civil rights topic 2- To what extent did the spread of Jim Crow Laws change race relations in the south and how were black people excluded from voting?

de facto

- As well as legal or de jure segregation, enacted by state law, de facto segregation also developed. Often a result of segregation by individuals. - Even prostitution segregated in some areas! New Orleans, Louisiana had separate areas for black and white prostitutes. - Some private organisations brought in their own regulations segregating their facilities. - Nashville, Tennessee, only whites could use the new pavilion at Glendale Park for baseball. - Raleigh's Brookside Park swimming pool, North Carolina, only open to whites.

Impact on voter numbers in the south in the 1890s

- Black electorate shrank considerably. In Louisiana, the reduction was 90%. - In 1890s, each southern state passed constitutional amendments placing stipulations on voting that hit black Americans hardest. - Three main methods: - 1. Poll taxes - Put a tax on voting. Had discouraging effect on poor people, white and black. (until made illegal with Twenty-Fourth Amendment (1964). - 2. Property tests - Had to own property to vote. - Together with poll taxes, reduced whites voting also, but not as much as whites. - 3. Literacy test - Together, the impact was to see a drop of 65 per cent in the south of black American voting, and of 26 per cent of white voting. - Grandfather clause aimed exclusively at black Americans, helped cement racial divide between poor whites and poor blacks where it was introduced.

black response

- Even prominent members of southern black community accepted the onset of segregation. - 1895, September 12, Booker T. Washington, leading black civil rights leader (and one of most influential black Americans in the 1890s), gave a speech in Atlanta known as the 'Atlanta Compromise', speech. Stated he was willing to accept racial segregation in the south if it still allowed black Americans to acquire education and skills to improve their standard of living. - Washington founded Tuskegee College to educated black American men. - His views were attacked by the black American academic W. E. B. Du Bois, in 1903, who demanded full civil rights for black Americans.

jc laws

- Following re-establishment of white rule in the southern states after 1877, civil rights of black Americans gradually eroded by laws passed by various southern state legislatures. - Together laws known as 'Jim Crow Laws' - Introduced system of legal segregation of black and white races in - Education - Public transportation - Public facilities - In addition, some Jim Crow Laws introduced new regulations on the registration of voting which removed the right to vote for majority of black Americans in southern states.

extension of segregation into social areas

Changes to rail travel in Florida, 1887 - Once 1883 civil rights cases judgement declared that 1875 Civil Rights Act was unconstitutional, it gave state governments right to introduce legal segregation of the races. - 1887 - Florida became first state to introduce legal segregation in railway carriages. - 1887 Florida State Law declared black and white passengers had to occupy separate railway carriages. - Black person convicted of violating this, faced fine of $500. other states such as north calorlina and Virginia followed e.g- Extended to all restaurants and eating houses at railway states - 1906, South Carolina.

voting

Excluding black voters Following Fifteenth Amendment, 700,000 ex-slaves were enfranchised. Black voters outnumbered white voters in five of the former confederate states. - In Texas, 42 black Americans were elected to the state legislature, 50 in South Carolina, 172 in Louisiana and 99 in Alabama. Black Americans also became US senators and congressmen. HOWEVER - Following end of Reconstruction, southern state governments, dominated by Democrat Party, began process which removed most black Americans from voting and political systems of the southern states. - Impact - Reversal of political gains achieved during Reconstruction - Ensured dominance of white-dominated Democrat party in the south until the 1970s. - Major attempt to exclude black Americans from voting. - 1890 - Delegation appointed to adopt new state constitution, primarily to deprive black Americans of the right to vote. - Before 1890, constitution and laws of Mississippi provided that all male citizens over 21 could register to vote, if lived in state for 6 months and in the country for 1 month. - Mississippi's population = 55% black American - HOWEVER, of 134 delegates appointed to draw up new state constitution, only 1 was black. - Methods of reducing the black vote: - 1. Article 12 of the new state constitution reduced the black vote by: - Demanding a poll tax of $2 for voter registration. - As poverty among black Mississippians v. high, poll tax disproportionately affected black voters who could not afford to pay it. - 2. Introduction of literacy test for all voter registration. - Involved being able to recite and explain parts of Mississippi State Constitution. - 60% of Mississippi's black population were illiterate in 1890. Therefore disproportionately excluded them. - Impact - Before 1890, 67% of voting age African Americans in the state of Mississippi were registered to vote. - By 1 January 1892, when the new constitution came into effect, had dropped to 5.7%. - Stayed this way until 1960s. - By 1899, approx. 122,000 white males were registered to vote, 82 per cent of potential white voting population. - All primary elections of Democrat Party were exclusively white. As they were organised by political parties as private organisations, they were not covered in the state constitution. - As Democrat candidate almost always won, made it virtually irrelevant if remaining registered black voters participated in a federal or state election. Louisiana's Grandfather Clause, 1898 Other states used different methods: - Louisiana: 8 February 1898, Louisiana Constitutional Convention met for the first time. - President of the Convention clear that he aimed to remove from the electorate, illiterate voters, the vast majority of whom were black Americans. - Convention included provision requiring potential voters to pass a literacy test or own a certain amount of property in order to register. - Many whites were neither literate nor property owners ... therefore: - Profound: 1896 - estimated 130,000 black Americans registered to vote in Louisiana; in 1904 - 1,324. - However: - In 1915, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Guinn v. United States that grandfather clauses were unconstitutional after NAACP challenged it. . BUT that literacy tests untethered from grandfather clauses were OK.