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Essay On Segregation And Discrimination

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Segregation and Discrimination (1880-1920) Essay

Tennessee enacted 20 Jim Crow laws between 1866 and 1955, including six school segregation ones, four which outlawed miscegenation, three which segregated railroads, two requiring segregation for public accommodations, and one which mandated segregation on streetcars. The 1869 law declared that no citizen could be excluded from the University of Tennessee because of race or color but then mandated that instructional facilities for black students be separate from those used by white students.
1866: Separate schools required for white and black children
1870: Intermarriage prohibited between white persons and Negroes.
1870: Miscegenation Penalty for intermarriage between whites an blacks …show more content…

But the courts challenged earlier civil rights legislation and handed down a series of decisions that permitted states to segregate people of color. In the pivotal case of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racially separate facilities, if equal, did not violate the Constitution. Segregation, the Court said, was not discrimination. In 1890 a new Louisiana law required railroads to provide “equal but separate accommodations for the white, and colored, races.” Outraged, the black community in New Orleans decided to test the rule.
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) was the seminal post-Reconstruction Supreme Court decision that judicially validated state sponsored segregation in public facilities by its creation and endorsement of the “separate but equal” doctrine as satisfying the Constitutional requirements provided in the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
Southern states enacted poll taxes of one or two dollars per year between 1889 and 1966 as a requisite to voting. A citizen paid the tax when registering; some laws required payment up to nine months before an election. Many states had a cumulative feature that required an individual to pay all previous years' poll taxes before he could vote in the instant

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A “separate but equal” doctrine became known for segregation being legal as long as the separate facilities were equal. The majority of the South was separated, but the African American facilities were very rarely considered equal as to the Caucasian facilities. The Louisiana state law stated that railroad cars were to be separated by race, and that if a train had more than two passenger cars, they were required to have designated seating for the opposite races. If the train only had one passenger car, they were to put up a curtain to separate the people of separate races. This law had a fine of twenty five dollars or up to twenty nights in jail for

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632 Words | 3 Pages

Ferguson). It enacted Jim Crow laws that segregated the population and this wasn’t labeled as discrimination (“Separate but Equal”). This shows that it strengthened segregation because as Brown stated that equality does not necessarily mean integration (“Plessy v. Ferguson”). “By the 1890s white domination had returned with passage of Jim with passage of Jim Crow laws that enforced segregation” (Mauro 239). This enforced segregation by requiring there to be segregation in most

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466 Words | 2 Pages

Allison Krug English II Ms. Cuddihy January 24th, 2015 Plessy vs. Ferguson It might be hard to imagine but in 1896 people who sat in the wrong part of the passenger train were fined and/or jailed. Plessy vs. Ferguson helped pave the way for many anti racial discrimination laws. This Supreme Court decision helped to uphold the Statue of Louisiana acts of 1890, which required passenger trains to provide “separate but equal” accommodations for whites and colored races on its railroads which changed the rights to make separate facilities for both races to be constitutional as long as they were equal. This truly changed the Civil Rights Era forever.

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1286 Words | 6 Pages

Ferguson case was passed in 1896. “This decision approved segregation of the races as being consistent with the 14th amendment and formulated the doctrine of "separate but equal" facilities. It served as a legal basis for segregation in education. The case arose when one Homer A. Plessy, who was 7/8ths caucasian and 1/8th negro, was arrested for entering a railroad coach reserved for whites and refusing to sit in a segregated couch for negroes. The court, speaking through Justice Henry B Brown, found that these "separate but equal accommodations" satisfied the demands of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

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1725 Words | 7 Pages

Ferguson was a court case that arose in Louisiana, and it created a drastically different atmosphere in 1896. This court case gave state laws that required black and white people to use separate facilities. The case came into light when Homer Plessy, an African-American, never moved to the “colored only” section on a train. Plessy was said to have had his Fourteenth Amendment violated because the separated facilities were discriminating; however the Court stated that the separate facilities were separate yet equal. Separate yet equal means that people have the same rights, but are separated by their race, religion, and wealth.

