How Did Racial Segregation Affect African Americans

How did racial segregation affect African Americans in the USA?

Introduction

Racial Segregation was the system created by white people in the USA after slavery was abolished to keep black people in a ‘servant’ state. Racial segregation was also invented to prevent Black people in the US from interacting with white people in the USA. Segregation in the US meant that in some states African Americans were made to drink from different water fountains, blacks were only permitted to sit at the back of the bus and would be made to give up their seat for white people when they came on the bus, having separate toilet rooms from white people, placing black children in separate school away from white children towns were segregated into black and white residential areas, and In some places interracial marriage was illegal. These rules were known as Jim Crow laws and disobeyers of this law were lynched. “Separate free schools shall be established for the education of children of African descent; and it shall be unlawful for any colored child to attend any white school, or any white child to attend a colored school.”

—Missouri, 1929

Social Changes

After the Jim Crow laws were implemented to the public, the

patterns of social life among this group changed drastically. Both races didn’t communicate with each other due to the segregation that came from Jim Crow laws and because of hate built up from slavery. On top of that many blacks were being lynched after being accused of a crime that they didn’t commit which started protests which then caused white people to retaliate with unnecessary violence. Often riots broke out after a black individual was accused of a crime. An example of this happened in Tulsa. The riot began when armed mobs of white and black people gathered at Tulsa County Court. The black people were there to defend Dick Rowland who was accused of assault, from being lynched by the mob of white people gathered at the Court. A shot was fired after a white individual asked a black man to lower his pistol. After the shot was fired, it triggered a chain reaction from both sides and as a result ten white men and two black men died. The riots continued until the next day with casualties being over 300 most being black, over 1000 people were left homeless due to the masses of fires lit during the riot,
Riots such as these fuelled hate from both white and blacks in the USA making it difficult for other white or black individuals who see each other as equals to communicate.

Protection Of African Americans
The NAACP, or National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, was organised in 1909 by Moorfield Storey, Mary White Ovington and W. E. B. Du Bois owing to the need for effective civil rights organisations amid an explosion of racial prejudice in Springfield, Illinois. The purpose of the NAACP was to stop the lynchings of African Americans, the numbers of which were increasing alarmingly, and to put an end to racial segregation. Several tactics were proposed to tackle racial segregation and lynching, one of them being the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill. The bill was supposed to be passed by the U.S House of Representatives on January 26, 1922 though it never was. If the bill was passed and became a law, the group of people who participated in lynching would receive a minimum of five years in jail, any state official who failed to protect a victim but had the jurisdiction would receive either a $5000 fine and a maximum five years of prison time and a $10000 fine would be paid by the county in which the lynching took place. The purpose of the bill was to punish any groups of people that participated in the lynching of a person. Though the bill was never passed, the NAACP made a report detailing the number of people lynched from 1889-1919. The consequent discussion in relation to this report helped to reduce the number of lynchings by a significant amount. In 1930 the NAACP commissioned the Margold Report which aimed to reverse the ‘Separate but Equal’ belief that had sprung from the Plessy v Ferguson court trial. Though the NAACP did not have a lot of power, they helped with the advancement of civil rights for coloured people by releasing reports such as the Margold report which raised awareness and helped bring out certain issues for public debate.

Factors That Influenced the Changes
The Plessy v Ferguson trial was the trial that coined the ‘separate but equal’ belief’.

A majority of the judges in the court acclaimed that the policy did not violate either the thirteenth or fourteenth amendment, stating that the purpose of the 14th amendment was “to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law…. Laws … requiring their separation … do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race”. This ‘separate but equal’ belief was accepted in a number of American states, legalising segregation and promoting the separations of schools, as well as other public areas. By the court made the remaining general public remove any doubts that made the segregation seem racist though there were some that still understood that it was indeed

racist.