How Did Jim Crow Laws Protect African Americans

By the 1870’s after the civil war white politicians abandoned the cause of protecting African Americans. In the former Confederacy local governments had created a legal system set to re establish a society based on white supremacy. African American men were mainly banned from voting. Legislation known as Jim Crow laws separated people of color from whites in schools, housing, jobs, and public gathering places. Denying black men the right to vote through legal maneuvering and violence was a first step in taking away their civil rights. Beginning in the 1890s, southern states enacted literacy tests, poll taxes, complicated registration systems, and eventually only white Democratic Party primaries to exclude black voters.The laws proved very effective. In Mississippi, fewer than 9,000 of the 147,000 voting-age African Americans were registered after 1890. In Louisiana, where more than 130,000 black voters had been registered in 1896, the number had plummeted to 1,342 by 1904.

It shows african americans as nothing more than imbeciles. By the 1890s the name “Jim Crow” was being used to describe laws and customs thats goal at segregating African Americans and others. These laws were made to eliminate social contact between white people and other groups and to limit the freedom and opportunity of people of color. . In the depression ridden 1890s, racism seemed to appeal to white people who feared losing their jobs to black people. In 1890, despite of its 16 black members, the Louisiana General Assembly passed a law to prevent black and white people from riding together on railroads. Plessy v. Ferguson, a case challenging the law reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896. Upholding the law, the court said that public facilities for blacks and whites could be “separate but equal.” Soon the South had to be separate according to the