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
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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