History of capitalist theory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_capitalist_theory

A theory of capitalism describes the essential features of capitalism and how it functions. The history of various such theories is the subject of this article.

Overview

Conceptions of what constitutes capitalism have changed significantly over time, as well as being dependent on the political perspective and analytical approach adopted by the observer in question. Adam Smith focused on the role of enlightened self-interest (the "invisible hand") and the role of specialization in promoting the efficiency of capital accumulation. Ayn Rand defined capitalism as a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned, and called it the unknown ideal. Robert LeFevre, an American libertarian and primary theorist of autarchism, defined capitalism as savings and capital—in essence—as savings made by men, which are then invested in the tools of production. Some proponents of capitalism (like Milton Friedman) emphasize the role of free markets, which, they claim, promote freedom and democracy. For many (like Immanuel Wallerstein), capitalism hinges on the extension into a global dimension of an economic system in which goods and services are traded in markets and capital goods belong to non-state entities. For others (like Karl Marx), it is defined by the creation of a labor market in which most people must sell their labor power in order to make a living. Marx, along with others like Hilaire Belloc, also argued that capitalism differs from other market economies that feature private ownership because it features the concentration of the means of production in the hands of a few.

Adam Smith

Adam Smith is considered the first theorist of what we commonly refer to as capitalism. His 1776 work, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, theorized that within a given stable system of commerce and evaluation, individuals would respond to the incentive of earning more by specializing their production. These individuals would naturally, without specific state intervention, "direct ... that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value." This would enable the whole economy to become more productive, and it would therefore be wealthier. Smith argued that protecting particular producers would lead to inefficient production, and that a national hoarding of specie (i.e. cash in the form of coinage) would only increase prices, in an argument similar to that advanced by David Hume. His systematic treatment of how the exchange of goods, or a market, would create incentives to act in the general interest, became the basis of what was then called political economy and later economics. It was also the basis for a theory of law and government that gradually superseded the mercantilist regime then prevalent.

Smith asserts that when individuals make a trade they value what they are purchasing more than they value what they are giving in exchange for a commodity. If this were not the case, then they would not make the trade but retain ownership of the more valuable commodity. This notion underlies the concept of mutually-beneficial trade where it is held that both sides tend to benefit by an exchange.

Adam Smith is often described as the "father of capitalism" (and the "father of economics"). He described his own preferred economic system as "the system of natural liberty." Smith defined "capital" as stock, and "profit" as the just expectation of retaining the revenue from improvements made to that stock. Smith also viewed capital improvement as being the proper central aim of the economic and political system.

Karl Marx

A critique of the results of capitalism was formulated by Karl Marx. According to Marx, the treatment of labor as a commodity led to people valuing things more in terms of their price rather than their usefulness (see commodity fetishism), and hence to an expansion of the system of commodities. Much of the history of late capitalism involves what David Harvey called the "system of flexible accumulation" in which more and more things become commodities, the value of which is determined through the process of exchange rather than their use. For example, not only pins are commodities; shares in the ownership of a factory that manufactures pins become commodities; then options on the stock issued in the company that operates the factory become commodities; then portions of the interest rate attached to bonds issued by the company become commodities, and so on. Speculation in these abstract commodities then drives the allocation of materials and labor.

Marx believed that the extension of the labor theory of value indicated that owners of productive means would exploit workers by depriving them of the full value that workers themselves create. According to Marx, surplus value is the difference between the value that the worker has created and the wage that the worker receives from his/her employer. Many economists have since used marginalism to dispute the Labour theory of Value.

Historical development

During the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there was a gradual movement in Europe and in the states that Europeans had founded, for the reduction of trade barriers, in particular restrictions on production and labor, the use of non-standard weights and measures, restrictions on the formation of new businesses, and royal prerogatives that interfered with the conduct of commerce. Two parallel doctrines emerged to describe and justify this process. One was the legal doctrine that the rightful owner of land or exerciser of a property right was the one that could make the best economic use of it, and that this principle must be reflected in the property laws of each nation. The other was the political doctrine of laissez-faire economics, namely that all coercive government regulation of the market represents unjustified interference, and that economies would perform best with government only playing a defensive role in order to ensure the operation of free markets.

The next major revision of the theoretical basis of capitalism began in the late 19th century with the expansion of corporations and finance, the globalization of production and markets, and the increasing desire to tap the productive capacity of the capital sectors of economies in order to secure the markets and resources required to continue economic growth. Many, particularly the wealthy, came to view the state as a vehicle for improving business conditions, securing markets, and gaining access to scarce materials—even when such objectives could only be achieved through military force. In the 1920s this philosophy found its most publicly prominent voice in President Calvin Coolidge's assertion that "the business of America is business". Critics of this period label it "corporatism", while its adherents generally regard it as a logical extension of the "laissez-faire" principles of natural liberty.

Capitalism and imperialism

J. A. Hobson, a British liberal writing at the time of the fierce debate concerning imperialism during the Second Boer War, observed the spectacle of the "Scramble for Africa" and emphasized changes in European social structures and attitudes as well as capital flow, though his emphasis on the latter seems to have been the most influential and provocative. His so-called accumulation theory, very influential in its day, suggested that capitalism suffered from under-consumption due to the rise of monopoly capitalism and the resultant concentration of wealth in fewer hands, which he argued gave rise to a misdistribution of purchasing power. His thesis called attention to Europe's huge, impoverished industrial working class, which was typically far too poor to consume goods produced by an industrialized economy. His analysis of capital flight and the rise of mammoth cartels later influenced Vladimir Lenin in his book Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, which has become a basis for the Marxist analysis of imperialism.

Contemporary World-Systems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein perhaps addresses better Hobson's counter-arguments without degrading Hobson's underlying inferences. Accordingly, Wallerstein's conception of imperialism as a part of a general and gradual extension of capital investment from the center of the industrial countries to an overseas periphery coincides with Hobson's. According to Wallerstein, Mercantilism became the major tool of semi-peripheral, newly industrialized countries such as Germany, France, Italy, and Belgium. Wallerstein thus perceives formal empire as performing a function that was analogous to that of the mercantilist drives of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England and France; consequently, the expansion of the Industrial Revolution contributed to the emergence of an era of aggressive national rivalry, leading to the late nineteenth-century scramble for Africa and the acquisition of formal empires.

Democracy, the state, and legal frameworks

The relationship between the state, its formal mechanisms, and capitalist societies has been debated in many fields of social and political theory, with active discussion since the 19th century. Hernando de Soto is a contemporary economist who has argued that an important characteristic of capitalism is the functioning state protection of property rights in a formal property system where ownership and transactions are clearly recorded. According to de Soto, this is the process by which physical assets transform into capital, which in turn is used in many more ways and much more efficiently in the market economy. A number of Marxian economists have argued that the Enclosure Acts in England, and similar legislation elsewhere, were an integral part of capitalist primitive accumulation and that specific legal frameworks of private land ownership have been integral to the development of capitalism.

New institutional economics, a field pioneered by Douglass North, stresses the need of a legal framework in order for capitalism to function optimally, and focuses on the relationship between the historical development of capitalism and the creation and maintenance of political and economic institutions. In new institutional economics and other fields focusing on public policy, economists seek to judge when and whether governmental intervention (such as taxes, welfare, and government regulation) can result in potential gains in efficiency. According to Gregory Mankiw, a New Keynesian economist, governmental intervention can improve on market outcomes under conditions of "market failure," or situations in which the market on its own does not allocate resources efficiently. Market failure occurs when an externality is present and a market either underproduces a product with a positive externality, or overproduces a product that generates a negative externality. Air pollution, for instance, is a negative externality that cannot be incorporated into markets as the world's air is not owned and then sold for use to polluters. So, too much pollution could be emitted and people not involved in the production pay the cost of the pollution instead of the firm that initially emitted the air pollution. Critics of market failure theory, like Ronald Coase, Harold Demsetz, and James M. Buchanan argue that government programs and policies also fall short of absolute perfection. In this view, market failures are often small, and government failures are sometimes large. It is therefore the case that imperfect markets are often better than imperfect governmental alternatives. While all nations currently have some kind of market regulations, the desirable degree of regulation is disputed.

The relationship between democracy and capitalism is a contentious area in theory and popular political movements. The extension of universal adult male suffrage in 19th century Britain occurred along with the development of industrial capitalism, and democracy became widespread at the same time as capitalism. Research on the democratic peace theory further indicates that capitalist democracies rarely make war with one another and have little internal violence. However critics of the democratic peace theory note that democratic capitalist states may fight infrequently or never with other democratic capitalist states because of political similarity or political stability rather than because they are democratic (or capitalist).

