In the United States, the so-called Jim Crow laws (also known as the Black Codes) were made to enforce racial segregation and included laws that would prevent African Americans from doing things a white person could do (Jim, 2005). Jim Crow laws regulated the use of drinking fountains, segregated seating on public transportation, and varied among different communities throughout the United States. The first such law was passed in 1723 to stop blacks in Virginia from voting or owning property. After the American Civil War, during the Reconstruction period, the federal government intervened to protect the rights conferred on blacks by the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1875.
In 1883, the Supreme Court had held that the 14th Amendment did not give the federal government the power to outlaw private discrimination, and held in 1896 in Plessy vs. Ferguson that Jim Crow laws were constitutional as long as they allowed for separate but equal facilities (Jim, 2005). The Supreme Court began to overturn Jim Crow laws when it held in Guinn vs. United States in 1915 that an Oklahoma state law that denied the right to vote to some citizens was unconstitutional, invalidating the 15th Amendment voter registration requirements containing the 'father clause' which made voter registration in part dependent upon whether the applicant was descended from men enfranchised before enactment of the 15th Amendment (Introduction, 2005). The Court found the Oklahoma law to have been adopted in order to give whites who might otherwise have been disenfranchised by the state's literacy test a way of qualifying to vote that was not available to blacks. However, most African Americans were unable to vote in the Deep South until the 1950s or 1960s (Jim, 2005).
In Sweatt vs. Painter in 1950, Herman Marion Sweatt, an African American postal worker from Houston, applied for admission to the University of Texas...