The era of the American civil rights movement was characterized by grassroots nonviolent protests and civil disobedience involving students, activists, and a large contingent of participants in African American religious culture. These protests and acts of civil disobedience regularly targeted exemplary forms of racial discrimination. Sit-ins at segregated venues like the Greensboro, North Carolina, sit-ins …
In the midst of the lynchings and massacres of this period, some Supreme Court decisions of note emerged. In Powell v. Alabama (1932), eight of nine African American men, the Scottsboro Boys, who had been accused of raping two white women, had been rapidly sentenced to death in one-day trials. They had seen their attorneys …
proportion to their population, more blacks were in prison in the north than in the south. In Chicago, a full quarter of blacks inhabited slum areas, and this group committed a substantial number of crimes—largely of larceny, burglary, and robbery. Similar to what Du Bois found of Philadelphia, Chicago crime showed an increase over a …
With the expiration of Reconstruction, a series of revived Black Codes or Jim Crow statutes emerged, with every southern state eventually enacting some barrier to black suffrage. The most well-known strategies were the poll tax, the grandfather clause, and literacy tests. A steady procession of states revised statutes to bar interracial marriage as well. West …
The Civil War and its immediate aftermath brought revolutionary changes to African American legal circumstances, albeit briefly. The 1865 Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution ended slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime. The Fourteenth Amendment (1868) contained a three-pronged remedy for African American civil exclusion. It dismantled the Dred Scott decision …