Many people believed that Jim Crow was a person, but in reality it was an era. This time period impacted the lives of millions of individuals. It takes its name from a famous 19th century song that stereotypes African Americans. It also became a set of legal laws in the South. “Jim Crow” became the symbol of racial oppression of African Americans and white supremacy in the United States. Jim Crow still exists today, but to a much lesser extent. During the Reconstruction period of 1865-1877, federal laws ensured the protection of civil rights in the United States. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essaySouth for freedmen, African Americans who had formerly been slaves, and the minority of blacks who had been free before the war. In the 1870s, Democrats gradually regained power in Southern legislatures, after using rebellious paramilitary groups, such as the White League and the Red Shirts, to disrupt Republican organizing, run Republican officials out of town, and intimidate blacks to suppress their vote. Extensive voter fraud was also used. Gubernatorial elections were close and had been contested for years in Louisiana, with increasing violence against blacks during the campaigns from 1868 onward. In 1877, a national Democratic Party compromise to gain Southern support in the presidential election led to the cabinet retiring the last of the federals. troops from the South. White Democrats had regained political power in every Southern state. These white, Southern, and Democratic governments legislated Jim Crow laws, officially separating blacks from the white population. Blacks were still elected to local offices throughout the 1880s, but their vote was suppressed for state and national elections. Democrats passed laws to tighten voter registration and election rules, with the result that the political participation of most blacks and many poor whites began to decline. Between 1890 and 1910, ten of the eleven former Confederate states, starting with Mississippi, passed new constitutions. or amendments that effectively disenfranchised most blacks and tens of thousands of poor whites through a combination of poll taxes, literacy and comprehension tests, and residency and record-keeping requirements. The unprecedented clauses temporarily allowed some illiterate whites to vote but gave no relief to most blacks. Voter turnout fell sharply in the South following such measures. In Louisiana, in 1900, black voters were reduced to 5,320 on the rolls, although they made up the majority of the state's population. In 1910, only 730 blacks were registered, less than 0.5 percent of eligible black men. "In 27 of the state's 60 parishes, not a single black voter was registered; in 9 other parishes, only one black voter was." The cumulative effect in North Carolina meant that black voters were completely purged from the voter rolls during the period. from 1896 to 1904. The growth of their burgeoning middle class was slowed. In North Carolina and other Southern states, blacks suffered from being made invisible in the political system: "Within a decade of disenfranchisement, the campaign for white supremacy had erased the image of the black middle class from minds of whites in North Carolina. "In Alabama, tens of thousands of poor whites were also disenfranchised, although initially ilegislators had promised them that they would not be negatively affected by the new restrictions. Those who could not vote were not eligible to serve on juries and could not run for local office. They effectively disappeared from political life, as they could not influence state legislatures and their interests were neglected. While public schools were first established by Reconstruction legislatures in most Southern states, those for black children were consistently underfunded compared to schools for white children, even when viewed in the context of the financial difficulties of the postwar South. , where the decreasing price of cotton kept the agricultural economy at low levels. Like schools, public libraries for blacks were underfunded, if they existed at all, and were often stocked with secondhand books and other resources. These structures were introduced for African Americans in the South only in the first decade of the 20th century. In the Jim Crow era, libraries were only sporadically available. Before the 20th century, most libraries established for African Americans were combinations of school libraries. Many public libraries for both European-American and African-American patrons in this period were founded as a result of middle-class activism aided by Carnegie matching grants. Foundation. In some cases, progressive measures intended to reduce voter fraud, such as the Eight Box Law in South Carolina, worked against white and black voters who were illiterate, because they could not follow directions. While the separation of African Americans from the general population was becoming legalized and formalized during the Progressive Era (1890-1920), it was also becoming customary. For example, even in cases where Jim Crow laws did not expressly prohibit blacks from participating in sports or recreational activities, a segregated culture had become common. Americans. Most blacks still lived in the South, where they had been effectively disenfranchised and therefore could not vote at all. Although poll taxes and literacy requirements prohibited many poor or illiterate Americans from voting, these provisions often had loopholes that exempted European Americans from meeting the requirements. In Oklahoma, for example, anyone qualified to vote before 1866, or related to someone qualified to vote before 1866 (a sort of "grandfather clause"), was exempt from the literacy requirement; but the only people who had the right to vote before that year were white males or European-Americans. European Americans were effectively exempted from literacy tests, while Black Americans were effectively singled out by the law. Woodrow Wilson was a Democrat elected from New Jersey, but he was born and raised in the South, and was the first Southern-born president. the period following the Civil War. He appointed Southerners to his cabinet. Some quickly began pushing for segregated workplaces, even though the city of Washington, D.C., and federal offices had been integrated since the post-Civil War era. In 1913, for example, Treasury Secretary William Gibbs McAdoo – a presidential appointee – was heard expressing his opinion about black and white women working together in a government office: "I am sure this must go against the grain of women Is there any reason why white women shouldn't just have white women working in front of them on the machines?” Wilson introduced segregation in federal offices, despite many protests from African American leaders and national groups. He appointed Southern segregationist politicians because he was staunchlyconvinced that racial segregation was in the best interests of both blacks and European Americans.[16] At Gettysburg on July 4, 1913, the semicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's declaration that "all men are created equal," Wilson addressed the crowd: How complete has the union become, and how dear to us all, how unquestioned, how benign and benevolent majestic, for state after state has added to this, our great family of free men! In stark contrast to Wilson, a Washington Bee editorial questioned whether the 1913 "reunion" was a meeting of those who fought for "the extinction of slavery" or a meeting of those who fought to "perpetuate slavery and who now employ every artifice and argument known to deception" to present emancipation as a failure. Historian David W. Blight notes that the "Peace Jubilee" over which Wilson presided at Gettysburg in 1913 "was a Jim Crow meeting, and one might say that white supremacy has been the silent and invisible master of ceremonies." several cities adopted residential segregation laws between 1910 and the 1920s. Legal restrictions required separate fountains and restrooms. Jim Crow laws were a product of what had become a solidly Democratic South due to the disenfranchisement of blacks. In January 1964, President Lyndon Johnson met with civil rights leaders. On January 8, during his first State of the Union address, Johnson asked Congress to "let this session of Congress be known as the session that did more for civil rights than the last hundred sessions combined ". On June 21, civil rights activists Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney disappeared in Neshoba County, Mississippi, where they were volunteering to register African-American voters as part of the Mississippi Summer Project. The disappearance of the three activists captured national attention, and the ensuing outrage was used by Johnson and civil rights activists to build a coalition of Northern Democrats and Republicans and push Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 On July 2, 1964, Johnson signed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. It invoked the Commerce Clause to prohibit discrimination in public accommodations (privately owned restaurants, hotels, and stores, as well as in private schools and workplaces). This use of the commerce clause was confirmed in Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States 379 US 241 (1964). By 1965, efforts to break the state's grip on disenfranchisement through voter registration education in southern counties had been underway for some time. , but overall it had achieved only modest success. In some areas of the Deep South, white resistance rendered these efforts almost entirely ineffective. The murder of three voting rights activists in Mississippi in 1964 and the state's refusal to prosecute the killers, along with numerous other acts of violence and terrorism against blacks, had attracted national attention. Finally, the March 7, 1965, unprovoked attack by county and state troops on peaceful Alabama marchers crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge en route from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery convinced the President and Congress to overcome Southern legislators' resistance to an effective vote. legislation on the respect of rights. President Johnson issued a call for a strong voting rights law, and hearings soon began on the bill that would become the Voting Rights Act. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 ended legally sanctioned state barriers to voting for.