5.2 The african american struggle for equality  (Page 5/28)

With blacks effectively disenfranchised, the restored southern state governments undermined guarantees of equal treatment in the Fourteenth Amendment. They passed laws that excluded African Americans from juries and allowed the imprisonment and forced labor of “idle” black citizens. The laws also called for segregation of whites and blacks in public places under the doctrine known as “separate but equal.” As long as nominally equal facilities were provided for both whites and blacks, it was legal to require members of each race to use the facilities designated for them. 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 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson    , consistent with the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause, and allowed segregation to continue.

Civil rights in the courts

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. W. E. B. Du Bois , however, argued for a more confrontational approach and in 1909 founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) as a rallying point for securing equality. Liberal whites dominated the organization in its early years, but African Americans assumed control over its operations in the 1920s.

The NAACP soon focused on a strategy of overturning Jim Crow laws through the courts. Perhaps its greatest series of legal successes consisted of its efforts to challenge segregation in education. Early cases brought by the NAACP dealt with racial discrimination in higher education. In 1938, 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.