Lead up to the Segregation era
In 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation symbolically established a national intent to eradicate slavery in the United States. Decades of state and federal legislation around civil rights followed. In January of 1865, the 13th amendment to the Constitution officially abolished slavery in this country, while the 14th amendment, passed in 1866, set forth three principles:
Finally, the 15th amendment, passed in 1869, outlawed the denial of voting rights due to race, color, or past servitude.
However, immediately after the Civil War ended, some states began imposing restrictions on the daily lives of African Americans, whether they were survivors of slavery or had always been free. By the end of the 19th century, laws or informal practices that required that African Americans be segregated from whites were often called Jim Crow practices, believed to be a reference to a minstrel-show song, "Jump Jim Crow."
With the Compromise of 1877, political power was returned to Southern whites in nearly every state of the former Confederacy. The federal government abandoned attempts to enforce the 14th and 15th amendments in many parts of the country. By 1890, when Mississippi added a disfranchisement provision to its state constitution, the legalization of Jim Crow had begun.
Jim Crow was not enacted as a universal, written law of the land. Instead, a patchwork of state and local laws, codes, and agreements enforced segregation to different degrees and in different ways across the nation. In many towns and cities, ordinances designated white and black neighborhoods, while in others covenants and unwritten agreements among real estate interests maintained residential segregation. African Americans were denied the right to vote by onerous poll taxes, unfairly applied tests, and other unjust barriers. The signs we associate today with Jim Crow – "Whites Only," "Colored"– appeared at bus stations, water fountains and rest rooms, as well as at the entrances and exits to public buildings. Hotels, movie theaters, arenas, night clubs, restaurants, churches, hospitals, and schools were segregated, and interracial marriages outlawed. Segregation was not limited to African Americans, but often applied to other non-white Americans.
Segregation was often maintained by uniformed law enforcement. In other instances, it was enforced by armed white mobs and violent attacks by anonymous vigilantes. African Americans resisted these pervasive restrictions using many different strategies, from public advocacy and political activism to individual self-defense and attempts to escape to a better life. In the century following the end of Reconstruction, millions of African Americans moved away from the South in what became known as the Great Migration, only to discover that they faced discrimination in the northern states.
In the middle of the twentieth century, generations of resistance to segregation culminated in the Civil Rights movement, in which African Americans launched widespread demonstrations and other public protests to demand the rights and protections provided by the Constitution. As a result, a series of landmark court cases and new legislation in the 1950s and 60s, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, relegated many of the Jim Crow laws and practices of the previous century to the dustbin of history. The impact of a century of segregation can still be felt today, and, although the specific segregation policies of the 19th and 20th centuries have been discredited, voices calling for equal rights for all are still heard today.
Source: Library of Congress, Primary Source Set, Jim Crow and Segregation, <https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/jim-crow-segregation/>
Frontline: Episode 9
March 26, 1985 / 53mins
The day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered in April 1968, Jane Elliott’s third graders from the small, all-white town of Riceville, Iowa, came to class confused and upset. They recently had made King their “Hero of the Month,” and they couldn’t understand why someone would kill him. So Elliott decided to teach her class a daring lesson in the meaning of discrimination. She wanted to show her pupils what discrimination feels like, and what it can do to people.
At the bus station in Durham, North Carolina [May 1940].
Young boys harassing the Horace Baker family, the first African American family to move into the all white Delmar Village neighborhood of Folcroft, Pennsylvania [August 30, 1963].
In 1910, 90% of Black Americans lived in the South. By 1940, around 1.5 million Black Americans had left their homes, and 77% lived in the South. By 1970, 52% of Black Americans remained in the South. People moved away for many reasons, including increased opportunity in the more industrial North and West. They sought a relatively safer life away from the lynchings and violence that were concentrated in the South. This Great Migration shaped 20th-century America in countless ways, but we're going to try to count some of them in this video.
David Korn-Brzoza directs Ku Klux Klan, An American History. A 2 x 55-minute documentary on the origins of the oldest terrorist movement in the United States. From the Civil War to the present day, the history of the Ku Klux Klan has made headlines. 150 years of hatred, racism and violence. Archives and interviews help us understand the longevity of this organization which has disappeared several times before rising from its ashes. Historical advisor: Pap Ndiaye, Produced by Roche Production / ARTE / RTBF / RTS.
The following is Part 1 [Birth of an invisible empire], which looks at the beginnings of the KKK in 1865 through the 1920s when a movie, “The Birth of A Nation”, mainstreamed the Klan across the country.
NB: Age restriction [M] is in place as the content contains graphic images and violent rhetoric.