African American History
Segregation #5
- In April 1865, as the war drew to a close, Lincoln shocked many by proposing limited suffrage for African Americans in the South. He was assassinated days later, however, and his successor Andrew Johnson would be the one to preside over the beginning of Reconstruction. The plan of Reconstruction gave the white South a free hand in regulating the transition from slavery to freedom and offered no role to blacks in the politics of the South.
Violence was on the rise, making danger a regular aspect of African American life. Black schools were vandalized and destroyed, and bands of violent white people attacked, tortured, and lynched Black citizens in the night. Families were attacked and forced off their land all across the South.
Black codes were strict local and state laws that detailed when, where, and how formerly enslaved people could work, and for how much compensation. The codes appeared throughout the South as a legal way to put Black citizens into indentured servitude, to take voting rights away, to control where they lived and how they traveled, and to seize children for labor purposes.
Jim Crow Laws
- The segregation and disenfranchisement laws are known as "Jim Crow" 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" and "Colored" signs were constant reminders of the enforced racial order.
- The legal system was stacked against Black citizens, with former Confederate soldiers working as police and judges, making it difficult for African Americans to win court cases and ensuring they were subject to Black codes.
The most ruthless organization of the Jim Crow era, the Ku Klux Klan, was born in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee, as a private club for Confederate veterans. Leading Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest was chosen as the first leader.
- The KKK grew into a secret society terrorizing Black communities and seeping through white Southern culture, with members at the highest levels of government and in the lowest echelons of criminal back alleys.
READ MORE: Isaiah Montgomery: The African American-only town in Mississippi.
READ MORE: The First Black Man Elected to Congress Was Nearly Blocked From Taking His Seat.
READ MORE: Red Summer of 1919: How Black WWI Vets Fought Back Against Racist Mobs.
READ MORE: When Ida B. Wells Took on Lynching.
READ MORE: Charlotte Hawkins Brown: Created a black school in North Carolina.
READ MORE: Andrew Carnegie- funded a library, a hospital, a bank, etc...
The unfairness or prejudicial treatment of people and groups based on characteristics
Discrimination!
The level of racial segregation in schools has important implications for the educational outcomes of minority students. ... Nationwide, minority students continue to be concentrated in high-poverty, low-achieving schools, while white students are more likely to attend high-achieving, more affluent schools.