Monday Sept. 19

[7Jessica]

Work day.-What laws and restrictions were put on African-Americans and other minorities after Reconstruction ended?-Explain the significance of Plessy v. Ferguson.Voting Restrictions:All southern states made new voting restrictions for African Americans. Some states limited voting to only the people who could read and made them take a literacy test. African Americans usually were giving harder questions and tests in a different language. Another new requirement was the poll tax, which was an anual tax that had to be paid before they could vote. Blacks and white sharecroppers usuallly couldnt aford the tax because they were too poor.To let whites who failed the reading test or are too poor to pay the poll tax vote, they created the grandfather clause. The grandfather clause said that even if a man failed the leteracy test or could not afford the poll tax. he was still entitled to vote is his father or his grandfather had been elegible to vote befor January 1 1867. Befor 1867 freed slaves were not allowed to vote.Jim Crow Laws:During the 1870's and 1880's southern states passed racial segregation lows to sperate white and black people in public and priavite places. Later these law were called the Jim Crow Laws because of a song that ended with the words "jump, jim crow."Plessy v. FergusonIn 1892 a man named Homer Plessy sat in a "whites only" car of a train and refused to move. Plessy was arrested, tried and convicted for breaking a Louisiana segregation law. Plessy said that he was denied equal protection under law, but the Supreme Court ruled that seperate-but-equal facilities for black and white people didnt violate the Constitution.Turn of the century race relatoinAfrican Americans faced informal rules called racial etiquette. Racial Etiquette were rules that regulated relationships between blacks and whites. The rules usually humiliated and belittled the African AMericans, enforcing then into their second class statusViolencepeople who didnt follow the racial etiquette rules where lynched..which is being shot, burned or hung.Discrimination in the North