History of Racial Segregation in The United States - History

History

After Congress passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867, the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1870 providing the right to vote, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875 forbidding racial segregation in accommodations, Federal occupation troops in the South assured blacks the right to vote and to elect their own political leaders. The Reconstruction amendments asserted the supremacy of the national state and the formal equality under the law of everyone within it. However this radical Reconstruction era would collapse because of multidimensional racialism related to the spread of democratic idealism (progressivism). What began as region wide passage of ‘Jim Crow’ segregation laws that focused on issues of equal access to public activities and facilities would by 1910 have spread throughout the south, mandating the segregation of whites and blacks in the public sphere.

The collapse of the reconstruction amendments and what alluded to racial segregation was also a political move that emerged in the Southern states. Many of the white voters in the south were farmers and opposed to the black man voting for racial reasons, and also because they objected to the possibility of their vote being employed against them. This was during a time of agrarian unrest and the uncertainty of the political importance of the agricultural sector of the south. Independent challenges to the Democrat power remained endemic in the South until the end of the 19th century. To discourage black voting, Southern Democrats resorted to violence. The white supremacist group Ku Klux Klan terrorized black political leaders to counter the Republican party's power base. Many blacks were killed (often lynched) for attempting to exercise their right to vote, for being members of political organizations and for attending school. Racialism was also fueled by the ideology of Social Darwinism, which broadly asserted that because of a natural competition among humans and the social evolution driven by the survival of the fittest, the white man not only should but deserved to retain political and economic power. Thus the behavior exhibited towards Negros was not perceived as racism but rather action that was sanctioned by the ‘science’ of Euro-centric racialism.

The efforts to disenfranchise black men in the south were at first performed while trying not to directly violate the intent of the Fifteenth Amendment. Such efforts included implementing poll taxes and property qualifications, which were directly aimed at discouraging the black voter but did not technically deny the right to vote based on color.

After the Compromise of 1877, all federal troops were withdrawn from the South and Reconstruction ended, which also marked the onset of the nadir of American race relations, when African-Americans both in the South and the North were increasingly oppressed by white mob violence and by de jure and de facto segregation.