Authoritarian regimes have been able to manage economic growth without making concessions to greater political freedom.

Racialization

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racialization 

In sociology, racialization or ethnicization is a political process of ascribing ethnic or racial identities to a relationship, social practice, or group that did not identify itself as such. Racialization or ethnicization often arises out of the interaction of a group with a group that it dominates and ascribes a racial identity for the purpose of distinguishing dominant group's identity as comparatively different from the nondominant group, and for continuing/reproducing domination and social exclusion. Over time, the racialized and ethnicized group develop the society enforced construct (internalized oppression) that races are real, different and unequal in ways that matter to economic, political and social life, an unhealthy norm that strips them from their dignity of a full humanity. This systemic tool in varying flexibility have been commonly used throughout the history of imperialism, nationalism, racial and ethnic hierarchies.

History

Eugène Delacroix, Women of Algiers in their Apartment, 1834, Oil on canvas, 180 × 229cm Louvre

Racial categories have historically been used as a way to enable an oppressive figure or group to discriminate against other groups or individuals which were seen as different from that of the oppressor. In nineteenth and early twentieth century Europe, artwork was a common form of racialization which targeted countries in the Middle East and Asia. The artwork, predominantly paintings, were portrayed in order to instill prejudice in the Western populations through sexualizing and manipulating images. One of the most prominent examples of Orientalist work in art is a piece by Eugène Delacroix titled Women of Algiers in their Apartment. Dating back to 1834, it portrays three women resting in a harem in exotic clothing while an African woman is dressed in plain clothing, depicting her role as a servant. Fine textiles, hookahs, and other paraphernalia adorn the room, which represents a European fantasy of an exotic scene. Attempts to portray these cultures as strange, foreign and exotic through Orientalism led to intolerance towards the Arab and Asian communities in Europe and the United States. Others argue that Delacroix, who travelled in North Africa sketching extensively, was depicting a realistic scene of the era based on his first-hand knowledge and experience. In such an interpretation the clothing, for example, is consistent with the times, as Arab North Africans dressed differently from Europeans, and kept black slaves who would not have been treated as equals.

Many North African and Middle Eastern countries, such as Tunisia, Algeria, and Syria, were colonized by European nations. These countries were not fully independent until the mid-twentieth century, a time in which globalization began to rise both economically and politically. With the rise of globalization came an expanding cultural influence and an increase in immigration to Western nations. New cultures, ethnic groups, and ideals have contributed to the process of racialization which is familiar in modern society. Racialization is a long process, and members of each group are categorized based on their perceived differences relative to those who are considered elite within a society. Another major contributor to the process of racialization is the media. News outlets, films, television shows, and other forms of public communication portray racial groups to often reflect stereotypes which contribute to the public’s opinion of certain cultural groups. These opinions and stereotypes may become institutionalized and racial groups must then encounter the institutionalized racism that is a result. Dominant groups in a society tend to racialize others because new cultural and racial groups are seen as threatening to their society. These threats instill fear into the dominant members of the society due to the possibility of downward mobility or perceived loss of national security. While threats can be imagined or real, they are most prominent when there is some other issue in the nation, such as a poorly performing economy. The effects of racialization are often more harmful to racial and ethnic groups than the actual racialization itself, a few examples being systemic and structural racism. Further significant research in this area is aiding politicians and policy makers in creating a more equal society that embraces and supports different racial and ethnic groups.

Racialized incorporation

The process of racialization can affect newly arriving immigrants as well as their second-generation children in the United States. The concept of racialized incorporation bridges the idea of assimilation with critical race studies in general and the concept of racialization in particular.^[9] While immigrants may possess specific ethnic and cultural identities associated with their countries of origin, once they arrive in the U.S., they are incorporated into a society that is largely organized along the lines of race. The racial hierarchy in the United States is pervasive in many aspects of life including housing, education, and employment. The racialized incorporation perspective argues that regardless of the ethnic and cultural differences across immigrant groups, racial identification is the ultimate and primary principle of social organization in the United States. So an immigrant from Sweden and his/her U.S. born second-generation children are likely to be incorporated into the White mainstream, while an immigrant from Ghana and his/her U.S. born second-generation children are likely to be incorporated into the Black community. Because the lived experiences of Whites and Blacks in U.S. society diverge in most areas of social life, the racialized category that immigrants and their children are incorporated into will largely determine their experiences and opportunities in the United States. The concept of racialized incorporation is relatively new and was recently applied in a study of self-employment in the United States.

