Jim Crow Laws, Plessy v Ferguson, and Separat

By 1877, reconstruction had succumbed to bitter opposition and backroom politics. Federal troops then occupying the south were withdrawn, and white supremacists were left to reestablish the racial hierarchy that had existed before the war. Across the former confederacy, informal practices of racial discrimination were written under law. States instituted poll taxes, literacy tests, and other requirements that disenfranchised negroes. They passed Jim Crow laws, which imposed segregation and other restrictions on blacks. A few blacks challenged the system of legal discrimination. In New Orleans, a man named Homer plessy deliberately defy the Louisiana state law requiring separate railcars for blacks and whites. He was arrested and jailed. But the incident led eventually to the Supreme Court case plessy versus Ferguson. Plus he argued that the law infringed on his Fourteenth Amendment right to equal protection. But the majority of justices disagreed. The court's opinion read in part. Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts. Or to abolish distinctions based upon physical differences. If one race be inferior to the other socially, the constitution of the United States can not put them upon the same flame. The court affirmed that segregation was constitutional, as long as accommodations were separate, but equal. It also lifted up to the individual states not the federal government to guarantee equal standards. As the loan descending opinion, justice John Marshall Harlan wrote, the thin disguise of equal accommodations will not mislead anyone. Nor a tone for the wrong this day done. Plessy versus Ferguson became a landmark decision. It sanctioned a system of institutionalized racism that would persist for decades. One that would require a second period of reconstruction to overcome.