Jim Crow Essay Research Paper Jim Crow

· Promotion of Equality Any person…who shall be guilty of printing, publishing or circulating printed, typewritten or written matter urging or presenting for public acceptance or general information, arguments or suggestions in favor of social equality or of intermarriage between whites and Negroes, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and subject to fine or not exceeding five hundred (500.00) dollars or imprisonment not exceeding six (6) months or both. Mississippi

· Intermarriage The marriage of a white person with a Negro or mulatto or person who shall have one-eighth or more of Negro blood, shall be unlawful and void. Mississippi

· Hospital Entrances There shall be maintained by the governing authorities of every hospital maintained by the state for treatment of white and colored patients separate entrances for white and colored patients and visitors, and such entrances shall be used by the race only for which they are prepared. Mississippi

· Prisons The warden shall see that the white convicts shall have separate apartments for both eating and sleeping from the Negro convicts. Mississippi

· Education 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

· Intermarriage All marriages between…white persons and Negroes or white persons and Mongolians…are prohibited and declared absolutely void…No person having one-eighth part or more of Negro blood shall be permitted to marry any white person, nor shall any white person be permitted to marry any Negro or person having one-eighth part or more of Negro blood. Missouri

· Education Separate rooms [shall] be provided for the teaching of pupils of African descent, and [when] said rooms are so provided, such pupils may not be admitted to the schoolrooms occupied and used by pupils of Caucasian or other descent. New Mexico

· Textbooks Books shall not be interchangeable between the white and colored schools, but shall continue to be used by the race first using them. North Carolina

· Libraries The state librarian is directed to fit up and maintain a separate place for the use of the colored people who may come to the library for the purpose of reading books or periodicals. North Carolina

· Militia The white and colored militia shall be separately enrolled, and shall never be compelled to serve in the same organization. No organization of colored troops shall be permitted where white troops are available, and while white permitted to be organized, colored troops shall be under the command of white officers. North Carolina

· Transportation The…Utilities Commission…is empowered and directed to require the establishment of separate waiting rooms at all stations for the white and colored races. North Carolina

· Teaching Any instructor who shall teach in any school, college or institution where members of the white and colored race are received and enrolled as pupils for instruction shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and upon conviction thereof, shall be fined in any sum not less than ten dollars ($10.00) nor more than fifty dollars ($50.00) for each offense. Oklahoma

· Fishing, Boating, and Bathing The [Conservation] Commission shall have the right to make segregation of the white and colored races as to the exercise of rights of fishing, boating and bathing. Oklahoma

· Mining The baths and lockers for the Negroes shall be separate from the white race, but may be in the same building. Oklahoma

· Telephone Booths The Corporation Commission is hereby vested with power and authority to require telephone companies…to maintain separate booths for white and colored patrons when there is a demand for such separate booths. That the Corporation Commission shall determine the necessity for said separate booths only upon complaint of the people in the town and vicinity to be served after due hearing as now provided by law in other complaints filed with the Corporation Commission. Oklahoma

· Lunch Counters No persons, firms, or corporations, who or which furnish meals to passengers at station restaurants or station eating houses, in times limited by common carriers of said passengers, shall furnish said meals to white and colored passengers in the same room, or at the same table, or at the same counter. South Carolina

· Child Custody It shall be unlawful for any parent, relative, or other white person in this State, having the control or custody of any white child, by right of guardianship, natural or acquired, or otherwise, to dispose of, give or surrender such white child permanently into the custody, control, maintenance, or support, of a Negro. South Carolina

· Libraries Any white person of such county may use the county free library under the rules and regulations prescribed by the commissioners court and may be entitled to all the privileges thereof. Said court shall make proper provision for the Negroes of said county to be served through a separate branch or branches of the county free library, which shall be administered by [a] custodian of the Negro race under the supervision of the county librarian. Texas

· Education [The County Board of Education] shall provide schools of two kinds; those for white children and those for colored children. Texas

· Theaters Every person…operating…any public hall, theatre, opera house, motion picture show or any place of public entertainment or public assemblage which is attended by both white and colored persons, shall separate the white race and the colored race and shall set apart and designate…certain seats therein to be occupied by white persons and a portion thereof, or certain seats therein, to be occupied by colored persons. Virginia

· Railroads The conductors or managers on all such railroads shall have power, and are hereby required, to assign to each white or colored passenger his or her respective car, coach or compartment. If the passenger fails to disclose his race, the conductor and managers, acting in good faith, shall be the sole judges of his race. Virginia

· Intermarriage All marriages of white persons with Negroes, Mulattos, Mongolians, or Malaya hereafter contracted in the State of Wyoming are and shall be illegal and void. Wyoming (4).

