Many people believed that Jim Crow was a person, when in fact it was an era. This period had an impact on the lives of millions of people. It is named after a famous 19th century song that stereotyped African Americans. It also became a body of law in the South. “Jim Crow” became the symbol of racial oppression of African Americans and white supremacy in the United States. Jim Crow still exists today, but to a much lesser extent. During the Reconstruction period from 1865 to 1877, federal laws provided civil rights protections in the United States. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay on the South for freedmen, African Americans who were once slaves, and the minority of blacks who were free before the war. In the 1870s, Democrats gradually regained power in Southern legislatures, after using insurgent paramilitary groups, such as the White League and the Red Shirts, to disrupt Republican organization, driving Republican officials out of town and intimidating black people into suppressing their right to vote. Extensive electoral fraud was also used. Gubernatorial elections had been close and contested in Louisiana for years, with increasing violence against blacks during campaigns beginning in 1868. In 1877, a compromise by the national Democratic Party to gain Southern support during the The presidential election resulted in the withdrawal of the government of the last federal party. southern troops. White Democrats had regained political power in all the Southern states. These white redemptive Democratic governments in the South legislated Jim Crow laws, officially separating blacks from the white population. Black people were still elected to local offices throughout the 1880s, but their right to vote was removed in state and national elections. Democrats passed laws to make voter registration and voting rules more restrictive, with the result that the political participation of most blacks and many poor whites began to decline. Between 1890 and 1910, ten of the eleven former Confederate states, starting with Mississippi, adopted new constitutions. or amendments that effectively disenfranchised most blacks and tens of thousands of poor whites through a combination of poll taxes, literacy and comprehension tests, and residency and record-keeping requirements . Grandfather clauses temporarily allowed some illiterate whites to vote, but provided no relief to most blacks. Voter turnout fell drastically in the South as a result of these measures. In Louisiana, in 1900, black voters were reduced to 5,320 registered voters, even though they constituted the majority of the state's population. In 1910, only 730 blacks were registered, less than 0.5 percent of eligible black men. “In 27 of the state's 60 parishes, not a single black voter was registered; in 9 other parishes, only one black voter was. » The cumulative effect in North Carolina means that black voters were completely eliminated from the voting rolls during the period. from 1896 to 1904. The growth of their burgeoning middle class was slowed. In North Carolina and other Southern states, blacks suffered from being made invisible in the political system: "In a decade of disenfranchisement, the campaign for white supremacy erased the image of the middle class. thereblack middle class in the minds of white North Carolina. » In Alabama, tens of thousands of poor whites were also disenfranchised, even though lawmakers initially promised them they would not be negatively affected by the new restrictions. Those who could not vote were not eligible. They could not serve on juries and could not run for local office, because they could not influence state legislatures and their interests were neglected. While public schools had been first established by Reconstruction legislatures in most Southern states, those for black children were systematically underfunded compared to schools for white children, even when considering the strained finances of the postwar South where falling cotton prices kept the agricultural economy at a low level. Like schools, public libraries for blacks were underfunded or nonexistent, and they were often stocked with used books and other resources. These facilities were not introduced for African Americans in the South until the first decade of the 20th century. During the Jim Crow era, libraries were only sporadically available. Before the 20th century, most libraries established for African Americans were combinations of school libraries. Many public libraries serving European-American and African-American patrons in this period were founded as a result of middle-class activism aided by matching grants from the Carnegie. Foundation. In some cases, progressive measures intended to reduce voter fraud, such as South Carolina's Eight Box law, worked against illiterate black and white voters because they could not follow instructions. As the separation of African Americans from the general population became legalized and formalized during the Progressive Era (1890s–1920s), it also became customary. For example, even in cases where Jim Crow laws did not expressly prohibit blacks from participating in sports or recreation, a culture of segregation became common. Against the backdrop of Jim Crow, the 1912 presidential election was heavily biased against black interests. Americans. Most blacks still lived in the South, where they were effectively disenfranchised and therefore could not vote at all. While poll taxes and literacy requirements barred many poor or illiterate Americans from voting, these stipulations often had loopholes that exempted Americans of European descent from meeting the requirements. In Oklahoma, for example, anyone eligible to vote before 1866, or related to someone eligible to vote before 1866 (a sort of "grandfather clause"), was exempt from the literacy requirement ; but the only people who had the right to vote before that year were white or European-American men. European Americans were effectively exempt from literacy tests, while black Americans were effectively sidelined by law. Woodrow Wilson was an elected Democrat from New Jersey, but he was born and raised in the South, and was the first southern-born president of the state. the post-Civil War period. He appointed southerners to his cabinet. Some soon began pushing for separate workplaces, even though the city of Washington, D.C., and federal offices had been integrated since the Civil War. In 1913, for example, Treasury Secretary William Gibbs McAdoo – appointed by the president – ​​was heard expressing his views on black and white womenworking together in the same government office: “I'm sure that must go against conventional wisdom. "Wilson introduced segregation in federal offices, despite numerous protests from African American leaders and national groups. He appointed segregationist Southern politicians because of his own belief that racial segregation was in the best interests of Americans blacks and Europeans.[16] At Gettysburg, on July 4, 1913, on the occasion of the half-centennial of Abraham Lincoln's declaration that “all men are created equal,” Wilson addressed the crowd: “ How complete and how dear to us all the union has become, how unquestioned, how benign and majestic, as state after state has been added to it, our great family of free men Unlike Wilson, an editorial! of Washington Bee questioned whether the 1913 "meeting" was a meeting of those who fought for the "extinction of slavery" or a meeting of those who fought to "perpetuate slavery and now employ." every artifice and argument known to deceive" to present emancipation as a failure. Historian David W. Blight notes that the "Peace Jubilee" that Wilson presided over at Gettysburg in 1913 "was a Jim Crow meeting, and it could be said that white supremacy has been the silent and invisible master of ceremonies. » In Texas, several cities passed residential segregation laws between 1910 and the 1920s. Legal restrictions required separate water fountains and toilets. Jim Crow laws were the product of what had become a solidly Democratic South due to black disenfranchisement. In January 1964, President Lyndon Johnson met with civil rights leaders. On January 8, in his first State of the Union address, Johnson called on Congress to "make this session of Congress known as one that has done more for civil rights than the last hundred sessions united”. On June 21, civil rights activists Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney disappeared in Neshoba County, Mississippi, where they were volunteering to register African-American voters as part of the Mississippi Summer Project. The disappearance of the three activists attracted national attention, and the ensuing outrage was used by Johnson and civil rights activists to build a coalition of Northern Democrats and Republicans and push Congress to pass the Protection Act. Civil Rights Act of 1964. On July 2, 1964, Johnson signed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. It invoked the Commerce Clause to prohibit discrimination in public places (restaurants, hotels, and private stores, as well as in schools and private workplaces). This use of the commerce clause was upheld in Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States 379 US 241 (1964). By 1965, efforts to break the state's hold on disenfranchisement through voter registration education in southern counties had been underway for some time. , but achieved only modest success overall. In some areas of the Deep South, white resistance made these efforts almost completely ineffective. The murder of the three voting rights activists in Mississippi in 1964 and the state's refusal to prosecute the murderers, along with numerous other acts of violence and terrorism against black people, had attracted national attention. Finally, the March 7, 1965, unprovoked attack by county and state troopers on peaceful Alabama demonstrators crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge en route from Selma to the state capital, Montgomery, persuaded THE.