Cite three examples of Jim Crow laws that would have presented financial hardships to a local government or institution. What can you infer from the fact that these laws went unchallenged for many years?
Answers
Answer:
Examples of Jim Crow Laws - Oct. 1960 - Civil Rights
The Jackson Sun - 2001
From the 1880s into the 1960s, a majority of American states enforced segregation through "Jim Crow" laws (so called after a black character in minstrel shows). From Delaware to California, and from North Dakota to Texas, many states (and cities, too) could impose legal punishments on people for consorting with members of another race. The most common types of laws forbade intermarriage and ordered business owners and public institutions to keep their black and white clientele separated. Here is a sampling of laws from various states.
Alabama
Arizona
Florida
Georgia
Kentucky
Louisiana
Maryland
Mississippi
Missouri
New Mexico
North Carolina
Oklahoma
South Carolina
Texas
Virginia
Wyoming
Answer:
It shall be unlawful for a negro and white person to play together or in company with each other at any game of pool or billiards." This selection is an example of a Jim Crow law that was in effect in the state of Alabama from the late 19th century to the early 20th century.
Thurgood Marshall with Little Rock Defendants
Jim Crow was the name of a minstrel character created in 1828 by Thomas Dartmouth ("Daddy") Rice. Rice’s comedy routines and the popular song “Jump, Jim Crow” established the common name for laws that enforced racial prejudice and denied human rights to black people in the United States.
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Legal History of Jim Crow
Jim Crow laws started to come into effect, primarily but not exclusively in southern states, after the end of Reconstruction in 1877.
The legal principle of separate but equal was established in the Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson in 1895. The Court’s decision was summarized by Chief Justice Henry Billings Brown, who stated that the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause “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 upon terms unsatisfactory to either.”
That distinction of social, as opposed to strictly legal, discrimination, provided the foundation for states to keep black and white people separated, particularly in social settings and social institutions such as marriage. The convenient fiction of “separate but equal” was quickly abandoned and African Americans were treated as second-class citizens by institutions and laws that persist to this day.
Jim Crow Laws in Daily Life
These laws worked to enforce segregation amongst the races, which led to civil rights actions by individuals such as Ida B. Wells, and ultimately to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s led by people like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr..
Examples of Jim Crow laws that caused these extreme tensions in the country included the following.
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Business
“The business of America is business,” said President Calvin Coolidge, but in his own era and in the present, it has been the country’s business to enforce racial inequality. Buying, selling and the simplest activities of daily life - symbolized most famously by the simple water fountain - were firmly segregated by Jim Crow laws.
Alabama: “Every employer of white or negro males shall provide for such white or negro males reasonably accessible and separate toilet facilities.”
Alabama: "It shall be unlawful to conduct a restaurant or other place for the serving of food in the city, at which white and colored people are served in the same room, unless such white and colored persons are effectually separated by a solid partition extending from the floor upward to a distance of seven feet or higher, and unless a separate entrance from the street is provided for each compartment."
Georgia: “All persons licensed to conduct the business of selling beer or wine...shall serve either white people exclusively or colored people exclusively and shall not sell to two races within the same room at any time.
Georgia: "It shall be unlawful for any amateur white baseball team to play baseball on any vacant lot or baseball diamond within two blocks of a playground devoted to the Negro race, and it shall be unlawful for any amateur colored baseball team to play baseball in any vacant lot or baseball diamond within two blocks of any playground devoted to the white race."
Louisiana: “All carriers must provide equal but separate seats for white and colored. No person of one race is allowed to be in the section set aside for the other race.”
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Marriage
Marriage has always been a highly politicized issue. As one of the most fundamental institutions of society, when social change occurs, marriage changes with it. Examples of Jim Crow laws like the following were intended to freeze marriage into a perceived ideal where racial mixing was impossible:
California: “All marriages of white persons with Negroes, Mongolians, members of the Malay race, or mulattoes are illegal and void."
Florida: "All marriages between a white person and a negro, or between a white person and a person of negro descent to the fourth generation inclusive, are hereby forever prohibited."