Rise and Fall of the Jim Crow Era between the End of Reconstruction

The Rise and fall of the Jim Crow Era between the End of Reconstruction in 1877 and the Beginning of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s
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The Rise and fall of the Jim Crow Era between the End of Reconstruction in 1877 and the Beginning of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s
American history has been endowed with many contentious issues that elicited differing arguments among various parties. One of them that ranks at the top of the list is racism and privilege and compounds the reason as to the establishment of the Jim Crow and its prevalence for a considerable period. Jim Crow is a phrase that is used to refer to racial separation of people. The end of the Civil War raised fear among the Southern Whites as the Blacks provided the labor force to work in their farms. The birth of Jim Crow in Alabama intended to alleviate this fear among landowners who as a consequence of the halt to slave trade found themselves short of stable work force. The population distribution in Alabama facilitated the formulation of oppressive laws (Gold, 2004). Besides the favorable numbers to the Whites, the Alabama economy was suited well to agriculture and thus, the labor system had to be amended to accommodate the new changes. The paper provides an in-depth analysis into the Jim Crow laws, how they affected the Blacks, and reasons that led to their failure after the Second World War II.
The endorsement of the 13th Amendment was the genesis of the Jim Crow laws as the process facilitated the freeing of four million slaves. Despite the apparent disregard that the Blacks in the South received, the Conservative-Democrats were unable to maintain considerable strength in the ostracization, segregation, or public humiliation that they received (Edwards & Thomson, 2010). With time, and particularly in 1876, the Jim Crow was slowly coming to the fold and was about to come to permanent reality. Provisions such as those separating educational facilities, splitting prisoners based on racial lines, and those concerning miscegenation escalated the nature of the situation. Jim Crow became official in 1896 based on the sanction from the United States Supreme Court in regards to the case of Plessy v. Ferguson (Edwards & Thomson, 2010).
The Plessy vs, Ferguson case came into light as a Homer Adolph Plessy disobeyed the 1890 Louisiana legislation “providing for separate railway carriages for the white and colored races.” The Louisiana law provided clear stipulations that passenger railways were to have separate cars. Although this separation was to be equal in facilities, people of color were prohibited from mixing with the Whites. The 14th Amendment called for the equality of every person and more so, their protection and thus, there is no individual that would be subject to any injustice regardless of color (Davis, 2004). In 1892, Homer Plessy was ready to challenge the notion of segregated train chairs with the 14th Amendment as his shield. Plessy who hailed from New Orleans was an African American whose intent to get arrested was deliberate. While on the train he boarded the ‘whites-only’ compartment, which led to his arrest when he declined to move to the Blacks territory.
Although many undermined the extent of the case, it gradually gained traction until in 1896 when it reached the Supreme Court. Unfortunately for Plessy, the judges overruled his claim declaring that the state’s law did not in any way violate the 14th Amendment. Furthermore, they claimed that given there were equal carriages for the Blacks and Whites, then his case was null and void (Davis, 2004). The ruling resulted in adverse consequences for the entire nation. Every state elevated the legality of racial segregation in some way. Even though the primary contingent of the application of the Jim Crow segregation was in the Deep South, other demographic areas of the country such as the North practiced housing and job discrimination in a segregationist nature.
Jim Crow laws entered the 20th Century as a formidable force and the prevalence of the laws outlines that violence was its major feature (Zubovich, 2018). The National Ass...