Race Legislation in The United States - Legislation During The Nadir of American Race Relations

Legislation During The Nadir of American Race Relations

Further information: Nadir of American race relations

Following the end of the Reconstruction period, southern whites reasserted political and social supremacy, with the violence and discrimination that caused the nadir of American race relations. There was increasing racial violence in the South, lynchings and attacks to intimidate blacks and repress their voting. After regaining power in the state legislatures in the 1870s, white Democrats passed legislation to impose electoral requirements that effectively disfranchised black voters. From 1890-1910, Southern states ratified constitutional amendments or new constitutions that increased requirements for voter registration, which resulted in disfranchising most blacks and many poor whites (as in Alabama.) With political control in what was effectively a one-party system, they passed Jim Crow laws and instituted racial segregation in public facilities. In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the defendants in the Plessy v. Ferguson case, which established the "separate but equal" interpretation of provision of services. Without the vote, however, black residents in the South found their segregated facilities consistently underfunded, and they were without recourse in the legal system, as only voters could sit on juries or hold office. They were closed out of the political process in most states. In 1899, the Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education case ended in the legalization of segregation in schools.

Anti-miscegenation laws prohibited marriages of European-Americans with people of African descent, even if of mixed race. Some states also prohibited marriages across ethnic lines with Native Americans and, later, Asians. Such laws were first passed during the Colonial era in several of the Thirteen Colonies, starting with Virginia in 1691. After the American Revolutionary War, several of the newly independent states repealed such laws. However, all the slave states and many free states enforced such laws in the Antebellum era.

During Reconstruction, when biracial Republican coalitions controlled the legislatures, several Southern states repealed anti-miscegenation laws. As Democrats returned to power, between 1870 and 1884, legislatures passed anti-miscegenation laws in all the states of the Confederacy to re-establish white supremacy.

Western states newly admitted to the Union after the Civil War passed anti-miscegenation laws laws, often directed against marriages between Europeans and Asians (the increasing immigrant population in that area), as well as prohibiting marriages with blacks and Native Americans. For instance, Utah's marriage law had an anti-miscegenation component passed in 1899; it was repealed in 1963. It prohibited marriage between a white and anyone considered a Negro (Black American), mulatto (half black), quadroon (one-quarter black), octoroon (one-eighth black), "Mongolian" (East Asian), or member of the "Malay race" (a racial classification discriminating against Filipinos). No restrictions were placed on marriages between people of ethnic groups who were not "white persons.".

At the end of the 19th century, sundown towns began to post warnings against blacks staying overnight. Sometimes they passed laws against minorities; in others, they erected signs, such as one posted in the 1930s in Hawthorne, California, which read, "Nigger, Don't Let The Sun Set On YOU In Hawthorne". Discrimination was also accomplished through restrictive covenants for residential areas, agreed to by the real estate agents of the community. In others, the racist policy was enforced through intimidation, including harassment by law enforcement officers.

In addition to the expulsion of African Americans from "sundown towns", Chinese Americans were driven out of some towns. For example, in 1870, ethnic Chinese made up one-third of the population of Idaho, where they had worked on railroads and in mining. Following a wave of violence and an 1886 anti-Chinese convention in Boise, almost none remained by 1910. The town of Gardnerville, Nevada blew a daily whistle at 6 p.m., alerting Native Americans to leave by sundown. Jews were excluded from living in some sundown towns.

The National Housing Act of 1934 established the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) to try to encourage home ownership during the Great Depression, but another consequence was redlining. In 1935, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB) asked the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) to assess 239 cities and develop "residential security maps" to indicate the level of security for real estate investments in each surveyed city. Because of older housing in minority neighborhoods, and undervaluation of minority readiness to work and protect their homes, the agency defined certain areas as high risk. This prevented many residents of minority neighborhoods from being able to get mortgages or loans to renovate their properties. Such redlining had the unanticipated result of increased residential racial segregation and encouraging urban decay in the United States. Urban planning historians theorize that the maps were used for years afterward by public and private entities to deny loans to people in black communities.

The mass immigration to the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries led to other restrictive laws, influenced by the nativist movement. The new populations came from eastern and southern Europe and were Catholic and Jewish, as opposed to the majority population in the United States of northern European and African American Protestants. y were mostly enacted according to national origins, but also involved racial typologies developed by scientific racism theorists. For example, although Indian Americans were not classified as members of any races until the end of the 19th century, the Supreme Court created in 1923, during the United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind case, the official stance to classify Indians as non-white, which at the time retroactively stripped Indians of citizenship and land rights. While the decision was placating racist Asiatic Exclusion League (AEL) demands, spurned by growing outrage at the Turban Tide / Hindoo Invasion alongside the pre-existing outrage at the "Yellow Peril", and while more recent legislation influenced by the civil-rights movement has removed much of the statutory discrimination against Asians, no case has overturned this 1923 classification. Hence, this classification remains, and is still relevant today because many laws and quotas are race-based.

This period, however, also saw the Yick Wo v. Hopkins case in 1886, which was the first case where the United States Supreme Court ruled that a law that was race-neutral on its face that was administered in a prejudicial manner was an infringement of the Equal Protection Clause.