In some states, poorer, less literate white voters feared being disenfranchised by the literacy and understanding tests. Some states introduced a loophole, known as the grandfather clause , to allow less literate whites to vote. The grandfather clause exempted those who had been allowed to vote in that state prior to the Civil War and their descendants from literacy and understanding tests. Because blacks were not allowed to vote prior to the Civil War, but most white men had been voting at a time when there were no literacy tests, this loophole allowed most illiterate whites to vote while leaving obstacles in place for blacks who wanted to vote as well.
Time limits were often placed on these provisions because state legislators realized that they might quickly be declared unconstitutional, but they lasted long enough to allow illiterate white men to register to vote.
The grandfather clause made such a situation possible. In states where the voting rights of poor whites were less of a concern, another tool for disenfranchisement was the poll tax. Because former slaves were usually quite poor, they were less likely than white men to be able to pay poll taxes. According to this receipt, a man named A. Although these methods were usually sufficient to ensure that blacks were kept away from the polls, some dedicated African Americans did manage to register to vote despite the obstacles placed in their way.
To ensure their vote was largely meaningless, the white elites used their control of the Democratic Party to create the white primary : primary elections in which only whites were allowed to vote.
Furthermore, they contended, voting for nominees to run for office was not the same as electing those who would actually hold office. So they held primary elections to choose the Democratic nominee in which only white citizens were allowed to vote.
With blacks effectively disenfranchised, the restored southern state governments undermined guarantees of equal treatment in the Fourteenth Amendment. Similarly, state and local governments passed laws limiting what neighborhoods blacks and whites could live in. Collectively, these discriminatory laws came to be known as Jim Crow laws. The Supreme Court upheld the separate but equal doctrine in in Plessy v. By the turn of the twentieth century, the position of African Americans was quite bleak.
Even outside the South, racial inequality was a fact of everyday life. African American leaders and thinkers themselves disagreed on the right path forward.
Some, like Booker T. Washington, argued that acceptance of inequality and segregation over the short term would allow African Americans to focus their efforts on improving their educational and social status until whites were forced to acknowledge them as equals.
Liberal whites dominated the organization in its early years, but African Americans assumed control over its operations in the s. Perhaps its greatest series of legal successes consisted of its efforts to challenge segregation in education. In , the Supreme Court essentially gave states a choice: they could either integrate institutions of higher education, or they could establish an equivalent university or college for African Americans.
Southern states chose to establish colleges for blacks rather than allow them into all-white state institutions. Although this ruling expanded opportunities for professional and graduate education in areas such as law and medicine for African Americans by requiring states to provide institutions for them to attend, it nevertheless allowed segregated colleges and universities to continue to exist.
The NAACP was pivotal in securing African American civil rights and today continues to address civil rights violations, such as police brutality and the disproportionate percentage of African American convicts that are given the death penalty.
The landmark court decision of the judicial phase of the civil rights movement settled the Brown v. Board of Education case in In this case, the Supreme Court unanimously overturned its decision in Plessy v. Ferguson as it pertained to public education, stating that a separate but equal education was a logical impossibility.
Even with the same funding and equivalent facilities, a segregated school could not have the same teachers or environment as the equivalent school for another race. The court also rested its decision in part on social science studies suggesting that racial discrimination led to feelings of inferiority among African American children.
The only way to dispel this sense of inferiority was to end segregation and integrate public schools. It is safe to say this ruling was controversial.
While integration of public schools took place without much incident in some areas of the South, particularly where there were few black students, elsewhere it was often confrontational—or nonexistent.
Organized by A. A few months later, in Little Rock, Arkansas, governor Orval Faubus resisted court-ordered integration and mobilized National Guard troops to keep black students out of Central High School. To avoid integration, Faubus closed four high schools in Little Rock the following school year. For a year, they escorted nine African American students to and from school and to and from classes within the school. Although de jure segregation , segregation mandated by law, had ended on paper, in practice, few efforts were made to integrate schools in most school districts with substantial black student populations until the late s.
Many white southerners who objected to sending their children to school with blacks then established private academies that admitted only white students. Advances were made in the courts in areas other than public education. In many neighborhoods in northern cities, which technically were not segregated, residents were required to sign restrictive real estate covenants promising that if they moved, they would not sell their houses to African Americans and sometimes not to Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, Filipinos, Jews, and other ethnic minorities as well.
