Disenfranchising African Americans

Jim Crow was the systematic practice of promoting the segregation of the Negro peoples which took place especially in the South form the late 1800s through the 1960s (Reed 107). 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.

The Jim Crow Movement was the single most influential factor that led to the immobilization of the black population in America from 1865-1950. These laws were set up by several Supreme Court decisions made after Reconstruction had ended. Some of these decisions were that the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was declared unconstitutional and ruled that the Fourtee

Another attempt to keep blacks from voting was the enactment of the grandfather clauses. The “grandfather clause” was a constitutional device enacted by Southern states to deny suffrage to American blacks. “It provided that those who had enjoyed the right to vote prior to 1866 or 1867, or their lineal descendants, would be exempt from educational, property, or tax requirements for voting”(Internet 3). Only whites would benefit from this clause. The grandfather clause was an attempt to force the poll tax on blacks--whose grandfathers obviously had not voted before the Civil War--which stopped nearly all blacks from voting. Such provisions as poll taxes, literacy tests, and the grandfather clause did not violate the Fifteenth Amendment because they applied to all voters regardless of race.

Segregation and disfranchisement laws were often supported, moreover, by brutal acts of violence against southern blacks. "Jim Crow" laws did such things as pass unfair poll taxes and voting tests to keep African-Americans from voting. This discrimination toward African-Americans lasted for about one hundred years, until the 1960s, when things started to change.

nth Amendment did not prohibit individuals and private organizations from discriminating on the basis of race. The 1875 law stipulated: "That

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