Nettie Hunt and her daughter Nickie sit on the steps of the U. Supreme Court in May of Nettie explains to her daughter the meaning of the high court's ruling in the Brown v. Board of Education case that segregation in public schools is unconstitutional.
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Related Stories. How the U. Already a print subscriber? Go here to link your subscription. In legal theory, blacks received "separate but equal" treatment under the law — in actuality, public facilities for blacks were nearly always inferior to those for whites, when they existed at all.
In addition, blacks were systematically denied the right to vote in most of the rural South through the selective application of literacy tests and other racially motivated criteria. The Jim Crow system was upheld by local government officials and reinforced by acts of terror perpetrated by Vigilantes.
In , 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. In , journalist Ray Stannard Baker observed that "no other point of race contact is so much and so bitterly discussed among Negroes as the Jim Crow car.
In , in spite 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. Supreme Court in Two years later, the court seemed to seal the fate of black Americans when it upheld a Mississippi law designed to deny black men the vote.
In , Louisiana had , registered black voters. Jim Crow laws touched every part of life. In South Carolina, black and white textile workers could not work in the same room, enter through the same door, or gaze out of the same window. In Richmond, one could not live on a street unless most of the residents were people one could marry. One could not marry someone of a different race.
By , Texas had six entire towns in which blacks could not live. Mobile passed a Jim Crow curfew: Blacks could not leave their homes after 10 p.
Georgia had black and white parks. Oklahoma had black and white phone booths. Prisons, hospitals, and orphanages were segregated as were schools and colleges. In North Carolina, black and white students had to use separate sets of textbooks. Atlanta courts kept two Bibles: one for black witnesses and one for whites. Though seemingly rigid and complete, Jim Crow laws did not account for all of the discrimination blacks suffered.
Unwritten rules barred blacks from white jobs in New York and kept them out of white stores in Los Angeles. Humiliation was about the best treatment blacks who broke such rules could hope for. More than , black men served in World War I. The country welcomed them home with 25 major race riots, the most serious in Chicago.
White mobs lynched veterans in uniform. Black Americans fought back. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, founded in , and the Urban League publicized abuses and worked for redress. Protesters march against school segregation.
Wikimedia Commons. Though they drew support from both races, these groups barely stemmed the tide. The s and 30s produced new Jim Crow laws. By , a Swede visiting the South pronounced segregation so complete that whites did not see blacks except when being served by them.
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