Civil Rights
"The rights of citizens to political and social freedom and equality"
-Google
Rights Established
"The 13th Amendment (1865) abolished slavery; the 14th Amendment (1868) defined citizenship; the 15th Amendment (1870) protected voting rights. These amendments were intended to eliminate the last remnants of slavery and to protect the citizenship of African-Americans."
- National Archives, Documented Rights
- National Archives, Documented Rights
Rights Taken Away
"A short period of initial freedoms quickly eroded into 'second class' civil rights and, in some cases, new forms of slavery."
- National Archives, Documented Rights
- National Archives, Documented Rights
"Denying black men the right to vote through legal maneuvering and violence was a first step in taking away their civil rights. Beginning in the 1890's, southern states enacted literacy tests, poll taxes, elaborate registration systems, and eventually whites-only Democratic Party primaries to exclude black voters. The laws proved very effective. In Mississippi, fewer than 9,000 of the 147,000 voting-age African-Americans were registered after 1890."
- Smithsonian, National Museum of American History |
The Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson then legalized segregation of blacks and whites.
"Justice Harlan [Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan, who cast the lone dissenting vote in Plessy v. Ferguson] predicted that the court's ruling 'will not only stimulate aggressions, more or less brutal and irritating, upon the admitted rights of colored citizens, but will encourage the belief that it is possible, by means of state enactments, to defeat the beneficent purposes which the people of the United States had in view when they adopted the recent amendments of the constitution....' If separate-but-equal was acceptable on railroads, he asked, what would keep States from enacting laws that required white citizens and African-Americans to walk only on alternative sides of the street, or apply similar restrictions to streetcars and other vehicles, and to courtrooms, juries, or legislatures?"
- The Road to Civil Rights, U.S. Department of Transportation
- The Road to Civil Rights, U.S. Department of Transportation
Jim Crow Laws
Justice Harlan was right: states enacted laws that continued to degrade African-Americans.
"It shall be unlawful for any white prisoner to be handcuffed or otherwise chained or tied to a negro prisoner."
- Arkansas, 1903 "Separate free schools shall be established for the education of children of African descent; and it shall be unlawful for any colored child to attend any white school, or any white child to attend a colored school." - Missouri, 1929 |
"Marriages are void when one party is a white person and the other is possessed of one-eighth or more negro, Japanese, or Chinese blood."
- Nebraska, 1911 "It shall be unlawful for a negro and white person to play together or in company with each other in any game of cards or dice, dominoes or checkers." - Birmingham, Alabama, 1930 |