Common Jim Crow laws included literary tests, poll taxes, and the grandfather clause, which were all restrictions on voting meant to keep black men from casting a ballot. Bans on interracial marriage and separation between races in public and places of business were also common parts of Jim Crow. The special relationship between Jim Crow laws and transit would make buses and trains a focus of anti-segregationists throughout the period of Jim Crow laws, especially during the American civil rights movement. In 1954 the Supreme Court reversed Plessy in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. It declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional, and, by extension, that ruling was applied to other public facilities. In the years following, subsequent decisions struck down similar kinds of Jim Crow legislation. They made laws such as...
It shall be unlawful for a negro and white person to play together or in company with each other at any game of pool or billiards." This selection is an example of a Jim Crow law that was in effect in the state of Alabama from the late 19th century to the early 20th century.
It shall be unlawful to conduct a restaurant or other place for the serving of food in the city, at which white and colored people are served in the same room, unless such white and colored persons are effectually separated by a solid partition extending from the floor upward to a distance of seven feet or higher, and unless a separate entrance from the street is provided for each compartment.
It shall be unlawful for any amateur white baseball team to play baseball on any vacant lot or baseball diamond within two blocks of a playground devoted to the Negro race, and it shall be unlawful for any amateur colored baseball team to play baseball in any vacant lot or baseball diamond within two blocks of any playground devoted to the white race.
That’s how African Americans experienced discrimination in the south during the Jim Crow era
