Atlanta Exposition Speech

Jim Crow refers to a series of laws passed across the South following the end of Reconstruction and remaining in place (and growing in number) until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Jim Crow laws made racial discrimination legally enforceable, even going so far as to require, in some cases, the use of separate Bibles in wedding ceremonies and separate hospitals and ambulance services. The laws effectively prevented Black people from acquiring property, voting, and receiving higher education, and they also interfered in private life by forbidding interracial marriages and social events. Jim Crow segregation was deemed constitutional the year after Washington’s speech in the US Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), according to the principle of “separate but equal.” That is, segregation did not violate the “equal protection” clause of the 14th Amendment as long as Black people and white people were offered equal facilities and opportunities. Of course, facilities and opportunities were not equal. It was not until the 1954 case Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, KS, that the court rejected the Plessy precedent. And even then, many of the social customs and attitudes that enforced Black inferiority persisted after Jim Crow laws were removed from the books.