7.1: Segregation in the North and South

Paired Sources from U.S. History, 1877-present
Table of Contents

  You don't have access to this content. Please try to log in with your institution. Sign In

Abstract

Jim Crow segregation developed in the South in the last decades of the nineteenth century as a way for racist white people to reestablish the social control that they once had during slavery. Sometimes it was written into law, but often it was perpetuated entirely through social customs. While the South tended to rely on laws to impose segregation (which were ruled constitutional by the Supreme Court’s infamous 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision), the northern states that imposed segregation tended to depend upon custom.

Contents