The Importance Of Life During Segregation In America

Register to read the introduction… Racism, which is bad enough, led to things much worse for African Americans. “Along with restrictions on voting rights and laws to segregate society, white violence against African Americans increased. Many African Americans were lynched because they were suspected of committing crimes,” (Appleby et all, 520). Even if African Americans were innocent, they were killed because many were not allowed to go on trial. All it took was an accusation from a white to destroy the life of an innocent black. Legal slavery in the United States ended in 1865, but African Americans were still treaty unfairly by many white Southerners. “During the Depression, many blacks were fired or laid off for periods of time,” (Growing Up Black ). One of the good things for blacks during this period was that there were places in the South where poor, working class blacks could go to live until they could afford to purchase their own homes. These places were small, but they had everything they needed to survive. Slavery had largely disappeared from the North by the 1830s. However, racial prejudice and discrimination remained in the Northern States. A few African Americans were able to break through this racial barrier and rise in the business world, but the overwhelming majority of the black population was extremely poor. Most blacks were poorly educated. “Most communities would not allow free African Americans to attend public schools and barred them from public facilities as well. Often African Americans were forced to attend segregated schools and they could only go to segregated hospitals,” (Appleby et all, 392). Segregation lived on for many years because of the “Separate but Equal” Doctrine introduced in Plessey v. …show more content…
Segregation first became legal in the 1896 case of Plessey v. Ferguson. The Supreme Court made it legal because they thought that even though blacks and whites wouldn’t be able to use the same public facilities, the facilities for blacks were equal to the white facilities. These facilities weren’t even close to being equal. The state funded white schools well, while black schools didn’t really get anything. If the black schools did have books, they were usually old and out-dated books. Whites received a far better education than blacks did during this period. There were a number of educational, economical, and social disadvantages for the blacks compared to the whites. “After Slavery was abolished in America by the Thirteenth Amendment, racial discrimination then became regulated by the Jim Crow Laws,” (Wikipedia). The Jim Crow Laws were state and local laws that mandated segregation in just about everything that was public. In the United States, legal segregation was required in some states and came with “ant-miscegenation laws”, which prohibited against interracial marriage. There were laws passed against segregation in the 1960s. “Beginning in the 1930s, the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People)—under the leadership of African-American attorney Charles Hamilton Houston—began its assault on the “Separate but Equal,” Doctrine announced in Plessey,” (law.umkc.edu). In 1938, Houston persuaded the Supreme Court that Missouri’s refusal to provide legal education for blacks within its own borders denied blacks the equal protection of the laws. The NAACP gave to the “equal” part of Separate but