Jim Crow Laws On African Americans In The Early 1900's

"In this perilous world, if a black boy wanted to live a halfway normal life and die a natural death he had to learn early the art of how to get along with white folks." These words were spoken by Benjamin Mays recalling his youth growing up in the South as an African American boy in the early 1900’s. Just because slavery ended after the Civil War didn’t mean that African Americans did not face oppression and discrimination. After the Civil War, the South still wanted to oppress African Americans, so they developed the Jim Crow Laws. The Jim Crow Laws were laws that discriminated against African Americans with concern to attendance in public schools and the use of facilities such as restaurants, theaters, hotels, cinemas and public baths. Jim Crow Laws not only affected African Americans but also it was also against young people, females, mentally retarded people, anyone who was not Christian, and basically anyone who was not white. The Jim Crow Laws were laws of hatred and did not discriminate who the hate was directed towards. Even after slavery was abolished in 1865, most slaves did not go far. When the slaves were first abolished they didn’t know what to do because they didn’t know anything else. They also had no money at all or anywhere to go, just the clothes on their backs. Because of this, most of the slaves started working for the …show more content…
Out of this violence and oppression of the newly free African Americans, sprouted an organization formed on the ideology that the white people are still in charge and should punish and keep the African Americans in check, they were formed in 1860’s. This organization would come to be called the Ku Klux Klan. The KKK was behind countless lynchings, burning of black churches, black schools, and black homes. This was just the main group of people behind violence towards African