Jim Crow laws

The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws introduced in the Southern United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that enforced racial segregation, "Jim Crow" being a pejorative term for an African American. Such laws remained in force until 1965. Formal and informal segregation policies were present in other areas of the United States as well, even if several states outside the South had banned discrimination in public accommodations and voting. Southern laws were enacted by white "Redeemers"-dominated state legislatures to disenfranchise and remove political and economic gains made by African Americans during the Reconstruction era. Such continuing racial segregation was also supported by the successful Lily-White Movement of Southern Republicans. In practice, Jim Crow laws mandated racial segregation in all public facilities in the states of the former Confederate States of America and in some others, beginning in the 1870s. Jim Crow laws were upheld in 1896 in the case of Plessy vs. Ferguson, in which the Supreme Court laid out its "separate but equal" legal doctrine concerning facilities for African Americans. Moreover, public education had essentially been segregated since its establishment in most of the South after the Civil War in 1861–1865. Companion laws excluded almost all African Americans from the vote in the South and deprived them of any representation government. Although in theory, the "equal" segregation doctrine governed public facilities and transportation too, facilities for African Americans were consistently inferior and underfunded compared to facilities for white Americans; sometimes, there were no facilities for the black community at all. Far from equality, as a body of law, Jim Crow institutionalized economic, educational, political and social disadvantages and second class citizenship for most African Americans living in the United States. After the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded in 1909, it became involved in a sustained public protest and campaigns against the Jim Crow laws, and the so-called "separate but equal" doctrine. In 1954, segregation of public schools (state-sponsored) was declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark case Brown v. Topeka Board of Education.