Jim Crow laws spread across the South

Jim Crow laws were state and local laws that separated Black and white Americans in public life and kept most Black Southerners from voting. They took their name from a racist minstrel routine of the early nineteenth century. After Reconstruction ended in 1877, white Democrats regained control of Southern state governments, and in the 1890s they began writing racial exclusion directly into constitutions and statutes. The turning point came in Mississippi, which adopted a new constitution on November 1, 1890. All but one of the convention's delegates were white, and the document was never submitted to voters for ratification.¹²³

Mississippi's constitution required voters to pay a poll tax and to read and pass a test on the state constitution before registering. The rules did not name race, a way of getting around the Fifteenth Amendment, but they were used to exclude almost all Black voters, and they also kept many poorer white men from the polls. James K. Vardaman, later governor and U.S. senator, said openly that the convention had been held to remove Black men from politics. Other Southern states followed with poll taxes, literacy tests, 'grandfather clauses' that exempted men whose ancestors could vote before 1867, and all-white primaries. In Louisiana, the number of registered Black voters fell from 130,344 in 1897 to 5,320 in 1900 after its 1898 constitution. Losing the vote also kept Black citizens off juries and out of elected office.²³⁴⁵⁶

Segregation laws spread alongside disenfranchisement, covering railroad cars, schools, waiting rooms, theaters, restaurants, water fountains and workplaces, often marked with 'White' and 'Colored' signs. The Supreme Court upheld the 'separate but equal' principle in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, and the federal government did little to challenge the system. It was enforced by custom and violence as well as by law: by the late 1920s, about 95 percent of lynchings in the United States took place in the South. The NAACP won early court victories, including Guinn v. United States in 1915, which struck down Oklahoma's grandfather clause. Legal segregation was dismantled only in the mid-twentieth century, through Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.¹⁵⁶