Jim Crow Laws facts?

Question

I wanted to know if What was the purpose of the Jim Crow Laws? Why were they Predominatly in the south? Did the Laws affect Blacks and Whites in the same way. If you dont know the Answer, do you know a website??? Thank Ypu.

Answer 1

I'll try to give you what I recall.

Following the gains of Reconstruction came the setbacks of the so-called Black Codes (also known as Jim Crow Laws).

What happened was kind of like this: as the Federal government returned control of the state governments of the former Confederacy to the locals, there were a lot of former Confederates who wanted things to go back to the way they were before the war. While they couldn't bring back slavery, they did what they could to stall the gains blacks had made during the period of Reconstruction and, if possible, reverse them.

Nearly all of the eleven states that had seceded (Virginia, Tennessee, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, North Carolina, Mississippi, and Florida) had passed laws limiting the civil rights of its black citizens. These laws ranged from denying the right to vote based on one's grandfather's right to vote prior to the Civil War (please don't ask me how a man who may well have had a white grandfather who was a slave owner could be barred from voting--I guess the fact that he wasn't more than 1/4 white was cited, or he was called a liar for claiming a white grandfather!) to dictating what parts of town blacks could live in. Some states even restricted black ownership of land, particularly those that had a property requirement for voting.

What often could be even worse than the laws that were passed were the social attitudes that engendered them. A white man could rape a black woman with impunity, but let a black man be merely suspected of having even consensual sex with a white woman, and he'd be convicted--assuming he wasn't lynched first. Many places had laws banning marriage between whites and blacks, and let's not forget the "separate-but-equal" travesty that claimed that black public schools gave education that was equal to that available in white schools. As a teacher, I couldn't imagine trying to educate anyone without the proper tools, and the black schools, generally, had to make do with outdated textbooks, few things like maps or globes, and just a general shortage of supplies.

Granted, some states had more liberal "black codes" than others, but the very existence of such laws caused a number of blacks to move to the northern part of the country--they called it "voting with their feet." While these men and women still faced prejudice in the North, they at least didn't have the injury aggravated by knowing that they had to put up with abuse because the law was not on their side.

What's sad is that these conditions prevailed, in many areas, into the latter part of the 20th century.

Answer 2

Jim crow laws where enforced in the south. They were geared toward non whites mainly african americans. It was basically segregation.
Wikipedia.com is a good website to look up detailed information

Answer 3

I was born in 1952
I didnt hear about jim crow until after 2000
who invented this jim crow stuff? it wasnt in the news or my school books
I am southern I live in alabama
we aint never heard of jim crow
yeah we had white only and colored only bathrooms and stuff but I just never heard of jim crow...you know?

Answer 4

whites were afraid of blacks taking over the country and gaining power. they were mainly in the south and stereotyped to rednecks and hicks.

Answer 5

Go to www.pbs.org or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws