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African American Reconstruction
Amanda Madison
HIS 204
Aimee Thibodeaux
Sept 17, 2012

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This essay will discuss slavery and how African-Americans worked to end slavery, segregation,
discrimination, freedom, and isolation. This essay will also discuss what led to the civil rights
implementation, how it was carried out along with its leaders, and how African-Americans
overcome the struggles and stereotypes as an African-American.
Racial segregation was a system derived from the efforts of white Americans to keep African
Americans in a subordinate status by denying them equal access to public facilities and ensuring
that blacks lived apart from whites. During the era of slavery, most African Americans resided in
the South, mainly in rural areas. Under these circumstances, segregation did not prove necessary
as the boundaries between free citizens and people held in bondage remained clear. Furthermore,
blacks and whites lived in close proximity on farms and plantations and geographical isolation
made contact between neighbors infrequent. However, free people of color, located chiefly in
cities and towns of the North and Upper South, experienced segregation in various forms. By the
time the Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857) that African Americans were not
U.S. citizens, northern whites had excluded blacks from seats on public transportation and barred
their entry, except as servants, from most hotels and restaurants. When allowed into auditoriums
and theaters, blacks occupied separate sections; they also attended segregated schools. Most
churches, too, were segregated.
Reconstruction after the Civil War posed serious challenges to white supremacy and
segregation, especially in the South where most African Americans continued to live. The
abolition of slavery in 1865, followed by ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment (1868)
extending citizenship and equal protection of the law to African Americans and the Fifteenth

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Amendment (1870) barring racial discrimination in voting, threatened to overturn the barriers
whites had erected to keep blacks separate and unequal. Yet the possibilities of blacks sharing
public conveyances and public accommodations with whites increased during the period after
1865. Blacks obtained access to streetcars and railroads on an integrated basis. Indeed, many
transportation companies favored integration because they did not want to risk losing black
business.
African Americans did gain admission to desegregated public accommodations, but racial
segregation, or Jim Crow as it became popularly known, remained the custom. (The term Jim
Crow originated from the name of a character in an 1832 minstrel show, where whites performed
in black face.) Passage by Congress of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which barred racial
discrimination in public accommodations, provides evidence of the continued presence of
segregation and the need to rectify it. The law lasted until 1883, when the Supreme Court of the
United States declared the statute unconstitutional for regulating what the justices considered
private companies, such as streetcars and entertainment facilities. By this time, the interracial
Reconstruction governments had fallen in the South and the federal government had retreated
from strong enforcement of black civil rights. With white-controlled governments back in power,
the situation of southern blacks gradually deteriorated. To maintain solidarity and remove
possible political threats, white southerners initiated a series of efforts to reduce further African
American citizenship rights and enforce Jim Crow. The Supreme Court’s 1883 ruling in the Civil
Rights Cases spurred states to enact segregation laws. Between 1887 and 1892, Alabama,
Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Maryland, North Carolina, Kentucky,
Tennessee, and Virginia refused equal access to African Americans on public accommodations
and transportation. These laws forced blacks to sit in the back of the bus, on separate cars in

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trains, and in the balcony at theaters, for example. From this period on, segregation became a
rigid legal system separating the races from cradle to grave—including segregated hospital
facilities, cemeteries, and everything in between—no longer tolerating any flexibility in the
racial interactions that had previously existed.
Why did Jim Crow become entrenched in the 1890s? The third-party Populist uprising of
that decade threatened conservative Democratic rule in the South. Many of those blacks who
could still vote, and the number was considerable, joined the Populist insurgency. To check this
political rebellion and prevent blacks from wielding the balance of power in close elections,
southern Democrats appealed to white solidarity to defeat the Populists, whipped up anti-Negro
sentiment, disfranchised African Americans, and imposed strict de jure (by law) segregation.
In contrast with the South, in the late 1880s and early 1890s, Indiana, Nebraska, Ohio,
Michigan, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and New York all adopted laws that
prohibited racial discrimination in public facilities. Yet blacks encountered segregation in the
North as well. Rather than through de jure segregation, most northern whites and blacks lived in
separate neighborhoods and attended separate schools largely through de facto segregation. This
kind of segregation resulted from the fact that African Americans resided in distinct
neighborhoods, stemming from insufficient income as well as a desire to live among their own
people, as many ethnic groups did. However, blacks separated themselves not merely as a matter
of choice or custom. Instead, realtors and landlords steered blacks away from white
neighborhoods and municipal ordinances and judicially enforced racial covenants signed by
homeowners kept blacks out of white areas.