Racialization of religion

An ongoing scholarly debate covers the racialization of religious communities. Adherents of Judaism, Islam, and Sikhism can be racialized when they are portrayed as possessing certain physical characteristics, despite the fact that many individual adherents of those religions do not possess any of those physical characteristics. This racialization extends to the descendants of the adherents, even though those descendants may often convert away from the active observance of the religion of their forebearers but they may also retain the lingering cultural aspects of that religion for familial and communal purposes.

The most immediate effect of the racialization of religion is said to be the internalization of the racialization by the descendants of a religion's adherents, whereby the descendants of a religion's adherents accept and internalize their religiously-influenced familial culture as an ethnoracial distinction and identity. A positive application of racialization is nationalism, whereby the created race seeks to assert cultural and national aspirations which are compatible and accommodating to other groups. A negative application of racialization is racism and discrimination, whereby those who are racialized are barred from participating in any public or private functions of society due to the negative "attributes" of the race which has been assigned to them.

Racialization of labor

The racialization of labor is said to involve the segregation and appointment of workers based on perceived ethnic differences. This racialization of labor is said to produce a hierarchical arrangement which limits employee agency and mobility based on their race. The process of racialization is reinforced through presupposed, stereotypical qualities which are imposed upon the racialized person by the racializer. Racialization is then normalized by the promotion of "colorblindness" through the use of "soft" language which avoids highlighting ethnic differences.

The racialization of labor specially limits upward mobility of a person based on race. Dominant racialized labor groups, mainly White/European workers, are generally presented more privileges than subordinate labor groups, mainly Black or Hispanic workers. The subordinate labor groups face the denial of basic citizenship rights, more exploitation, and inferior working conditions. Furthermore, they are less likely to move up in rank within a company or advance to a higher job position.

Members of the dominant race (e.g., whites) benefit from the privileges of whiteness, whether these are material or psychological, and are maintained and reproduced within social systems As a result, immigrant workers, especially Latino and Black workers, experience poor working conditions in day labor work. Day laborers experience "race" and this has impacted their integration into the labor market.

Furthermore, research by Edna Bonacich, Sabrina Alimahomed Jake B. Wilson, 2008 regarding the effects of race and criminal background on employment indicates that Black men need to work more than twice as hard as white men to secure the same job. Being Black in America today is about the same as having a felony conviction in terms of one’s chances of finding a job. Specifically, “the combination of minority status and criminal background appears to intensify employers’ negative reactions, leaving few employment prospects for black ex-offenders (200 applications resulted in only 10 callbacks)”. Additionally, According to Chetty, Hendren, Kline, and Saez, the effect of race segregation impacts the labor market, saying “upward income mobility is significantly lower in areas with larger African American Populations”. Race segregation may lead to divergent economic outcomes due to the fact that areas with larger black population tend to be more segregated by income and race and have adverse effects.

Lastly, the decline of labor unions has negatively affected racialization of labor. Those who would have benefited from union membership no longer will as labor unions continue to diminish. In Jake Rosenfeld’s article, Little Labor: How Union Decline Is Changing the American Landscape, he describes people who can no longer benefit from labor unions: “an immigrant employee who once would have been organized, a female African-American worker no longer able to rely on a union wage to reduce pay gaps with her white counterpart, or a less-educated worker lacking the training, resources, and knowledge to participate in politics”.

Racialization in education

Racialization in an educational setting is apparent based on the teacher and the background they come from. The teacher’s race along with their views that came along through socialization growing up can affect the way the students portray themselves in a classroom setting. It also has to do with the number of people who come from the same background because the majority of a population will dictate which group is being racialized. An example of students being racialized by their teachers and institutions can be seen through the way high schools teach in America today. Schools tend to teach classes that focus on a more Anglo-Saxon point of view without incorporating any diverse classes that would accommodate for the population of students that come from diverse backgrounds like Latinos, African, and Native Americans.