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1551 Words | 7 Pages

For nearly a century, the United States was occupied by the racial segregation of black and white people. The constitutionality of this “separation of humans into racial or other ethnic groups in daily life” had not been decided until a deliberate provocation to the law was made. The goal of this test was to have a mulatto, someone of mixed blood, defy the segregated train car law and raise a dispute on the fairness of being categorized as colored or not. This test went down in history as Plessy v. Ferguson, a planned challenge to the law during a period ruled by Jim Crow laws and the idea of “separate but equal” without equality for African Americans. This challenge forced the Supreme Court to rule on the constitutionality of segregation, and in result of the case, caused the nation to have split opinions of support and

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427 Words | 2 Pages

Ferguson was a case of the Supreme Court in 1892 after passenger Homer Plessy traveled on the Louisiana railroad and refused to sit in a car for blacks only. Homer Plessy was brought before Judge John H. Ferguson to a Criminal Court in New Orleans to be trailed for refusing to follow the state law of Louisiana “separate but equal.” Such conflict challenged the violation of the 13th and 14th amendment where they ensure equality for recently emancipated slaves. They stated, “Separate facilities for blacks and whites satisfied the Fourteenth Amendment so long as they were equal.” “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 unsatisfactory to either.”

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414 Words | 2 Pages

Plessy v. Ferguson-The Plessy v. Ferguson trial initially began when the state of Louisiana passed the Separate Car Act in 1890 which made it legal to separate common train carriers. Homer Plessy (a Black man) purposely sat in the Whites- only section in 1892. Homer was shortly arrested and the Plessy v. Ferguson case began. Plessy v. Ferguson was the Supreme Court case that established the “Separate But Equal” laws in the United States in 1896. This decision set the standard that separate facilities (i.e. restrooms, public transportation etc.), for blacks and whites were in fact legal, as long as they were equal in accommodations.

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946 Words | 4 Pages

On May 18, 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in the Plessy vs. Ferguson law case that separate-but-equal facilities on trains were constitutional.” It is deplorable that such laws were created by Southern Republics to ensure that African Americans would maintain to be treated inferior to them. This includes making segregation a law. Blacks and whites could no longer dine together, sit on the bus together, get an education together,

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1080 Words | 5 Pages

The local governments upheld the Jim Crow system. Just in case it wasn’t carried out, there were vigilantes who would reinforce acts of terror on African Americans. In 1896, the Supreme Court established the doctrine of Separate But Equal in Plessy v. Ferguson, after a black man in New Orleans attempted to sit in a whites-only railway car. Observed by Ray Stannard Baker, journalist, in 1908 that “no other point of race

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727 Words | 3 Pages

Several challenges to the law was increased in the courts. In 1883 the Supreme Court ruled in the Civil Rights cases that the act was invalid since it addressed social as opposed to civil rights. Furthermore, the court noticed that the Fourteenth Amendment secured individuals against infringement of their civil rights by states, not by the activities of people, for instance when a owner of a lodging facility declined to lease space to an African American. In the wake of a choice state councils all through the South established laws that legalized racial separation in basically all open spots from hospitals, to schools, even dining places. The Supreme Court supported the Jim Crow laws that authorized racial separation in its historic point of Plessy vs Ferguson in 1896.

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842 Words | 4 Pages

In 1896, the Supreme Court had ruled in Plessy vs Ferguson that segregation was legal, as long as separate places for blacks and whites were "separate but equal." The Lawyers argued that the white and black schools in Topeka were not "separate but

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456 Words | 2 Pages

In 1890, the separate car act required railroads to separate blacks and whites. Homer Plessy challenged the law by sitting in the whites only car and said that he was black, so he got charged. The judge did not agree with Plessy, the case decided that the Louisiana law was constitutional under the 14th amendment in the cars for african americans. The Plessy decision was “separate but equal” places, for whites and blacks were constitutional as long as they were equal. Even though blacks had a hard time with all the discrimination against them they still did not give up.

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897 Words | 4 Pages

Jim Crow laws were pursued in mostly all southern states in the 1880’s, legalizing segregation between all races. In the article “The Age of Jim Crow: Segregation From the End of Construction to the Great Depression.” by Jesse Walker Dees and James S. Walter, Dees and Walter state “Jim Crow was the name for a system of laws/customs that imposed racial segregation and discrimination on African Americans from the

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393 Words | 2 Pages

Particularly in the South, they continued to seek opportunities to legal slavery. As a result, Southerners pass a state law, Black Codes, during reconstruction. This law restricted the civil rights and public activities of legally freed African Americans. Owning weapons, freedom of movement, and land ownerships were against Black Codes. Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896), the court case that upheld authority of the state law claiming, “separate-but-equal facilities for whites and blacks” , led up to another significant factor, segregation, which arose to be controversy in mid-1900s.

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