Time to review our past and the “Jim Crow” of era seeming to make a comeback.
This analysis from PBS and my post here:
The segregation and disenfranchisement laws known as “Jim Crow” (origin here) represented a formal, codified system of racial apartheid that dominated the American South for three quarters of a century beginning in the 1890s.
The laws affected almost every aspect of daily life,
mandating segregation of schools, parks, libraries, drinking fountains,
restrooms, buses, trains, and restaurants.
“Whites Only — No Colored” signs were constant reminders of the enforced racial order. In legal theory, blacks received “separate but equal” treatment under the law — in actuality, public facilities for blacks were nearly always inferior to those for whites, when they existed at all. In addition, blacks were systematically denied the right to vote in most of the rural South through the selective application of literacy tests and other racially motivated criteria.
The Jim Crow system was upheld by local government officials and reinforced by acts of terror perpetrated by Vigilantes.
In 1896, the Supreme Court established the doctrine of separate but equal in Plessy v. Ferguson, after a black man in New Orleans attempted to sit in a whites-only railway car.
Historical Note: Plessy in essence was
overturned by the USSC decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, KS
(1954) that said “separate but equal” is NOT constitutional.
In 1908, journalist Ray Stannard Baker observed that “no
other point of race contact is so much and so bitterly discussed among Negroes
as the Jim Crow car.” As bus travel became widespread in the South over the
first half of the 20th century, it followed the same pattern.
This from Diane
Nash in her interview of the Freedom Riders: “Travel in the segregated South for black
people was humiliating. The very fact that there were separate facilities was
to say to black people and white people that blacks were so subhuman and so
inferior that we could not even use the public facilities that white people used.”
Transit was a core component of segregation in the South, as
the 1947 Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) pamphlet and Bayard Rustin song:
“You Don't Have to Ride Jim Crow” attests keeping whites and blacks from
sitting together on a bus, train, or trolley car might seem insignificant, but
it was one more link in a system of segregation that had to be defended at all
times — lest it collapse. Thus transit was a logical point of attack for the
foes of segregation, in the courtroom and on the buses themselves.
It would take several decades of legal action and months of
nonviolent direct action before these efforts achieved their intended result.
Related History:
States starting in the 1890’s had literacy tests in place as a prerequisite to
voting mostly for blacks and other minorities.
Those laws were outlawed August 6, 1965 when President
Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act (VRA) into law.
It outlawed those discriminatory voting practices that had
been adopted in many southern states after the Civil War.
This example of the AL voting literacy test is similar to those tests also used in
LA and MS.
My 2 cents: And, now here
we are basically all over again like ancient year and back in the South like
now in GA and TX and elsewhere where harsh voting law are being put in place … why?
All because the tactics and lies and deceit by Donald J. Trump during his
dramatic 2020 loss to Joe Biden that lest we forget over 60 court challenges by
Trump including three at the USSC went against him.
Trump ruined the country
on so many levels that we are apt to feel the ripple effect for decades. That my
friends is the sad part of his lousy time in office.
Thanks from stopping by.
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