The Jim Crow Laws

Methods were created to get around the Reconstruction rules and oppress the black population when the reconstruction period ended in 1877 and the white southerners started regaining control. These perpetrators went by the name Redeemers. Through the creation of new laws and the distorting of existing ones, they sought to deny black people their civil rights. The statutes earned the moniker "Jim Crow Laws," after a racist comic strip featuring an underprivileged, illiterate black guy.

The laws ranged from being inhumane, such as requiring black people to sit in the back of buses, to insane, such as requiring them to "qualify" to vote by paying poll taxes or by memorizing the entirety of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, or the one that prohibited keeping official records of black births, marriages, and deaths in the same books as records of white births, marriages, and deaths. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 ultimately overturned the Jim Crow Laws, which were still in effect as of 1965.