Jim Crow Law Case Study

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During the 1960s, the struggle for civil rights had become more defined than ever. Nearly 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, African Americans in Southern states still inhabited a starkly unequal world of disenfranchisement, segregation and various forms of oppression (Staff, History.com, 2009). African Americans were commonly known as Blacks, they were up against hard laws and white people that thought Blacks were second-class to their race. The phrase “Jim Crow” was the name of the racial caste system that was predominately used in Southern states between the times of 1877 and middle of the 1960s (Staff, History.com, 2010). The “Jim Crow” laws from local and state level banded them from using the same bathrooms, classrooms and…show more content…
Virginia (Staff, History.com, 2010). The original Virginia law required segregation to be allowed. This led to Irene Morgan being convicted of not giving up her seat to a white passenger. After her arrest, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, known as the NAACP had then begun to file for appeals on behalf of Mrs. Morgan after Virginia U.S. Supreme Court ruled against her. Later on, the 1946 Supreme Court decision struck down that particular Virginia law that required racial segregation on commercial buses (Catsam, Wolfe, 2014). This was in violation to the U.S. Constitution. All African Americans wanted during this time was equality and be able to live freely without being harmed or harassed. In 1961, the Congress of Racial Equality (core), having recovered from organizational challenges of the 1950s, was eager to claim a central place in the burgeoning struggle in the South, core leaders revived a strategy they had employed tentatively in 1947 to test compliance with laws that banned segregated interstate bus travel (Andrews, 2007). The core was founded in 1942 and became one of the leading activist organizations in the early years of the American Civil Rights…show more content…
The purpose of the Freedom rides were aimed to help desegregate public places such as commercial buses and being able to ride throughout the South without any uproar. Traveling segregated was humiliating to blacks and they wanted that to come to an end. The Freedom Riders began in Washington, DC and they were on two different buses that would travel to the South. On May 4, 1961, those thirteen people embarked on their journey to the South. They would travel through Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. Eventually, the Freedom Riders would try to make it to New Orleans, Louisiana by May 17, 1961 in order to celebrate the seventh anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision on the Brown v. Board of Education case (Staff, History.com, 2009). As they were traveling and stopping at each bus terminal, the African Americans would try to use the “White Only” bathrooms, and even try to eat at their lunch counters and the whites would do the

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