In the case of Shelley v. Kraemer , the Supreme Court held that while such covenants did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment because they consisted of agreements between private citizens, their provisions could not be enforced by courts.
Thus, if a white family chose to sell its house to a black family and the other homeowners in the neighborhood tried to sue the seller, the court would not hear the case. In , the Supreme Court struck down a Virginia law that prohibited interracial marriage in Loving v.
Beyond these favorable court rulings, however, progress toward equality for African Americans remained slow in the s. In , Congress proposed what later became the Twenty-Fourth Amendment , which banned the poll tax in elections to federal but not state or local office; the amendment went into effect after being ratified in early Several southern states continued to require residents to pay poll taxes in order to vote in state elections until when, in the case of Harper v.
Virginia Board of Elections , the Supreme Court declared that requiring payment of a poll tax in order to vote in an election at any level was unconstitutional. President Johnson used another key strategy to pass the civil rights bill. In public speeches and private talks, he urged passage of the civil rights act as a lasting legacy to the martyred president. Building widespread public support, he urged religious leaders throughout the nation especially in the South to use their influence on behalf of the civil rights act.
Faced with strong opposition from many Republicans and most Southern Democrats, he resorted to his forceful personal powers. The filibuster lasted 83 days, the longest in Senate history. But Johnson managed to get the votes to end it. Enlisting White House aides, civil rights and labor leaders, and key congressional civil rights advocates, he pulled out all the stops to gain a legislative victory.
On July 2, , he formally signed the Civil Rights Act of into law, using 72 ceremonial pens. Many dignitaries, including Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and several other national civil rights figures, attended the ceremony. This law banned racial discrimination in several areas, including hotels, restaurants, education, and other public accommodations. This landmark act also guaranteed equal job opportunities, fulfilling one major objective of the historic March on Washington.
Many larger Southern businesses had already desegregated in response to sit-ins and other civil rights protests. But the Civil Rights Act of added important legal protections to these political and social developments. Almost immediately, the new civil rights law came under legal challenge.
The owner of an Atlanta motel argued that Congress did not have the authority under the U. I Accept Show Purposes. Your Money. Personal Finance. Your Practice. Popular Courses. Part Of. Where the Gaps Are. The Role of Real Estate. Race and the Power Structure.
Legal Remedies. Table of Contents Expand. The Civil Rights Act of Title V: Future expansion. Title VI: Government agencies. Additional Civil Rights Laws in the s. Civil Rights Laws in the s. Civil Rights Laws, s to the Present. Where to File a Complaint. Effects and Limits of Civil Rights Law. Key Takeaways The landmark Civil Rights Act of banned discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, and national origin.
It addressed voting rights, employment, public accommodations, education, and more. A series of laws in the s and s clarified and expanded the discrimination ban to include age and disability discrimination, and applied it to housing and voting rights. The effectiveness of the agencies involved in civil rights enforcement has varied with the commitment of various presidential administrations.
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For decades after Reconstruction , the U. Congress did not pass a single civil rights act. Finally, in , it established a civil rights section of the Justice Department, along with a Commission on Civil Rights to investigate discriminatory conditions.
Three years later, Congress provided for court-appointed referees to help Black people register to vote. Both of these bills were strongly watered down to overcome southern resistance. When John F. Kennedy entered the White House in , he initially delayed supporting new anti-discrimination measures.
But with protests springing up throughout the South—including one in Birmingham, Alabama , where police brutally suppressed nonviolent demonstrators with dogs, clubs and high-pressure fire hoses—Kennedy decided to act. Johnson immediately took up the cause. During debate on the floor of the U. In a mischievous attempt to sabotage the bill, a Virginia segregationist introduced an amendment to ban employment discrimination against women.
That one passed, whereas over other hostile amendments were defeated. In the end, the House approved the bill with bipartisan support by a vote of The bill then moved to the U. Senate , where southern and border state Democrats staged a day filibuster—among the longest in U. Having broken the filibuster, the Senate voted in favor of the bill, and Johnson signed it into law on July 2,
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