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The Jim Crow Laws: The Plessy Vs. Ferguson Case

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“What can more certainly arouse race hate, what more certainly create and perpetuate a feeling of distrust between these races, than state enactments which, in fact, proceed on the ground that colored citizens are so inferior and degraded that they cannot be allowed to sit in public coaches occupied by white citizens?”- John Marshall Harlan. On May 18, 1896, the Supreme court passed the separate but equal act on a vote of 7-1. This allowed separate facilities to be made for whites and blacks. This was the result of the Plessy vs Ferguson case, where a man was forced out of a whites-only car because he had African descent. The Supreme court couldn’t find any differences in the train cars, yet separate facilities for blacks had a decrease in quality. After this decision, many laws would be made …show more content…

Most places banned interracial marriage, adoption, or even living together. These kinds of laws had a huge impact on segregation. It separated the races, making everyone believe the world was us or them. Henry Tajfel proposed the Social Identity theory in 1979. This theory says that the group a person belonged to was a source of self-esteem. He whites-only that a group would put another group down to increase their self-image. This kind of thinking was enforced by the Jim Crow laws. The separation of the two groups made it so people would see each other as lesser, allowing more Jim Crow laws to be put in place.

During the Jim Crow era, many activist fought against these laws. Although the activists had a variety of jobs, many of the activists were teachers or scholars. Another similarity is that they all believed that the way to end segregation was to increase education. The school system was segregated, and the white school was always superior. This means the higher positions in jobs would go to whites. By educating african-american children, they were trying to ensure that the next generation would have more

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Homer Plessy was a brave man willing to stand up against southern Jim Crow laws, and that is fate in the Supreme Court is unfair. The Separate Car Act dictates that separate races must sit in separate cars, which is segregatory, and passed by the state of Louisiana. This is in direct violation of the 14th, and rightfully deserved to be challenged. African Americans everywhere should be able to use their rights earned by four long years of bloodshed, and not be dampened by the courts. But the court overlooked the fact that it was an state law, and not private policy, and deemed the segregation private and thus legal.

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To understand the question, focusing on the court cases of Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education, we must first understand each court case on its own. Plessy v. Ferguson resulted in the year 1896. The case involved the 1890s Louisiana law that basically stated that there were separate railway carriages that were specifically labeled for blacks only and whites only. Plessy v. Ferguson involved Homer Plessy, who was seven-eighths white and one-eighth black and appeared to look like a white man. Plessy took an open seat in a white only railway car.

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The year was 1955 when fourteen year old Emmett Till was murdered in cold blood by Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam. Emmett was born on July 25, 1941 in Chicago, Illinois to Mamie and Louis Till. He was spending the summer in Money, Mississippi with his extended family after relentlessly begging his mother for hours on end, until she finally agreed to the proposition. Mamie warned Emmett to be careful of the way he acted in Mississippi, because she knew how racially segregated it was due to the Jim Crow laws that were passed in the south at the time. It all started three days after arriving in Money with his uncle Moses Wright and multiple cousins.

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Discrimination against blacks was happening in both the North and the South equally. While the Plessy vs. Ferguson case declared facilities were to be “separate but equal”, they were separate and unequal for 60 years. In Document C, there is a water fountain where one side is for whites, while the other side is for colored. This only created more tension between whites and blacks, and made the fight even harder for everyone to be treated equally. African Americans will always get the run down part of the bus and the dirtier water fountain.

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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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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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In the mid-to-late 1800s the African American community faced opposition and segregation. They were segregated from the whites and treated as second-class citizens. This segregation was caused in part by Jim Crow laws. Jim Crow laws separated races in schools, hospitals, parks, public buildings, and transportation systems. Both Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois had ideas on how to improve African American lives, Washington believed in starting at the bottom and working up whereas Du Bois had an opposing viewpoint he saw starting from the bottom as submissive and believed African Americans should hold important jobs in order to demand equal treatment.

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Throughout history, race has been an ongoing theme. Race was used to define a person as well as the rights that they held. People of races other than white were given little to none respect and were not treated as human beings but instead property. It was a constant battle between races, therefore forming a them versus us society. Through history there were many people who were treated based off their race, there were many different government made laws and documents that defined and laid out the rights of those certain races.

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Supreme Court Decisions Setting Precedent Discrimination may not seen as big a problem today, but people had to fight for that problem, and court cases set precedents for today. The case of Plessy versus Ferguson and Brown versus Board of Education helped change the way we view discrimination today. The case of Plessy versus Ferguson decided that segregation was legal as long as everything was equal. But on the other hand, Brown versus Board of Education included separate but equal schools made African-American children feel inferior to the white children. 1896, Supreme Court heard the Plessy versus Ferguson case.

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Even though the promise of equality was present for African Americans, this premise was never kept and African Americans remained segregated. Segregation separated whites and African Americans in public areas. Blacks and whites did not go to the school together, were given poor quality of materials, and did not have good education. Whites would beat or lynch Blacks whenever they were in the streets or crossed their neighborhoods. It was a crime for a colored person to argue against a white person.

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While reading, I noticed that there were similarities in how these books approach their theme. The main characters in the books were accepted by a white. Jackie Robinson was accepted by Pee Wee Reese, and Clover was accepted by Anne. Jackie and Clover were both taught to stay away from whites, but they didn’t. The author stated that the audience would throw trash at Jackie, but that didn’t stop Jackie from playing baseball with whites.

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People justified their reasonings and social inequality based upon the characteristics they attributed. People were who they were based upon their genes. There was hardly anything a black man could say to change the minds of an all white jury. However, ways were being sought to end the discrimination throughout America. Changes were being found in the way white people viewed others from different races with different color skin.

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5th Hour Cause and Effect Essay Jim Crow laws The Jim Crow laws were unfair and unjust to all African-Americans by making them unequal. The Jim Crow laws are laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States. It used the term separate but equal, even though conditions for African Americans were always worst than their white counterparts. They could not eat at the same restaurant as white people, they could not used the same restrooms, and they couldn't even use the same drinking fountain.

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The Jim Crow laws claimed to be “Separate but equal”, they were anything but. The laws separated the blacks from the whites. They had separate stores, schools, and even drinking fountains. The Jim Crow laws separated the blacks from the whites, made life harder for the blacks, and when they were separated their stores, restaurants, and other things were not equal.

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561 Words | 3 Pages

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.

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