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In response to the Thirteenth Amendment the southern states began passing what came to be known as the black codes. These laws were intended to assure that white supremacy would continue. The laws limited blacks in a number of ways. For example, some states limited the type of property blacks could own, and in other states black people were excluded from certain businesses or from skilled trades.
The Civil Rights Act of 1875 prohibited many forms of racial discrimination, including in public places and facilities, such as restaurants and public transportation. However, in the Civil Rights Cases of 1883, the U. S. Supreme Court declared the 1875 act unconstitutional.
segregated water coolerAn African American man drinks at a segregated water cooler at a streetcar terminal in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, in 1939.
Russell Lee, FSA, OWI/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-DIG-fsa-8a26761)In 1896 a challenge to Louisiana’s Separate Car Act (which required that all railroads operating in the state provide “equal but separate accommodations” for white and African American passengers) brought the case of Plessy v. Ferguson before the U.S. Supreme Court. On May 18 the Court upheld the Separate Car Act, a decision that paved the way for “separate but equal” segregation throughout the country.
Other laws had already restricted the rights of blacks and enforced forms of segregation. For example, all the southern states had passed miscegenation laws, which made marriage or cohabitation between whites and any person of color illegal.
Under Jim Crow laws states could authorize separate facilities not only for schools but for hospitals and clinics, sports events, restaurants, barbershops, railroad and bus stations, restrooms, beaches, public parks, and many other places.
Great MigrationThe Arthurs, an African American family moving to the urban North from the rural South, arrive in Chicago, Illinois, in 1920. The family left their hometown of Paris, Texas, after two family members were murdered because of their race, in an attack called a lynching.
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Jean Blackwell Hutson Research and Reference Division, The New York Public Library (1168439)Blacks migrated from the South to the North and West seeking greater freedom, but most northern and western states enacted their own Jim Crow laws.
The Ku Klux Klan used violence and terror to keep blacks from asserting their rights as citizens in many states. Statistics of reported lynching in the United States indicate that, between 1882 and 1951, nearly 3,500 black citizens were lynched.
Ida B. Wells-BarnettCivil rights advocate Ida B. Wells-Barnett led an anti-lynching crusade in the United States in the 1890s.
In the 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the Supreme Court declared the principle of “separate but equal” unconstitutional, thus ending segregation in schools. The Court found that separation of the races harmed black children in ways that were often irreversible.
Lyndon B. Johnson Library and Museum; photograph, Cecil StoughtonA decade later Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. These laws aimed to eliminate discrimination against black citizens in employment, voting, housing, and other areas. In Loving v. Virginia (1967) the U.S. Supreme Court declared that laws forbidding interracial marriage were unconstitutional. These measures effectively ended the Jim Crow era.
