In 1875 congress passed a civil rights act giving African Americans access to public facilities. Southern state legislatures reacted by creating a legal system to separate different races in every way possible. These new laws were called the Jim Crow laws. They denied African Americans the right of public education, transportation, lodging parks, theaters, hospitals, cemeteries, and restaurants, reducing them to second class citizens.

Also, beginning in 1890 all southern states made discriminatory voting requirements, like literacy tests, to limit African American influence in politics. In 1954 the turning point finally came for the Jim Crow laws, when the Supreme Court destroyed segregated schools with the Brown v. Topeka board of education court case.