Civil Rights Jim Crow, Plessy

Civil Rights

Jim Crow, Plessy v. Ferguson, and Brown v. Board of Education

The evolution of civil rights in the United States has been relatively rapid, which has led to some confusion regarding the roles of certain laws and legal decisions in that evolution. While slavery is widely acknowledged as the nadir of racial civil rights in the United States, it coexisted with something almost as insidious, the first Black Codes. Those Black Codes expanded following the Civil War. Eventually, the Black Codes were encompassed in laws referred to as Jim Crow laws, despite the fact that the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments were targeted at ending all vestiges of slavery and racial inequality, were held to be valid in Plessy v. Ferguson. In fact, it was not until the decision in Brown v. Board of Education that any branch of the Federal government demonstrated an actual intent to fulfill the promises of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Although the states in the American Midwest were not officially slave states, it would be a mistake to believe that the people of those states promoted civil rights. In contrast, it is in these states that the first Black Codes developed. The Black Codes were laws aimed at keeping Blacks in subservient roles and positions. For example, Black Codes included anti-miscegenation statutes, statutes that prohibited Blacks from owning property, and even statutes ordering free Blacks to leave a state or be whipped every six months. Furthermore, while the Black Codes were in non-slave states, some of them permitted Blacks to be forced to be indentured servants, which was essentially a form of slavery. Following the Civil War, many southern states enacted their own Black Codes.

The Fourteenth Amendment and the Fifteenth Amendment, along with several civil rights laws that were enacted in the 1860s and 1870s, were aimed at counteracting the Black Codes. The Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed equal protection under the law, regardless of race or citizenship. The Fifteenth Amendment granted voting rights to individuals regardless of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. For a while, the two amendments, and their attendant legislation, were successful in protecting the rights of free Blacks in the United States.

Jim Crow laws were enacted in the post-Reconstruction South, and were aimed at returning Blacks to bondage-like conditions. In fact, by 1915, Jim Crow laws had essentially eliminated any steps towards racial equality, which had been achieved by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Jim Crow laws circumvented those amendments by setting up separate facilities for whites and non-whites. In addition, Jim Crow laws were aimed at keeping Blacks, who frequently outnumbered whites, from gaining political power. One way that Jim Crow laws accomplished this goal was to impose poll taxes or literacy requirements on voters. White voters were exempt from these laws due to grandfather clauses.

In Plessy v. Ferguson, Plessy, a Black man under the Jim Crow laws, was arrested after purchasing a first-class ticket and taking a seat in a whites section. Plessy challenged his arrest, maintaining that the railroads use of racially segregated cars violated the Fourteenth Amendment. The Supreme Court disagreed with Plessy's assertion. The Court determined that racial segregation did not imply that Blacks were inferior. Furthermore, the Court found that the facilities provided to Blacks and whites were of equal quality. Because of this, the Court determined that separate but equal facilities did not violate the letter or the spirit of the Fourteenth Amendment. The decision in Plessy helped legalize segregation in the United States. In fact, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the Court repeatedly found that the facilities provided for whites and Blacks were equal.

The decision in Plessy was the definitive law on segregation until Brown v. Board of Education. In Brown, the plaintiff alleged that being forced to attend a Black-only school was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Because the Supreme Court had consistently approved racially segregated facilities, the legal team in Brown provided substantial evidence, not only that the facilities provided to Blacks were inferior, but also that these inferior facilities had detrimental effects on Black students. The resulting decision, now referred to as Brown I, was that separate educational facilities were inherently unequal. Unfortunately, the decision in Brown I lost much of its bite the following year, when the Court, in a decision now referred to as Brown II, directed states to comply with the decision in Brown I with all deliberate speed. The reality was that compliance with Brown took many years.

While actual compliance with Brown was not immediate, Brown was significant in that it marked the end of legal segregation. Although Brown was only aimed at overturning school segregation, Brown's effect was much broader. Having decided that school segregation violated the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court could no longer rubber-stamp other segregationist laws. Brown was followed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which gave teeth to the decision and opened up the door to federal enforcement of state civil rights violations.