r 75 years, at least in the South, where railroads, restaurants, hotels, schools, and other public accommodations were segregated by race. Southern whites even disenfranchised African-American voters in spite of the fifteenth amendment.
Southern whites enacted the laws in response to the SouthÆs changing demographics. In rural areas, wealthy white landowners exercised feudal-like control over African-Americans even after the Civil War. But many freed slaves soon left the farms and created large African-American communities in urban areas, providing a greater opportunity for social mixing. To prevent that, white elites created a much more stricter system of control. The South remained committed to white supremacy, only in a different guise. Segregation had replaced slavery (White 24).
The federal government often aided this process. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) upheld the doctrine of separate but equal, declaring that states had the power to require the ôseparation [of races] in places where they are liable to be brought into contact.ö Another example came during the New Deal of the 1930s, when the Federal Housing Administration extended aid to African-Americans only if they built a house in a ôblackö area (Barker and McCorry 18-21).
Terror and violence also underpinned Jim Crow laws. (Jim Crow was a character in a minstrel show performed by whites during the 19th century.) Lynchings and beatings were commonplace, almost always without repercussions for the white offenders. During the late 19th century, an average of 150 African-Americans were lynched each year (White 26). The wh
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