Read complete books and articles on: Jim Crow Laws

Jim Crow Laws - in U.S. history, statutes enacted by Southern states and muncipalities, beginning in the 1880s, that legalized segregation between blacks and whites. The name is believed to be derived from a character in a popular minstrel song. The Supreme Court ruling in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson that separate facilities for whites and blacks were constitutional encouraged the passage of discriminatory laws that wiped out the gains made by blacks during Reconstruction. Railways and streetcars, public waiting rooms, restaurants, boardinghouses, theaters, and public parks were segregated; separate schools, hospitals, and other public institutions, generally of inferior quality, were designated for blacks. By World War I, even places of employment were segregated, and it was not until after World War II that an assault on Jim Crow in the South began to make headway. In 1950 the Supreme Court ruled that the Univ. of Texas must admit a black, Herman Sweatt, to the law school, on the grounds that the state did not provide equal education for him. This was followed (1954) by the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kans., declaring separate facilities by race to be unconstitutional. Blacks in the South used legal suits, mass sit-ins, and boycotts to hasten desegregation. A march on Washington by over 200,000 in 1963 dramatized the movement to end Jim Crow. Southern whites often responded with violence, and federal troops were needed to preserve order and protect blacks, notably at Little Rock, Ark. (1957), Oxford, Miss. (1962), and Selma, Ala. (1965). The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 finally ended the legal sanctions to Jim Crow. See affirmative action; civil rights; integration.

See C. V. Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1966).

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16 of the Best Books and Articles on: Jim Crow Laws

as selected by Questia librarians

1.

Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chap. 2 "Living Jim Crow: The Atlanta Riot and Unmasking 'Social Equality'") » Read Now
by Kevin K. Gaines. 314 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

...they encountered discrimination in a Jim Crow army and harassment from white citizens...combined with antiblack violence and Jim Crow in the South, complicated matters...be...
2.

The Negro in American Civilization (Chap. 9 "From Reconstruction to Jim Crow") » Read Now
by Nathaniel Weyl. 360 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

...equal protection of the laws." Or, as George Mason...From Reconstruction to Jim Crow 101 10...THE ENLIGHTENMENT "Bad laws having made lazy men, they...MONTESQUIEU. The...
3.

From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality » Read Now
by Michael J. Klarman. 653 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

Do Supreme Court decisions matter? In 1896 the United States Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that railroad segregation laws were permissible under the Fourteenth Amendment. In 1954 the Court's decision in Brown v. the Board of Education held that the same constitutional provision...
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Do Supreme Court decisions matter? In 1896 the United States Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that railroad segregation laws were permissible under the Fourteenth Amendment. In 1954 the Court's decision in Brown v. the Board of Education held that the same constitutional provision invalidated statutes segregating public schools How great an impact did judicial rulings such as Plessy and Brown have? How much did such Court decisions influence the larger world of race relations? In From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, Michael J. Klarman examines the social and political impact of the Supreme Court's decisions involving race relations from Plessy, the Progressive Era, and the Interwar Period to World Wars I and II, Brown and the Civil Rights Movement. He explores the wide variety of consequences that Brown may have had--raising the salience of race issues, educating opinion, mobilizing supporters, energizing opponents of racial change. He concludes that Brown was ultimately more important for mobilizing southern white opposition to racial change than for encouraging direct-action protest. The decision created concrete occasions for violent confrontation--court ordered school desegregation and radicalized southern politics, leading to the election of politicians who calculated that violent suppression of civil rights demonstrations would win votes. It was such violence--vividly captured on television--that ultimately transformed northern opinion on race, leading to the enactment of landmark civil rights legislation in the mid 1960s. A fascinating investigation of the Supreme Court's rulings on race, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, spells out in exhaustive detail the political and social context against which the Supreme Court Justices operate and the consequences of those decisions on the civil rights movement and beyond.
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4.