For example, Desert View High School in Arizona has a great population of Native American students who wish to learn more about their cultural background and where they came from. However, author Timothy J. San Pedro who wrote “Truth, in the End, Is Different From What We Have Been Taught: Re-Centering Indigenous Knowledges in Public Schooling Spaces” found that the school mainly focuses on the “Americanized” perspective of history that does not tell the whole story on what came to be in the Native American population. For example, San Pedro describes how the Desert View High School has posters of history classes that glorify “explorers” that were really conquerors of people who initially settled in areas that were “discovered” (San Pedro 2016). That idea of limiting the Native American population from learning about themselves forces them to assimilate to the culture where they are being racialized in an educational setting. They are forced to conform and be put under a racial category among their American teachers and learn things that do not pertain to their culture or social identity.

Racialization and gender

Through the process of racialization, social groups are distinguished and subjected to different treatment on the basis of supposedly biological, phenotypic, cultural, and gender characteristics. Racialization can affect anyone in any race. Therefore, racialization and gender can often intersect (Elabor-Idemudia. 1999). Just as racism and gender intersect or discrimination and gender intersect it is easy for racialization to overlap with gender. During racialization, certain racial categories are created and distinctive and stereotypical characteristics are attributed to that specific category. Within these categories, there can also be subcategories of racialization such as Euro American men or African American women. Often immigrants who migrate to the U.S. are affected by racialization if they are not white and fit more into a minority group. For example, African American women may often be stereotyped as uneducated, loud, or improper. Through racialization, if a woman of African descent immigrated to the U.S people will attribute those same stereotypes to her because through a racial lens, she fits the African American woman category. Therefore, those same stereotypes will be applied to her as well. Racialization combined with gender can also be seen through the actions of the person that is racializing the other.

Racialization and incarceration

Coming to fruition in the 1980s, the United States began to enact extensive legal reforms that worked to create a more punitive society. These reforms include mandatory minimum sentences, trying juveniles as adults, three strikes and you’re out laws, truth in sentencing practices, and many other policies and practices which served to increase reliance on imprisonment in response to crime. As a result, U.S. society has been pegged with a “mass incarceration” structure. A recent report has concluded that nearly 1 in 100 U.S. adults are incarcerated and nearly 7.3 million Americans are either in prison or under parole. Although these reforms were intended to apply to all citizens regardless of race, this has not proven to be the reality. Statistically, these punitive reforms have disproportionately impacted African Americans. Specifically, those who are uneducated and/or live in low-income areas. Some have renamed the emergence of the “mass incarceration” society as rather the emergence of “racialized mass incarceration.” The numbers are much more alarming for African Americans behind bars; nearly 1 in 15 African Americans are incarcerated and more narrowly 1 in 9 African American men are incarcerated. These numbers point to an obvious discrimination towards blacks in the U.S. criminal justice system.

One clear reason for these disproportionate imprisonment rate can be tied to poverty and social structures. In particular, a pronounced weak attachment to labor among many working-age adults in black communities has fostered a common experience of poverty and economic hardship. Ultimately this has served to create social spaces where bonds of family and community begin to fray and fall apart. These types of environments have created higher levels of juvenile crime, drug use, and even violent and gang-oriented crimes. Although white Americans too have a history of living in poverty, the average national rate of family disruption and poverty among blacks is two to four times higher than among whites. Furthermore, another reason for the United States racialized prison system can be seen with the war on drugs. Despite similar rates of drug use among blacks and whites, blacks make up 50% of those incarcerated for drug use compared to only 26% of whites.

While the two examples above point to definite explanations for the United States racialized prison system, ultimately the most salient explanation for disproportionate imprisonment rates is public opinion and prejudice. Social stereotypes and stigmas have created assumptions about African Americans that make them more susceptible to arrest and imprisonment. These latter factors are often influenced by society’s outlook on the prison system. Most educated middle- or upper-class individuals are for things such as the death penalty, minimum sentences, and trying juveniles as adults, which combined with social stigmas make blacks unfairly disadvantaged in the realm of criminal justice. For example, in recent times, these effects can be seen in an increase in police brutality towards minorities. Statistically, it is 2.5 times more likely for blacks to be killed than whites.

Anti-miscegenation laws

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-miscegenation_laws

Anti-miscegenation laws or miscegenation laws are laws that enforce racial segregation at the level of marriage and intimate relationships by criminalizing interracial marriage and sometimes also sex between members of different races.

