Jim Crow Laws Essay

Between the years of 1930 to 1959, Jim Crow laws and etiquette rules dominated the South and allowed some of the most horrific crimes and injustices against African Americans to occur, especially throughout those thirty years. Unfortunately, for the people devastated by these abhorrent laws justice comes often came too late and many more never received any justice. After the Civil War ravaged the country, the Southern states and people wanted to remind the recently freed slaves that they were not equal to their white counterparts. During Reconstruction, most of the Southern states passed laws which allowed for the continued persecution and the atrocious treatment of African Americans. Even the laws themselves were given the racist name of
This can be seen in the case of the preventable death of Juliette Derricotte and the infant mortality rate of nonwhite infants. On a November night in 1931, the dean of Fisk University, Juliette Derricotte, was traveling from Nashville, Tennessee to Atlanta, Georgia. She and three students were on their way to her parents’ house when they were struck by an elderly white man, which caused the car to overturn into a ditch. The man proceeded to get out of his vehicle and yell at the injured people and then drove away. Derricotte and the students were able to make it to nearby Hamilton Memorial Hospital in Dalton, Georgia, where they were turned away for being black. The hospital’s policy was not to admit blacks and they were told to find help elsewhere. A white doctor treated the critically injured Derricotte in his office and sent her home to recuperate. One of the students tried to transport Derricotte to the hospital in Chattanooga, however, she passed away from her injuries before they could arrive. The Jim Crow laws of Mississippi stated “There shall be maintained by the governing authorities of every hospital maintained by the state for treatment of white and colored patients separate entrances for white and colored patients and visitors, and such entrances shall be used by the race only for which they are prepared.” Though the law itself only called for hospitals to provide separate entrances, many of the hospitals that arose in urban Mississippi were strictly “white only”