law, and not in social situations (Harlan 1). This famous case started the official acceptance of separate but equal laws, but what happened because of this? In the first twenty years of the separate Equal Laws being in effect, the various minorities suffered multiple consequences.
In the mid 1900’s blacks and whites were separated in many daily activities such as; public bathrooms, drinking fountains, and many other things. It wasn’t until 1965 that African Americans earned themselves the right to vote. By 1968 after much protesting the government gave them civil rights as well.
Equality is something that should be given to every human and not earned or be taken away. However, this idea does not present itself during the 1930’s in the southern states including Alabama. African Americans faced overwhelming challenges because of the thought of race superiority. Therefore, racism in the southern states towards African Americans made their lives tough to live because of disparity and inhumane actions towards this particular group of people.
The laws known as “Jim Crow” were laws presented to basically establish racial apartheid in the United States. These laws were more than in effect for “for three centuries of a century beginning in the 1800s” according to a Jim Crow Law article on PBS. Many try to say these laws didn’t have that big of an effect on African American lives but in affected almost everything in their daily life from segregation of things: such as schools, parks, restrooms, libraries, bus seatings, and also restaurants. The government got away with this because of the legal theory “separate but equal” but none of the blacks establishments were to the same standards of the whites. Signs that read “Whites Only” and “Colored” were seen at places all arounds cities.
In a society of a violent system it was hard for young blacks to take charge in an non-violent organization, it seemed to be a hypocrisy. And the idea of tolerance was wearing thin for the whole generation. Later on in the year, around August, the first of many large-scale riots began to break out. The first one was in Los Angeles, California and lasted for a little over three weeks. This single riot killed 39 people during its wrath of burning block after block.
Ferguson was a combination of rulings passed by the U.S. and state Supreme Courts after Reconstruction. Many of these decisions allowed and even required that Jim Crow segregation laws continued in the Southern states. Plessy v. Ferguson was an 1896 decision by the US Supreme Court that confirmed the principle of "Separate but Equal" and minority segregation. This case began in Louisiana in 1892. Homer Plessy agreed to be arrested to test the 1890 law establishing whites only train cars. Although it was believed that he had been one-eighth black and seven-eighths white, he was still legally required to sit in the "colored" car of the train. The judge at the trial was John Howard Ferguson, a lawyer from Massachusetts who had previously declared the Separate Car Act "unconstitutional” on trains that traveled through several states. After the decision had been made they returned to whites being superiority over blacks and that the 13th Amendment had taken that away from them after the Civil War. Plessy vs. Ferguson was the final step in erasing the policies put in place during Reconstruction.