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In 1896, the federal government sanctioned racial segregation, fashioning the
constitutional rationale for keeping the races legally apart. In the case of Plessy v. Ferguson, the
Supreme Court ruled that a Louisiana law providing for “equal but separate” accommodations
for “whites” and “coloreds” did not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth
Amendment. In its decision the majority of the court concluded that civil rights laws could not
change racial destiny. “If one race be inferior to the other socially,” the justices explained, “the
Constitution of the United cannot put them on the same plane.” This thinking, which accepted
the idea that whites were superior to blacks, derived from scientific judgments of the time that
light-skinned people had greater intelligence and a higher degree of civilization than darker-
skinned groups, opinions that also fueled U.S. imperialism in the 1890s.
Although the Supreme Court inscribed the doctrine of “separate but equal” into law, in
practice this did not happen. Local and state authorities never funded black education equally nor
did African Americans have equal access to public accommodations. To make matters worse
after the 1890s, nearly all southern blacks lost their right to vote through measures such as poll
taxes, literacy tests, and the white primary. For the next fifty years racial segregation prevailed,
reinforced by disfranchisement, official coercion, and vigilante terror. In addition, starting in
1913 with the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, who had close ties to the South, the federal
government imposed racial segregation in government offices in Washington, D.C. (a policy that
would not be reversed until the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s). The
bedrock of Jim Crow began to crack after World War II. The war had exposed the horrors of
Nazi racism; non-white nations in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia struggled to end colonial
rule; and scientists no longer accepted the notion of superior and inferior races. In 1948,
President Harry S. Truman issued an executive order desegregating the armed forces, thus

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reversing a longstanding practice. In 1954, the Supreme Court justices in Brown v. the Board of
Education reversed Plessy and decided that legally sanctioned racial segregation was inherently
unequal and a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Nevertheless, the Brown ruling signaled
only a first step, and it took another decade and a mass movement for civil rights for African
Americans to tear down the racist edifices of segregation in the South. The symbols of the Jim
Crow past—“Whites Only” and “Colored Only” signs—are found mainly in antiques stores,
museums, photographs, and documentaries. Now that an African American has been elected
president of the United States, segregation seems as outmoded and distant a practice as watching
black and white television.
The first question to ask is when did racial segregation begin? The importance of this
question helps in gauging the potency and endurance of racism as a feature of American history.
If segregation began very early in the nation’s history, this suggests that racism is embedded in
the very fabric of American society and culture and is something extremely difficult to eradicate.
The evidence points in this direction. Before the Civil War, free Negroes in the North
encountered segregation in schools, public accommodations, and the military. In 1849, the
Supreme Court of Massachusetts in Roberts v. City of Boston held that the state could require
separate and equal schools for Negroes without violating the right of equality in the
Massachusetts Constitution.
Segregation continued to exist after the Civil War and spread to the South once slaves
were emancipated. Still, it is one thing to confirm that segregation persisted following slavery, as
evidenced by the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, and another to assess its strength.
What seems unique about race relations from the 1870s to the early 1890s was its porousness:

