Jim Crow Laws Dbq

The Jim Crow laws weren’t originally named the Jim Crow laws in the reconstruction era (1865-1877) when they were first passed. They were started to called that by the actor named Jim Crow who was a white man who blacked his face and he danced around and sang about not having a care in the world. The Reconstruction era was the period of time after the civil war after the north triumphed over the south. Things weren’t a smooth transition for the people of the south with many people staying as racists and the creation of hate groups and deadly gangs such as the Ku Klux Klan were rampant after the northern soldiers left the south when reconstruction was over. The treatment of the innocent black people was unfair and unjust. Reconstruction wasn’t

The Jim Crow laws made it so that many black people became powerless as they couldn’t vote. They couldn’t vote because the lawmakers passed a law to make it so that people had to pay to vote. Because many black people at the time were poor many of them couldn’t pay this fee of voting and were left powerless when it came to political decisions. That is not the only way that the lawmakers made it so the blacks were powerless. They also made it so white and black people couldn’t be together in public so there had to be different railway cars, water fountains, stores, restaurants and pretty much their whole lives were apart. Tearing two types of people does not help the issue, if anything it makes the issue worse. By tearing apart two types of people, the people will be more racist because they only hear one point of view and no nothing about how the group of people are and what they’re like. Some people tried to test the laws such as white skinned man, Homer Pessey, who had a grandmother who was black. He sat in a white railroad car and the conductor decided he was a black man and Pessey got sent to jail. The judge who tried him, Judge Ferguson, agreed with the conductor but the case got sent to supreme court. The supreme court agreed with Judge Ferguson and racism in the US was let loose. That was until the supreme court looked back on their ruling and changed it, making it so that Jim Crow was a hate sign and kicking him off the stage (Jim Crow