Jim Crow: A Racial Caste System

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Jim Crow, a racial caste system which dominated the American South for three quarters of a century, affected almost every aspect of a person's life. It began in the late 1870s, after the Reconstruction Era and ended in the 1960s. Those segregation and disenfranchisement laws represented the legitimization of anti-black racism and barred black Americans from being of equal status with the white Americans. The status quo was upheld in 1896 when the US Supreme Court constituted that the facilities for blacks and whites are "separate but equal" and Vigilantes reinforced it by perpetrating acts of terror. States and cities could impose legal punishments for those consorting people of another race. Most common laws forbade intermarriage and ordered business owners and public institution to separate their black and white clientele. …show more content…

Whites believed that they were superior to blacks in their intelligence, morality, civilized behavior, etc. and that the mongrel race produced by sexual relations between blacks and whites would destroy

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