In the United States, interracial marriage, cohabitation and sex have been termed "miscegenation" since the term was coined in 1863. Contemporary usage of the term is infrequent, except to refer to historical laws banning the practice. Anti-miscegenation laws were first introduced in North America from the late seventeenth century onwards by several of the Thirteen Colonies, and subsequently, by many U.S. states and U.S. territories and remained in force in many US states until 1967. After the Second World War, an increasing number of states repealed their anti-miscegenation laws. In 1967, in landmark case Loving v. Virginia, the remaining anti-miscegenation laws were held to be unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren.

Anti-miscegenation laws were also enforced in Nazi Germany as part of the Nuremberg Laws which were passed in 1935, and in South Africa as part of the system of apartheid which was passed in 1948.

United States

Main article: Anti-miscegenation laws in the United States

 

Although the ban on interracial marriage ended in California in 1948, entertainer Sammy Davis Jr. faced a backlash for his involvement with a white woman in 1957.

The first ever anti-miscegenation law was passed by the Maryland General Assembly in 1691, criminalizing interracial marriage. In a speech in Charleston, Illinois, in 1858, Abraham Lincoln stated, "I am not, nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people". By the late 1800s, 38 US states had anti-miscegenation statutes. By 1924, the ban on interracial marriage was still in force in 29 states. While interracial marriage had been legal in California since 1948, in 1957 actor Sammy Davis Jr. faced a backlash for his relationship with a white woman, actress Kim Novak. In 1958, Davis briefly married a black woman, actress and dancer Loray White, to protect himself from mob violence.

In 1958, officers in Virginia entered the home of Richard and Mildred Loving and dragged them out of bed for living together as an interracial couple, on the basis that "any white person intermarry with a colored person"— or vice versa—each party "shall be guilty of a felony" and face prison terms of five years. In 1967 the law was ruled unconstitutional (via the 14th Amendment adopted in 1868) by the U.S. Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia.

South Africa

Early prohibitions on interracial marriages date back to the rule of the Dutch East India Company when High Commissioner Van Rheede prohibited marriages between European settlers and heelslag or full-blooded slave women (that is, of pure Asian or African origin) in 1685. The ban was never enforced.

In 1905, German South West Africa banned the "Rassenmischehe" (racial mixed marriage). These bans had no legal basis in German citizenship laws (issued in 1870 and 1913) and the "decrees [were] issued by either a colonial governor or the colonial secretary", they were "not laws that had received the approval of the Reichstag". Similar such laws were also adopted in the German colonies of German East Africa (1906) and German Samoa (1912).

In 1927, the Pact coalition government passed a law prohibiting marriages between whites and blacks (though not between whites and "coloured" people). An attempt was made to extend this ban in 1936 to marriages between whites and coloureds when a bill was introduced in parliament, but a commission of inquiry recommended against it.

South Africa's Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, passed in 1949 under Apartheid, forbade marriages between whites and anyone deemed to be non-whites. The Population Registration Act (No. 30) of 1950 provided the basis for separating the population of South Africa into different races. Under the terms of this act, all residents of South Africa were to be classified as white, coloured, or native (later called Bantu) people. Indians were included under the category "Asian" in 1959. Also in 1950, the Immorality Act was passed, which criminalized all sexual relations between whites and non-whites. The Immorality Act of 1950 extended an earlier ban on sexual relations between whites and blacks (the Immorality Act [No. 5] of 1927) to a ban on sexual relations between whites and any non-whites. Both Acts were repealed in 1985 as part of the reforms carried out during the tenure of P. W. Botha.

Australia

In the late 18th century and early 19th century, laws called Half-Caste Acts which included anti-interracial marriage clauses were enacted in some of the Australian states, including the Northern Territory, Western Australia and Queensland.  From the start there was a widespread ideology in lawmaking of separating races due to inferiority. However, by the mid-1930s there was a shift in which they used the anti miscegenation clauses to control who specifically Aboriginal peoples can marry in order to promote “assimilation” but this did not change their views on their inferiority, just merely to improve them by “whitening”.  Surprisingly, at the beginning when these acts were passed the biggest fear was not interracial aboriginal and white intermarriage, but aboriginal and Asian intermarriage, a reflection on Australia’s extreme stance during the yellow peril era, but after the white Australia Policy which banned all Asian immigration from 1901 on, these fears subsided and their attention was put on aboriginal and white interracial marriages and sexual behavior.

