Jim Crow
...e to fail this test he would not be able to vote. This test was only applied to the Black race. By 1890 laws if not by custom had signs posted equating blacks with animals: "Negroes and dogs not allowed." In some communities blacks could attend public performances but only by using separate entrances in the back or via an alley. In public halls, theaters, and movie houses, they always sat upstairs in the so-called "nigger heaven." And if a Black person wanted to buy clothes he or she was not allowed to try on clothes in fear that a White person would not want it afterwards. This included shoes, hats, scarves, or anything that would touch the body. If all these injustices were not enough legislation ensured that the races remained separate by prohibiting hearses from carrying both races, and cemeteries were required to maintain separate graveyards. The most heinous crime committed against African Americans was lynching; this act of terrorism against African Americans was used to threaten and control the Black race. More than 3,000 African Americans were killed mostly due to the allegedly belief held by White Southerners that the lynched or murdered victim raped a White woman. How can people of this time and era accept this? It comes down to two fears: one is the fear of a black man having sexual contact with a white woman under her consent. In the words of a Southern politician of the time, “Whenever the Constitution comes between me and the virtue of the white women of the South, I say to hell with the Constitution.” The other fear is the unification of poor Blacks and Whites, this was almost achieved through the Populist Movement an independent third party formed in the 1870s, in which they represent “to restore the government of the Republic to the hands of the plain people.” But the old regimes in the South drove the poor Whites back into line with fear of Black economic power. Denied their own rights, African Americans created their own schools, churches, and businesses. This created the middle class families known as the “Black bourgeois,” they subscribed the doctrine of racial uplifting of the lower class of African Americans. The success of the Black middle class enraged many Whites, they saw it as Blacks trying to get out of “their place.” With even a little success African Americans could not enjoy their earnings. In an eyewitness account by Reverened Alan Kirk during the riots of Wilmington, North Carolina. “Firing began and it seemed like a battle during wartime. They went on firing it seemed at every living Negro, poured volleys at fleeing men like sportsmen firing at rabbits in an open field; the shrieks and screams of children, mother and wives, caused the blood of the most inhuman person to creep; men lay on the street dead and dying while members of their race walked by unable to do them any good.” During this time there were outspoken Black ...