Which Best Describes the Purpose of Jim Crow Laws

Jim Crow laws were a collection of state and local statutes that legalized racial segregation. Named subsequently a Black minstrel show character, the laws—which existed for nearly 100 years, from the post-Civil War era until 1968—were meant to marginalize African Americans past denying them the right to vote, hold jobs, get an education or other opportunities. Those who attempted to defy Jim Crow laws often faced abort, fines, jail sentences, violence and expiry.

Black Codes

The roots of Jim Crow laws began as early as 1865, immediately following the ratification of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery in the United States.

Blackness codes were strict local and country laws that detailed when, where and how formerly enslaved people could work, and for how much compensation. The codes appeared throughout the Due south equally a legal way to put Black citizens into indentured servitude, to take voting rights away, to command where they lived and how they traveled and to seize children for labor purposes.

The legal system was stacked against Blackness citizens, with former Confederate soldiers working as law and judges, making it difficult for African Americans to win court cases and ensuring they were field of study to Black codes.

These codes worked in conjunction with labor camps for the incarcerated, where prisoners were treated every bit enslaved people. Blackness offenders typically received longer sentences than their white equals, and because of the grueling work, often did non live out their unabridged sentence.

READ More than: How the Black Codes Limited African American Progress

Ku Klux Klan

During the Reconstruction era, local governments, likewise as the national Autonomous Party and President Andrew Johnson, thwarted efforts to aid Blackness Americans move forrad.

Violence was on the rise, making danger a regular attribute of African American life. Blackness schools were vandalized and destroyed, and bands of violent white people attacked, tortured and lynched Blackness citizens in the dark. Families were attacked and forced off their land all beyond the Due south.

The virtually ruthless system of the Jim Crow era, the Ku Klux Klan, was born in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee, as a individual social club for Amalgamated veterans.

The KKK grew into a secret society terrorizing Blackness communities and seeping through white Southern culture, with members at the highest levels of government and in the lowest echelons of criminal back alleys.

READ More: How Prohibition Fueled the Rise of the KKK

Jim Crow Laws Expand

At the start of the 1880s, big cities in the Southward were not wholly beholden to Jim Crow laws and Black Americans institute more freedom in them.

This led to substantial Black populations moving to the cities and, as the decade progressed, white metropolis dwellers demanded more laws to limit opportunities for African Americans.

Jim Crow laws presently spread around the state with fifty-fifty more than strength than previously. Public parks were forbidden for African Americans to enter, and theaters and restaurants were segregated.

Segregated waiting rooms in bus and train stations were required, as well as water fountains, restrooms, building entrances, elevators, cemeteries, fifty-fifty amusement-park cashier windows.

Laws forbade African Americans from living in white neighborhoods. Segregation was enforced for public pools, phone booths, hospitals, asylums, jails and residential homes for the elderly and handicapped.

Some states required dissever textbooks for Blackness and white students. New Orleans mandated the segregation of prostitutes according to race. In Atlanta, African Americans in court were given a unlike Bible from white people to swear on. Marriage and cohabitation betwixt white and Black people was strictly forbidden in most Southern states.

Information technology was non uncommon to run into signs posted at town and city limits warning African Americans that they were non welcome there.

READ More than: How Nazis Were Inspired past Jim Crow Laws

Ida B. Wells

As oppressive every bit the Jim Crow era was, information technology was besides a time when many African Americans effectually the country stepped forward into leadership roles to vigorously oppose the laws.

Memphis teacher Ida B. Wells became a prominent activist confronting Jim Crow laws subsequently refusing to leave a first-class train machine designated for white people merely. A conductor forcibly removed her and she successfully sued the railroad, though that decision was after reversed by a higher court.

Angry at the injustice, Wells devoted herself to fighting Jim Crow laws. Her vehicle for dissent was newspaper writing: In 1889 she became co-owner of the Memphis
Costless Speech and Headlight
and used her position to take on schoolhouse segregation and sexual harassment.

Wells traveled throughout the South to publicize her work and advocated for the arming of Black citizens. Wells too investigated lynchings and wrote about her findings.

A mob destroyed her newspaper and threatened her with death, forcing her to move to the North, where she continued her efforts confronting Jim Crow laws and lynching.

READ More than: When Ida B. Wells Took on Lynching

Charlotte Hawkins Dark-brown

Charlotte Hawkins Chocolate-brown was a N Carolina-born, Massachusetts-raised Black woman who returned to her birthplace at the age of 17, in 1901, to work every bit a instructor for the American Missionary Association.

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After funding was withdrawn for that school, Chocolate-brown began fundraising to start her own school, named the Palmer Memorial Institute.

Brown became the offset Black woman to create a Black school in North Carolina and through her education piece of work became a fierce and vocal opponent of Jim Crow laws.

Isaiah Montgomery

Not everyone battled for equal rights within white society—some chose a separatist approach.

Convinced by Jim Crow laws that Blackness and white people could non live peaceably together, formerly enslaved Isaiah Montgomery created the African American-just town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi, in 1887.

Montgomery recruited other sometime enslaved people to settle in the wilderness with him, immigration the land and forging a settlement that included several schools, an Andrew Carnegie-funded library, a hospital, three cotton wool gins, a bank and a sawmill. Mound Bayou still exists today, and is withal almost 100 per centum Black.

Jim Crow Laws in the 20th Century

As the 20th century progressed, Jim Crow laws flourished inside an oppressive gild marked by violence.

Following World War I, the NAACP noted that lynchings had become so prevalent that it sent investigator Walter White to the South. White had lighter pare and could infiltrate white hate groups.