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segregation was not as rigid then as it later became. Moreover, blacks still had the right to vote
and could wield influence in public affairs. This changed in the 1890s, as the decisive role of the
federal government in contributing to the establishment of hardcore segregation in the South.
Thus, Jim Crow did not come about just through individual acts of prejudice but required
government intervention from the North as well as the South. Without the official approval of the
Supreme Court in Plessy, the southern states would not have had the constitutional power to
enforce Jim Crow. Only when the federal government took action after World War II in what has
been called “the Second Reconstruction” did segregation fall, thereby highlighting the critical
position Washington, D.C. played in preserving and then dismantling Jim Crow.
Despite complicity from the North, the harshest and most long-lasting forms of
segregation occurred in the South. Why were white southerners so adamant in maintaining
segregation? Students should come to recognize that segregation was part of the system to
subjugate African Americans and affirm their status as inferior people. Southern whites
considered this system of vital importance because of the vast majority of African Americans
lived in the South in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Separate was never equal
nor was it meant to be. Segregation was intended to debase African Americans, strip them of
their dignity, reinforce their inequality, and maintain a submissive agricultural labor force. The
southern United States from the 1890s through the 1960s was similar in many ways to South
Africa during its Apartheid Era. In addition, Jim Crow can be viewed as a system of “disease
control.” Segregation quarantined blacks to prevent them from infecting whites with the social
and cultural impurities associated with “inferior” African Americans. White men established
segregation to keep black men from having sexual relations with white women. Viewing
miscegenation as the ultimate threat to the perpetuation of their superior racial stock, they often

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resorted to lynching black men for allegedly raping white women. In doing so, white men not
only reinforced their control over blacks but also white women. They sought to maintain the
virtue and chastity of their wives and daughters, reinforcing their patriarchal roles as husband,
father, and ultimately guardian of their communities. However, it can be debated whether the
real issue was sexual purity or power, for many white southern men both during slavery and Jim
Crow actively pursued clandestine sexual relations with black women,
Segregation grew out of fear and a desire to control. Nevertheless, this fear of
miscegenation, whether real or imagined, reinforced Jim Crow. White southerners were adamant
about maintaining school segregation, particularly in the early grades, because they did not want
little white girls to socialize with black boys, which might lead to more intimate relations as they
turned into teenagers and young adults.
Fear of sexual contact also applied to other areas, and this the most interesting one that
relates to department store lunch counters. Why were blacks allowed to make purchases in stores
like Woolworth’s and even stand on checkout lines next to whites, but they could not eat at the
lunch counters that lined the inside walls of these stores? the difference between the two is to
discern that sitting down to eat was seen as a social activity that in the racialized South had
sexual connotations, whereas walking around a store or standing in line did not have the same
meaning.
How did African Americans respond to Jim Crow and did they view separation and
segregation in the same way? Comparing the two should reveal that for the most part African
Americans did not oppose separation so long as it was voluntary. Following the Civil War,
blacks formed their own schools, churches, and civic organizations over which they exercised

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control that provided independence from white authorities, including their former masters.
African Americans took great pride in the institutions they built in their communities. Black
businessmen accumulated wealth by catering to a Negro clientele in need of banks, insurance
companies, health services, barber shops and beauty parlors, entertainment, and funeral homes.
African Americans as diverse politically as Booker T. Washington in the 1890s, Marcus Garvey
in the 1920s, W.E.B. DuBois in the 1930s advocated that blacks concentrate on promoting self-
help within their communities and develop their own economic, social, and cultural institutions.
Ironically, one of the unintended side effects of racial integration in the second half of the
twentieth century was the erosion of longstanding black business and educational institutions that
served African-Americans during Jim Crow.
Students can then see that in contrast to voluntary separation and self-determination,
segregation was coercive and grew out of attempts to maintain black subordination and second-
class citizenship. Sanctioned by the government, Jim Crow demeaned African Americans, denied
them equal opportunity, and assigned them to the margins of public life. If African Americans
overstepped Jim Crow’s boundary lines they were forced back by law and, if necessary, through
retributive violence.
How did African Americans challenge segregation and white supremacy? In other words,
when did the Civil Rights Movement begin and what did it seek to accomplish? These are
questions that historians still debate. Begin with World War II, when African Americans began a
“Double V” Campaign—victory against totalitarianism abroad and racism at home. The
continued migration of blacks to the North and West gave African Americans increased voting
power to help pressure presidents from Harry Truman on to pass civil rights legislation that

