Discrimination Against and Segregation of African Americans After Reconstruction

Review of the 15th Amendment:

During the Reconstruction period following the Civil War, the United States government

passed three Amendments (13th, 14th, and 15th) to the Constitution granting certain rights and liberties to African Americans. One of these was the right to vote (15th Amendment). This right was seen as a threat to white southern society. Local laws known as Black Codes were passed that made voting nearly impossible for African Americans. Central to these codes was a literacy test that African Americans had to take. As slaves, black Southerners had never been taught to read and write. Some of these tests were extremely difficult and usually involved reading and interpreting sections of the Federal and State Constitutions. The situation continued until the passage of the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Source:

Tactics used in the South to prevent African American males from voting:

  • Literacy Tests

From the 1890s to the 1960s, many state governments in the South gave literacy tests to African American men to test their literacy in order to vote. In practice, these tests were intended to prevent racial minorities from voting. Whites were generally exempted from the literacy test if they could meet alternate requirements that in practice excluded blacks, such as agrandfather clauseor a finding of "good moral character."

  • Poll Taxes

Southern states enacted poll taxes of one ortwo dollars per year between 1889 and 1966, a requirement before voting. A citizen paid the tax when registering. Many African American males had recently been freed from enslavement and were therefore struggling economically. Many could not pay this tax and therefore were prevented from voting.

  • Grandfather Clause

Only those who had grandfathers who could vote before the Civil War could vote in elections. (Few if any blacks voted before the Civil War)

Government supported laws in the South that discriminated socially against African Americans

  • Jim Crow Laws ((1880’s-1960’s)
  • “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
  • “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
  • Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896)
  • This 1896 U.S. Supreme Court case upheld the constitutionality of segregation under the “separate but equal” doctrine. It stemmed from an 1892 incident in which African-American train passenger Homer Plessy refused to sit in a Jim Crow car, breaking a Louisiana law.

Responses from African Americans

  • The Great Migration

The movement of 6 million African-Americans out of the rural Southern United States to the urban Northeast, Midwest, and West that occurred between 1916 and 1970. Until 1910, more than 90 percent of the African-American population lived in the American South.

  • Booker T. Washington
  • W.E.B DuBois
  • Ida B. Wells