Middle East

Egypt

In Egypt, based on a law No. 26 of 1975, the government reviews all marriages between Egyptian men and Israeli women to decide on an individual basis whether to strip the men of their Egyptian citizenship. The decision is made by the Ministry of Interior. The cabinet takes into consideration whether the Israeli woman is an Arab or a Jew.

Egyptian law says citizenship can only be revoked if the citizen is proven to be spying on his country, and marrying an Israeli is considered an act of spying or a risk to national security.

Israel

In 2022, Israel's Knesset passed a law barring Palestinians who marry Israeli citizens from receiving citizenship or permanent residency, effectively denying spouses the right to live together in Israel. According to Reuters, proponents of the law stated it would ensure Israel's security and maintain its "Jewish character". Similar temporary restrictions had been enacted during the Second Intifada of 2003 and renewed on an annual basis before lapsing in 2021.

Saudi Arabia

Saudi women are prohibited from marrying men other than Arab citizens of the Gulf Cooperation Council countries without special dispensation from the King. Under Sharia law, Saudi women, as Muslims, are not permitted under any circumstances to marry non-Muslim men.

Saudi men require a government permit to marry a foreign woman and must be at least 25 years old to apply for such a permit. They may obtain a permit to take a foreign woman as a second wife only if their first wife has cancer, is disabled, or is unable to bear children. Saudi men are forbidden to marry women from Bangladesh, Myanmar, Chad, and Pakistan. Supposedly, this decision was predicated on the population of Saudi residents from these countries collectively surpassing 500,000.

Asia

China

Laws and policies which discouraged miscegenation were issued in various dynasties, including an 836 AD decree forbidding Chinese people to have relations with other peoples such as Iranians, Arabs, Indians, Malays, Sumatrans, and so on.

India

While there are no specific provisions in the Constitution of India regarding the freedom to marry someone from a different race, Article 21 of the Constitution, which is a Fundamental Right, is widely regarded as to provide that freedom as it comes under "personal liberty", which the Constitution guarantees to protect.

After the events of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, several anti-miscegenation laws were passed by the British colonial government.

North Korea

After the deterioration of relations between North Korea and the Soviet Union in the 1960s, North Korea began to enact practices such as forcing its male citizens who had married Eastern European and African women to divorce.

Additionally, the North Korean government has been accused of performing forced abortions and infanticides on repatriated defectors to "prevent the survival of half-Chinese babies".

Europe

Nazi Germany

The U.S. was the global leader in codified racism, and its race laws fascinated the Nazis. The National Socialist Handbook for Law and Legislation of 1934–35, edited by the lawyer Hans Frank, contains a pivotal essay by Herbert Kier on the recommendations for race legislation which devoted a quarter of its pages to U.S. legislation—from segregation, race based citizenship, immigration regulations, and anti-miscegenation. The Nazis enacted miscegenation statutes which discriminated against Jews, Roma and Sinti ("Gypsies"), and Black people. The Nazis considered the Jews to be a race supposedly bound by close genetic (blood) ties to form a unit which one could neither join nor secede from, rather than a religious group of people. The influence of Jews had been declared to have detrimental impact on Germany, in order to justify the discrimination and persecutions of Jews. To be spared, one had to prove one's Aryan descent, normally by obtaining an Aryan certificate.

Jews, Romani and Black people

Although Nazi doctrine stressed the importance of physiognomy and genes in determining race, in practice race was determined only through the religions followed by each individual's ancestors. Individuals were considered non-'Aryan' (i.e. Jewish) if at least three of four of their grandparents had been enrolled as members of a Jewish congregation; it did not matter if those grandparents had been born to a Jewish mother or had converted to Judaism. The actual religious beliefs of the individual himself or herself were also immaterial, as was the individual's status under Halachic law.

1935 chart shows racial classifications under the Nuremberg Laws and the definitions of a German, a Mischlinge and a Jew.