Abiding Courage: African American Migrant Women and the East Bay Community (Chap. One "It Was Just Like Living in Two Worlds: Growing Up in the Jim Crow South, 1910-1940") » Read Now
by Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo. 218 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

This study examines the migrated and community-building efforts of African-American women who moved from the South to the East Bay during World War II. Drawing on fifty oral interviews with former migrants, it details who these women were, how they experienced the migration, and how they used their...
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This study examines the migrated and community-building efforts of African-American women who moved from the South to the East Bay during World War II. Drawing on fifty oral interviews with former migrants, it details who these women were, how they experienced the migration, and how they used their southern cultural traditions to keep their families together and establish new communities in the East Bay.
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5.

Managing White Supremacy: Race, Politics, and Citizenship in Jim Crow Virginia » Read Now
by J. Douglas Smith. 407 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

Tracing the erosion of white elite paternalism in Jim Crow Virginia, Douglas Smith reveals a surprising fluidity in southern racial politics in the decades between World War I and the Supreme Court's 1954 "Brown v. Board of Education decision.
Smith draws on official records, private correspondence...
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Tracing the erosion of white elite paternalism in Jim Crow Virginia, Douglas Smith reveals a surprising fluidity in southern racial politics in the decades between World War I and the Supreme Court's 1954 "Brown v. Board of Education decision.
Smith draws on official records, private correspondence, and letters to newspapers from otherwise anonymous Virginians to capture a wide and varied range of black and white voices. African Americans emerge as central characters in the narrative, as Smith chronicles their efforts to obtain access to public schools and libraries, protection under the law, and the equitable distribution of municipal resources.
This acceleration of black resistance to white supremacy in the years before World War II precipitated a crisis of confidence among white Virginians, who, despite their overwhelming electoral dominance, felt increasingly insecure about their ability to manage the color line on their own terms. Exploring the everyday power struggles that accompanied the erosion of white authority in the political, economic, and educational arenas, Smith uncovers the seeds of white Virginians' resistance to civil rights activism in the second half of the twentieth century.
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6.

Disfigured Images: The Historical Assault on Afro-American Women (Chap. 3 "The Age of Jim Crow: White and Black Stories of Slave Women") » Read Now
by Patricia Morton. 174 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

"Much of the material unearthed by this book is ugly," writes Morton whose book exposes a multitude of dehumanizing constructions of reality embedded in American scholarly studies of the history of the Afro-American woman. Disfigured Images explores the "literature of fact" concerning black women...
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"Much of the material unearthed by this book is ugly," writes Morton whose book exposes a multitude of dehumanizing constructions of reality embedded in American scholarly studies of the history of the Afro-American woman. Disfigured Images explores the "literature of fact" concerning black women during a century of American historiography extending from the late 19th century to the present and finds a body of work that "presented little fact and much fiction." The volume is a long-needed refutation of a caricatured, mythical version of Black women's history.
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7.

Making Civil Rights Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1936-1961 (Chap. 21 "'I'd Kind of Outlived My Usefulness': The Changing Context of Civil Rights Litigation") » Read Now
by Mark V. Tushnet. 406 pgs.

Collections: Entire Library

From the 1930s to the early 1960s civil rights law was made primarily through constitutional litigation. Before Rosa Parks could ignite a Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Supreme Court had to strike down the Alabama law which made segregated bus service required by law; before Martin Luther King could...
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From the 1930s to the early 1960s civil rights law was made primarily through constitutional litigation. Before Rosa Parks could ignite a Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Supreme Court had to strike down the Alabama law which made segregated bus service required by law; before Martin Luther King could march on Selma to register voters, the Supreme Court had to find unconstitutional the Southern Democratic Party's exclusion of African-Americans; and before the March on Washington and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Supreme Court had to strike down the laws allowing for the segregation of public graduate schools, colleges, high schools, and grade schools. Making Civil Rights Law provides a chronological narrative history of the legal struggle, led by Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, that preceded the political battles for civil rights. Drawing on interviews with Thurgood Marshall and other NAACP lawyers, as well as new information about the private deliberations of the Supreme Court, Tushnet tells the dramatic story of how the NAACP Legal Defense Fund led the Court to use the Constitution as an instrument of liberty and justice for all African-Americans. He also offers new insights into how the justices argued among themselves about the historic changes they were to make in American society. Making Civil Rights Law provides an overall picture of the forces involved in civil rights litigation, bringing clarity to the legal reasoning that animated this "Constitutional revolution", and showing how the slow development of doctrine and precedent reflected the overall legal strategy of Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP.
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8.

