1. 6.5
The Rise of the Jim
Crow South

2. After the Civil War…
• Most African Americans are sharecroppers…
• Basically another form of slavery…
• Poor whites were beginning to take out their
frustrations on blacks

3. White Feelings in the South toward Blacks:
They hated black suffrage

4. Life should have been better…
• 15th amendment gave
blacks the right to vote
• Whites found ways to
intimidate blacks to keep
them from voting
• 1866—KKK is formed
• Most white men in the
south were VERY POOR.
While economically
equal to the black,
prejudice helped them to
feel more powerful.

5. Depression of 1873

6. The Colfax Massacre --
• Easter, April 1873, a group of whites had been
harassing a group of blacks
• A large number of blacks gather at the towns court
house
• Whites surround the court house—many were former
Civil War soldiers, were armed…even had a cannon
• Attacked and blacks went into hide
• Caught a black man and told him to light the building
on fire or they would shoot him
• He lit it and then they shot him
• People ran out and were executed…others burned alive
• 150 died

9. 1875 – Civil Rights Act
• Last-ditch effort by the
Republicans to continue
Reconstruction.
• It granted freedom of access to
all public facilities regardless of
race.

10. Election of 1876
• Rutherford becomes president
• Reconstruction ends
• Union troops leave blacks in the hands of the
white people with the money and the power

11. For blacks: “Oh crap.”
Violence and
prejudice is about to
get worse.
Should we stay or go?

13. Exodusters
Exodusters was a name given to African Americans who migrated from states along the
Mississippi River to Kansas in the late nineteenth century, as part of the Exoduster
Movement or Exodus of 1879. It was the first general migration of blacks following the
Civil War.

14. Exodusters

19. TAKING AWAY THE RIGHT TO VOTE
• 15th Amendment said that no one could be denied a
vote based on race…LOOPHOLE
• Southern states designed requirements for voting
that didn’t mention race, but targeted blacks
• Poll tax –citizens had to pay to vote
• Literacy test – had to show competency of the
state’s constitution
• Grandfather clause – said that if your grandfather
had voted then you were exempt from the poll tax
and literacy test

20. Jim Crow Laws
•Jim Crow laws – forced racial segregation
in the South
•Segregation – the separation of races
•Segregation in the began as customs, but
ending up as laws
•Named after “Jim Crow” dance

21. "Weel about and
turn about and do
jis so,
Eb'ry time I weel
about I jump Jim
Crow."

22. Some Facilities that Were Separate:
•Schools
•US military
• cemeteries
•Courts
•Hospitals
•mental institutions
•Orphanages
•Prisons
•Bibles to swear on in trials

23. At the bus station, Durham, North Carolina, 1940.

24. Greyhound bus terminal, Memphis, Tennessee. 1943.

25. A rest stop for bus passengers on the way from Louisville, Kentucky to
Nashville, Tennessee, with separate entrance for Blacks. 1943.

26. A sign at bus station, Rome, Georgia. 1943.

27. A highway sign advertising tourist cabins for Blacks, South Carolina.
1939.

28. Cafe, Durham, North Carolina. 1939.

29. Drinking fountain on the courthouse lawn, Halifax, North Carolina. 1938.

30. Movie theater’s "Colored" entrance, Belzoni, Mississippi. 1939.

31. The Rex theater for colored people, Leland,
Mississippi. June 1937.

32. Restaurant, Lancaster, Ohio. 1938.

33. Water cooler in the street car terminal, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. 1939.

34. Sign above movie theater, Waco, Texas. 1939.

35. Beale Street, Memphis, Tennessee. 1939.

37. 2 Ways Jim Crow Laws Were Supported:
TERRORISM

38. The
Law

39. Homer Plessy
• 30 year old shoe maker
• 1/8th black, 7/8th white
• Under Louisiana law had to
sit in the “black” section of
the railroad car
• Refused and was jailed
• Louisiana courts upheld
decisions
• Goes to the Supreme Court

40. Plessy v. Ferguson 1896
•Establishes “separate
but equal” is equal
• Separate but equal is NEVER equal. This
legalized the systematic prejudice of blacks
through poor education, medical services,
etc.

41. African American Response
• Ida B. Wells - was from
Tennessee. She fought
against lynching.
• Lynching – hangings without
proper court procedures
• She wrote articles for papers
• Went on speaking tours to
Europe
• Eventually she was run out of
Memphis and had to live in
Chicago

42. African American Response
• Booker T. Washington was an
educator who started the
Tuskegee Institute in
Alabama.
• Delivered the “Atlanta
Compromise Speech”
• This college focused on the
many things including
inventions made from the
peanut
• Didn’t argue for political
rights…instead urge blacks to
get an education—this was
very controversial in the south

43. The Compromise
• On the one hand, Washington warned white America of the
consequences of ignoring racial abuse or "efforts to curtail
the fullest growth of the Negro." He said that "we shall
constitute one third of the ignorance and crime of the
south or one-third of its intelligence and progress. One-
third to the business and prosperity...or we shall prove a
veritable body of death, stagnating, depressing, retarding
every effort to advance the body politic." However,
Washington also argued that "The wisest among my race
understand that the agitation of questions of social equality
is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of
all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of
severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial
forcing."

44. Cabin that Booker T. Washington was
born into slavery

45. 1st Three Buildings of the Tuskegee
Institute

46. Booker T. on a speaking tour in
Tennessee.

47. His famous book:
“Up From Slavery”

48. Tuskegee in 1916

49. • W. E. B. Du Bois was the
founder of the NAACP
• He clashed with Booker T.
Washington
• Wanted more political
representation for blacks
to ensure civil rights
• Wanted an elite rich,
powerful, and intellectual
black class to strive to
help other blacks
• 1st African American to
earn a PhD from Harvard
• start the NAACP which will
be discussed in Chapter 8.