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would aid their family, friends, and neighbors remaining in the South. At the same time, southern
black communities organized and mobilized. A new generation of leaders, many of them military
veterans or black college graduates, challenged Jim Crow and disfranchisement. Black women
have often been ignored as a significant force behind the Civil Rights Movement, with the focus
on the men who led the major organizations. However we should emphasize the role of mothers
who permitted their children to face the dangers of integrating schools, daughters who readily
joined protest demonstrations, domestic servants who walked miles to work to boycott
segregated buses, and churchwomen who rallied their congregations behind civil rights. Finally,
what did African Americans strive for in eliminating segregation? Usually integration is wrongly
interpreted as an end in itself or an attempt by blacks to assimilate into white society. It is most
important to understand that for blacks integration was a tactic, not a goal. For example, African
Americans sought to desegregate education not because they wanted to socialize with white
students, but because it provided the best means for obtaining a quality education. Blacks
confronted Jim Crow to defeat white supremacy and obtain political power—the kind that could
result in jobs, affordable housing, satisfactory health care, and evenhanded treatment by the
police and the judicial system. Rather than erasing their pride in being black or expressing a
desire to be like whites, African Americans gained an even greater respect for their race through
participation in the Civil Rights Movement and their efforts to shatter Jim Crow.
In 1955, C. Vann Woodward published The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Woodward
reflected the optimism following the previous year’s Brown decision by arguing that segregation
was not as inherent to southern society as previously believed. He demonstrated that not until the
1890s did southern whites institute the rigid system of Jim Crow that segregated the races in all
areas of public life. Woodward pointed out numerous instances during and after Reconstruction

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when blacks had access to public accommodations. Woodward’s research suggested that
segregation might be eradicated through simple changes in public policies, reversing those that
had created it in the not-so-distant past.
Woodward’s book spawned a number of other studies both challenging and modifying
his thesis. Many of these appeared as the South waged massive resistance to combat the efforts
of the Civil Rights Movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s, suggesting the depth of white
racism and the difficulty of overcoming it. In North of Slavery (Litwick,1961), Leon Litwack
found that even before the Civil War free northern Negroes encountered segregation in schools
and public accommodations, the kind of discrimination they would face in the South after
slavery. Accordingly, segregation had a longer pedigree than Woodward had argued, and it
transcended the South and operated nationwide. Joel Williamson’s After Slavery: The Negro in
South Carolina during Reconstruction, 1861-1877 (1965) examined race relations in the
Palmetto State and found Woodward’s interpretation wanting. Williamson concluded that freed
blacks encountered segregation soon after emancipation. He asserted that specific laws were not
necessary to keep the races apart because segregation was maintained de facto. He discovered
that most white South Carolinians did not accept racial equality and intended to adopt
segregation as soon as blacks gained their freedom from slavery.
Howard N. Rabinowitz did not focus so much on the timing of segregation as on its form.
In (Litwick, 1961), Leon Litwack argued that racial segregation appeared as a substitute for
racial exclusion. Thus, in the post-emancipation South freed blacks gained access for the first
time to public facilities such as public transportation and health and welfare services.

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Accordingly, segregation should not be perceived as a punitive measure but as a means of
extending services, albeit separate and unequal, to African Americans.
To summarize, historians generally agree that de facto segregation both preceded and
accompanied de jure segregation, but that racial interaction in public spheres was less rigid than
it became after the 1890s. Whatever its form, however, Jim Crow was always separate and never
equal; it constituted a means for reinforcing black subordination and white supremacy. Whatever
the exact beginning of segregation, southern whites shared a broad consensus for preserving it. It
required a mass, black-led, Civil Rights Movement, combined with the power and renewed
willingness of the national government, to overthrow Jim Crow.

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References:
Joel Williamson’s After Slavery: The Negro in South Carolina during Reconstruction, 1861-
1877
Litwick, (1961) Leon Litwick, North of Slavery
C. Vann Woodward 1955 The Strange Career of Jim Crow