3-5.2

It Is Essential For Students to Know:

• When Federal troops withdrew from the South ending Reconstruction, conditions deteriorated for African Americans.
• Segregation and discrimination had long been accepted practices in South Carolina. Schools had been segregated from the time of their establishment during Reconstruction. But within ten years of the end of Reconstruction, the South Carolina legislature passedJim Crow laws to provide a legal means to segregate African Americas in South Carolina.
• Jim Crow laws were a way for South Carolina to circumvent the rights established for African Americans by the thirteenth and fourteenth amendments to the Constitution of the United States.
• The thirteenth amendment abolished slavery.
• The fourteenth amendment secured rights of citizenship for African Americans including due process and equal protection of the laws.
• Jim Crow laws meant that African Americans could not ride in the same railroad cars, or use the same public restrooms or water fountains. They had to sit in the balcony at theatres and could not eat in the same restaurants as whites. Every aspect of life was separate. As time passed and technology changed, Jim Crow was applied to new circumstances (for example, to buses and movie theaters).
• Other laws were also passed to limit African Americans’ right to vote as protected in the 15th amendment.
• African Americans were required to pass a literacy test on the Constitution. Even if they could read the Constitution, the white examiner declared that they were illiterate and therefore could not vote.
• Voters were also required to pay a poll tax before they could vote. This was particularly hard for poor sharecroppers, many of whom were African Americans
• Poor illiterate whites were allowed to vote because of the ‘grandfather clause’ that said if their grandfather could vote before the Civil War then so could they.
• African Americans who protested these laws were intimidated by terrorist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.
• Racial discrimination was now written into the state law and could be enforced by the state government.
• Because their right to vote was denied, African Americans had no representation in this government and so could not protect their rights.
• The national government did not interfere in state government to protect African American citizens.
• The Supreme Court ruled that “separate but equal” was constitutional. However, conditions were not equal.

It Is Not Essential For Students to Know:

• It is not essential for students to know all of the circumstance in which segregation was practiced.
• Students do not need to know that Jim Crow laws were passed by the followers of Ben Tillman in an effort to be sure that the conservative faction of the Democratic Party could not appeal to the African American voter and therefore win an election.
• Students do not need to know that the Tillmanites used racism as a means of consolidating their own political power.
• Students do not need to know that the literacy test and poll tax were written into the South Carolina constitution of 1895 that replaced the Reconstruction era constitution of 1868.
• Students do not need to know the degree to which lynchings were used to intimidate African Americans.
• Students do not need to know the names of the Supreme Court case, Plessy v. Ferguson, that declared “separate but equal” to be constitutional.