The Supreme Court’s ruling on Plessy v. Ferguson was the birth of the separate but equal doctrine used to promote legal racism during the era of deconstruction.

Homer Plessy was an African American shoemaker from New Orleans, Louisiana. On June 7, 1892, he was arrested for sitting in a “whites only” railroad car of the East Louisiana Railroad. Plessy was only one-eighths black and seven-eighths white, and under Louisiana law, he was considered a black man and that required him to sit in the “Colored” car. Mr.Plessy went to court and argued, in Homer Adolph Plessy v. The State of Louisiana, that the Separate Car Act violated the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution. The judge was John Howard Ferguson, a lawyer from Massachusetts who had previously declared the Separate Car Act “unconstitutional on trains that traveled through several states” (5). (This makes you wonder, considering the corruption of the court system during this period of our history what his motives were and where they came from.)

In Plessy’s case, however, he decided that the state could choose to regulate railroad companies that operated only within Louisiana. He found Plessy guilty of refusing to leave the white car (6). Plessy then appealed to the Supreme Court of Louisiana, which upheld Ferguson’s decision. Four years after his arrest, in 1896, the Supreme Court of the United States heard Plessy’s case and found him guilty once again. Speaking for an eight-person majority, Justice Henry Brown wrote:

“That [the Separate Car Act] does not conflict with the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery…is too clear for argument…A statute which implies merely a legal distinction between the white and colored races-a distinction which is founded in the color of the two races, and which must always exist so long as white men are distinguished from the other race by color-has no tendency to destroy the legal equality of the two races…The object of the Fourteenth Amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either.”(7).

The lone dissenter, Justice John Harlan, showed incredible foresight when he wrote

“Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law…In my opinion, the judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott case…The present decision, it may well be apprehended, will not only stimulate aggressions, more or less brutal and irritating, upon the admitted rights of colored citizens, but will encourage the belief that it is possible, by means of state enactment’s, to defeat the beneficent purposes which the people of the United States had in view when they adopted the recent amendments of the Constitution.” (8).

Justice Harlan predicted the future. The Plessy decision set the precedent that “separate” facilities for blacks and whites were constitutional as long as they were “equal.” The “separate but equal” doctrine was quickly extended to cover many areas of public life, such as restaurants, theaters, restrooms, and public schools. These laws always caused the separation, but there was never equality.” The Supreme Court of the United States ruled that “separate but equal” accommodations were constitutional. In fact, separate was almost never equal, but the Plessy doctrine provided constitutional protection for segregation for the next 50 years”(9).

The decision in Plessy v. Ferguson remained the enforced standard in the south until the 1960s, when, influenced by the Civil Rights movement, the federal goverment and the courts dispensed rulings that struck down the legal walls of racial segregation and ended Jim Crow.

Starting in 1915, victories in the Supreme Court began to chip away at the Jim Crow Laws. The first major blow against the Jim Crow system of racial segregation was struck in 1954 by the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka,(10) Kansas, which declared segregation in the public schools unconstitutional.

This was one of the beginnings of what is known as the “Civil Rights Movement” and the beginning of the end of Jim Crow Laws.

Time Magazine chronicles an early event of the newfound spirit of the civil rights movement;

“The egalitarian revolution in the South sometimes moves like a spring flood, seeping over and around the barriers, running ahead of the sluggish channels dredged by the law. One afternoon last fortnight, such a spring freshet bubbled up in the textile city of Greensboro, N.C. (pop. 125,000) when four young college students–freshmen from the Negro Agricultural and Technical College–walked into the F.W. Woolworth store on South Elm Street and quietly sat down at the lunch counter. The white patrons eyed them warily, and the white waitress ignored their studiously polite requests for service. The students continued to sit until closing time. Next morning they reappeared reinforced by 25 fellow students. By last week their unique sit-down had spread through 14 cities in five Southern states in a far-ranging attach on the Jim Crow custom that Negroes may be served while standing at downtown lunch counters but not if they sit down “(11).