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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - VII. Social Inequality - 28. The Basis of Social Inequality - 4. The Jim Crow Laws
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Chapter 28. The Basis of Social Inequality 579
loitering as a symbolic act and in order to test out the new freedom.*
Reconstruction temporarily gave civil rights, suffrage, and even some
access to public office. It also marked the heroic beginning of the Negroes’
efforts to acquire the rudiments of education.
There is no doubt that Congress intended to give the Negroes ‘^social
equality” in public life to a substantial degree. The Civil Rights Bill of
1875,® which, in many ways, represented the culmination of the federal
Reconstruction legislation, was explicit in declaring that all persons within
the jurisdiction of the United States should be entitled to the full and equal
enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of
inns, public conveyances on land and water, theaters, and other places
of public amusement j
subject only to the conditions and limitations
established by law, and applicable alike to citizens of every race and color,
regardless of previous condition of servitude.^® The federal courts were
given exclusive jurisdiction over offenses against this statute. Stephenson
observes in Race Distinctions in American haw that ^^Congress apparently
intended to secure not only equal but identical accommodations in all public
places for Negroes and Caucasians.’”^
During Congressional Reconstruction some Southern states inserted
clauses in their constitutions or in special laws intended to establish the
rights of Negroes to share on equal terms in the accommodations of public
establishments and conveyances.^^ Louisiana and South Carolina went so
far as to require mixed schools.^^ From contemporary accounts of life in the
South during Reconstruction, it is evident, however, that Negroes met con-
siderable segregation and discrimination even during these few years of
legal equality.^^ It is also apparent that nothing irritated the majority of
white Southerners so much as the attempts of Congress and the Reconstruc-
tion governments to remove social discrimination from public life.
After Restoration of “white supremacy” the doctrine that the Negroes
should be “kept in their place” became the regional creed. When the
Supreme Court in 1883 declared the Civil Rights Bill of 1875 unconstitu-
tional in so far as it referred to acts of social discrimination by individuals—
endorsing even in this field the political compromise between the white
North and South—^the way was left open for the Jim Crow legislation of
the Southern states and municipalities. For a quarter of a century this
system of statutes and regulations—separating the two groups in schools,
on railroad cars and on street cars, in hotels and restaurants, in parks and
playgrounds, in theaters and public meeting places—continued to grow,
with the explicit purpose of diminishing, as far as was practicable and
possible, the social contacts between whites and Negroes in the region.^®
We do not know much about the effects of the Jim Crow legislation.
American sociologists, following the Sumner tradition of holding legisla-
• See Chapter lo, footnote 7.
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