Jim Crow's Coming Out: Race Relations and American Foreign Policy in the Truman Years, in Presidential Studies Quarterly » Read Now
by Thomas Borstelmann. 21 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

...state of Missouri at a time of fierce Jim Crow discrimination and violence, his slave-owning...racism at home, not a quiet return to a Jim Crow society of poverty...
9.

Communist Front? The Civil Rights Congress, 1946-1956 (Chap. 7 "I Will Not Live in Peace with Jim Crow: CRC in the South") » Read Now
by Gerald Horne. 458 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

...1948 they launched their "I Shall Not Live at Peace with Jim Crow" campaign. Although this campaign was criticized sharply...also that it was dangerously ambiguous, because...
10.

The Abolitionists: A Collection of Their Writings ("A Negro Abolitionist Protests against Jim Crow Railroads in Massachusetts" begins on p. 179) » Read Now
by Louis Ruchames. 255 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

...demanded this perpetual violation of the laws of God and the rights of man, this continual...the Constitution in consequence of the laws of some of the slave states...
11.

America's Struggle for Racial Equality, in Policy Review » Read Now
by Charles T. Canady. 6 pgs.

Collections: Entire Library

...The institution of slavery and Jim Crow laws both violated the fundamental American...segregation statutes, also known as Jim Crow laws. Historian C. Vann Woodward...
12.

African-American Soldiers and Filipinos: Racial Imperialism, Jim Crow and Social Relations, in The Journal of Negro History » Read Now
by Scot Ngozi-Brown. 12 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

...qualifications, and discriminatory laws which practically eliminated...intellectual backwardness.(12) Jim Crows Beach House in the...violence were hallmarks of Jim Crow...
13.

Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy ("Fear, Hope, and Struggle: Recasting Black North Carolina in the Age of Jim Crow" begins on p. 185) » Read Now
by David S. Cecelski, Timothy B. Tyson. 304 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

This study draws together scholarship on the Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and its aftermath. Contributors hope to draw attention to the tragedy, to honour its victims, and to bring a clear historical voice to the debate over its legacy.
14.

Racial Attitudes in the 1990s: Continuity and Change (Chap. 5 "Status, Ideology, and Dimensions of Whites' Racial Beliefs and Attitudes: Progress and Stagnation" begins on p. 93) » Read Now
by Steven A. Tuch, Jack K. Martin. 266 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

More than half a century has passed since the publication of An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, Gunnar Myrdal's agonizing portrait of the pervasiveness of racially prejudiced attitudes and discriminatory practices in American life. Central to Myrdal's work was the paradox...
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More than half a century has passed since the publication of An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, Gunnar Myrdal's agonizing portrait of the pervasiveness of racially prejudiced attitudes and discriminatory practices in American life. Central to Myrdal's work was the paradox posed by the coexistence of race-based social, economic, and political inequality on the one hand, and the cherished American cultural values of freedom and equality on the other. In the five decades since the publication of this work, there has been a dramatic decline in white Americans' overt expressions of anti-black and anti-integrationist sentiments and in many of the inequalities Myrdal highlighted in his monumental work. Yet the persistence of racial antipathy is evidence of the continuing dilemma of race in American society. This collection of original essays by leading race relations experts focuses on the recent history and current state of racial attitudes in the United States. It addresses key issues and debates in the literature, and it includes chapters on the racial attitudes of African-Americans as well as whites. The volume will be of great importance to students and scholars concerned with the sociology and politics of contemporary American race relations.
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15.

Southern Liberal Journalists and the Issue of Race, 1920-1944 (Chap. 11 "The Conservative Course in Race Relations") » Read Now
by John T. Kneebone. 314 pgs.

Collections: Entire Library

...Nation" implied that the triumph of the southern whites that overthrew Radical Reconstruction led directly to the Jim Crow laws. For southern reformers, this interpretation...
16.

Brown's Reflection, in Yale Law Journal » Read Now
by Robert A. Burt. 11 pgs.

Collections: Education, Entire Library

...only important exceptions are the Jim Crow laws in the Southern states. But even...striking directly at the keystone of the Jim Crow regime: the "separate but...