The Argument Against Jim Crow Laws

Jim Crow Essay

For a very long time, a very large portion of the american population was radically racist. In the 1820s, an american minstrel song was written about a stereotype of a Jim Crow (Jim Crow: Shorthand for separation, par. 2). After the song became a hit, white comedians took the idea created by the song and started painting themselves black and jumping about for the entertainment of other whites during their racist comedy shows. Jim Crow became a term used by whites and blacks alike for the “complex system of laws and customs separating the races in the south” (par. 1). Therefore, Jim Crow Laws were radically racist and unconstitutional laws made in the confederate states who were still grieving their lost to the union and wanted
Florida, Missouri, New Mexico, and Texas all had laws separating the education of blacks and whites. In Oklahoma, teachers were not allowed to teach in mixed classrooms and would receive a fine “any sum not less than ten dollars ($10.00) nor more than fifty dollars ($50.00) for each offense” (Jim Crow Laws Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site, 28). States claimed that their schools were separate but equal, when in reality, the schools of the white were in much better shape than the schools of the blacks. It wasn’t until 1954, in the trial of Brown V. The Board of Education that racially segregated schools were outlawed. “The U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that racial segregation in public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the constitution” (Jim Crow Stories, Brown V. Board of Education). It took them several decades to allow interracial public schooling. Separate but equal schooling deprived african americans from getting a proper
After 1877, many lost their right to vote or to hold government positions (Rise and fall of Jim Crow, the congress). These Jim Crow laws made african americans in the South lose one of the most important rights of an american, the right to vote. They made the laws of voting ridiculously complicated and biased towards white southerners. “In 1901, the last black representative lost his seat in Congress. It would be 30 years before a black person could gain a seat in the House or Senate,” (Rise and fall of Jim Crow, the congress). It wasn’t the Civil rights act of 1964 where the discrimination on the basis of race took away Jim Crow state laws and gave african americans actual freedom. It took the federal government a century to eliminate Jim Crow laws and the segregation of african americans and white