Effects Of Jim Crow Laws

Words: 1061
Pages: 5
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Blake Edwards
Honors United States History
Cirone

Jim Crow, Revised

Starting after the civil war in the late 1860’s and continuing through the civil rights movement of the late 1960’s, there was a set of unwritten rules in America, known as the Jim Crow laws. Jim Crow laws were created and enforced by southern governments because they wanted to keep black people down after slavery was abolished. By keeping black and white people separate and giving the white people the nicer facilities, schools, and books, they could continue to disrespect black people as a whole and continue to hold them down. Jim Crow laws damaged the country by keeping up the oppression faced by black people since the founding of the United States. Despite constitutional …show more content…
The effects of Jim Crow echoed all throughout the United States. Jim Crow had its hand all over the country, “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”. Jim Crow was also felt in states that were in the far north such as Massachusetts and Vermont. The laws were not so obvious, overt, and racist, in the north but they still perpetuated the segregation and the theme of holding black people down. “All railroads carrying passengers in the state (other than street railroads) shall provide equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races, by providing two or more passenger cars for each passenger train, or by dividing the cars by a partition, so as to secure separate accommodations,” that was the main racist law in New England. This furthers the idea that black people deserved separate but equal accommodations than white people. The problem with having separate but equal accommodations and facilities seems like it’s not that bad, but given a closer look at the details, Jim Crow was awful. The problem with Jim Crow is that everything that was supposed to be equal was not. The white people were given much worse facilities than the white people. White people …show more content…
From Fredrick Douglass to Martin Luther King Jr, all the activists were aware of what was going on. In a letter written by Fredrick Douglass, penned in 1887, he describes his knowledge of Jim Crow so far. He wrote, "’My own observation has been that white teachers of Colored Schools in the southern states, show but little interest in their pupils’". He realized the separate but equal strategy that was trying to be passed over by the southern governments was detrimental to the education that black children were trying to receive. That is part of the systematic racism that was used to keep black people down and squash their ideas and attempts to improve themselves. Black people were given teachers that weren’t prepared, supplies that had been passed down from generation to generation, and books that were well beyond outdated. Fredrick Douglass knew about this in 1887 and he was writing letters to his correspondents trying to figure out the problems about Jim Crow and looking for ways to combat them. The activists, including
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