The Reconstruction Amendments promised equal protection and the vote. After Reconstruction ended, Southern states found ways around both. These laws and customs were called Jim Crow.
Key idea
Southern states passed segregation laws and kept Black citizens from voting with poll taxes, literacy tests and grandfather clauses. In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) the Supreme Court upheld "separate but equal," 7 to 1, over Justice John Marshall Harlan's dissent. Journalist Ida B. Wells campaigned against lynching.
Why it works
How did states keep people from voting without breaking the Fifteenth Amendment, which forbids denying the vote "on account of race"? They used rules that did not name race. A poll tax charged a fee to vote. A literacy test was judged by local officials, who passed white voters and failed Black ones. A grandfather clause excused men from these rules if their grandfathers could vote before 1867, which covered most white men and almost no Black men. The Supreme Court struck down grandfather clauses in 1915, but poll taxes and tests lasted until the 1960s.
Violence enforced the system. Thousands of Black Americans were lynched, killed by mobs without trial, between the 1880s and the 1960s. After three Black grocers were lynched in Memphis in 1892, Ida B. Wells investigated lynchings across the South and published her findings in Southern Horrors (1892), showing that the usual excuses were often false.
Work it through
Worked example: Name the device
A county clerk asks a Black man to explain a clause of the state constitution and fails him, but lets white men register without the test. What device is this, and which amendment was it meant to get around?
- A test of reading or understanding before registering is a literacy test.
- It was applied unequally by the clerk.
- It avoided naming race, to get around the Fifteenth Amendment.
Answer: A literacy test, used to get around the Fifteenth Amendment.
Common mistake
Many students think separate facilities were in fact equal under Plessy. The schools, cars and waiting rooms provided for Black citizens were almost always worse, and courts rarely checked. The doctrine stood until Brown v. Board of Education (1954) overturned it for public schools.