An anti-miscegenation law was enacted by the Nazi government in September 1935 as part of the Nuremberg Laws. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour ('Gesetz zum Schutze des deutschen Blutes und der deutschen Ehre'), enacted on 15 September 1935, forbade sexual relations and marriages between Germans classified as so-called 'Aryans' and Germans classified as Jews. This applied also to marriages concluded in Germany with only one spouse of German citizenship. On 26 November 1935, the law was extended to include, "Gypsies, Negroes or their bastard offspring". Such extramarital intercourse was marked as Rassenschande ("race defilement") and could be punished by imprisonment — later usually followed by the deportation to a concentration camp, often entailing the inmate's death. Germans of African and other non-European descent were classified following their own origin or the origin of their parents. Sinti and Roma ("Gypsies") were mostly categorised following police records, e.g. mentioning them or their forefathers as Gypsies, when having been met by the police as travelling peddlers.

The existing 20,454 (as of 1939) marriages between persons racially regarded as so-called 'Aryans' and non-Aryans — called mixed marriages (German: Mischehe) — would continue. However, the government eased the conditions for the divorce of mixed marriages. In the beginning the Nazi authorities hoped to make the 'Aryan' partner get a divorce from their non-Aryan-classified spouses, by granting easy legal divorce procedures and opportunities for the 'Aryan' spouse to withhold most of the common property after a divorce. Those who stuck to their spouse would suffer discriminations like dismissal from public employment, exclusion from civic society organisations, etc.

Any children — whenever born — within a mixed marriage, as well as children from extramarital mixed relationships born until 31 July 1936, were discriminated against as Mischlinge. However, children later born to mixed parents, not yet married at passing the Nuremberg Laws, were to be discriminated against as Geltungsjuden, regardless if the parents had meanwhile married abroad or remained unmarried. Any children who were enrolled in a Jewish congregation were also subject to discrimination as Geltungsjuden.

According to the Nazi family value attitude, the husband was regarded the head of a family. Thus people living in a mixed marriage were treated differently according to the sex of the 'Aryan' spouse and according to the religious affiliation of the children, their being or not being enrolled with a Jewish congregation. Nazi-termed mixed marriages were often not interfaith marriages, because in many cases the classification of one spouse as non-Aryan was only due to her or his grandparents being enrolled with a Jewish congregation or else classified as non-Aryan. In many cases both spouses had a common faith, either because the parents had already converted or because at marrying one spouse converted to the religion of the second (marital conversion). Traditionally the wife used to be the convert. However, in urban areas and after 1900, actual interfaith marriages occurred more often, with interfaith marriages legally allowed in some states of the German Confederation since 1847, and generally since 1875, when civil marriage became an obligatory prerequisite for any religious marriage ceremony throughout the united Germany.

Most mixed marriages occurred with one spouse being considered as non-Aryan, due to his or her Jewish descent. Many special regulations were developed for such couples. A differentiation of privileged and other mixed marriages emerged on 28 December 1938, when Hermann Göring discretionarily ordered this in a letter to the Reich's Ministry of the Interior. The "Gesetz über die Mietverhältnisse mit Juden" (English: Law on Tenancies with Jews) of 30 April 1939, allowing proprietors to unconditionally cancel tenancy contracts with Germans classified as Jews, thus forcing them to move into houses reserved for them, for the first time enacted Göring's creation. The law defined privileged mixed marriages and exempted them from the act.

The legal definitions decreed that the marriage of a Gentile husband and his wife, being a Jewess or being classified as a Jewess due to her descent, was generally considered to be a privileged mixed marriage, unless they had children who were enrolled in a Jewish congregation. Then the husband was obviously not the dominant part in the family and the wife had to wear the yellow badge and the children as well, who were thus discriminated against as Geltungsjuden. Without children, or with children not enrolled with a Jewish congregation, the Jewish-classified wife was spared from wearing the yellow badge (else compulsory for Germans classified as Jews as of 1 September 1941).

In the opposite case, when the wife was classified as a so-called 'Aryan' and the husband as a Jew, the husband had to wear the yellow badge, if they had no children or children enrolled with a Jewish congregation. In case they had common children not enrolled in a Jewish congregation (irreligionist, Christian etc.) they were discriminated as Mischlinge and their father was spared from wearing the yellow badge.

Since there was no elaborate regulation, the practice of exempting privileged mixed marriages from anti-Semitic invidiousnesses varied amongst Greater Germany's different Reichsgaue. However, all discriminations enacted until 28 December 1938, remained valid without exemptions for privileged mixed marriages. In the Reichsgau Hamburg, for example, Jewish-classified spouses living in privileged mixed marriages received equal food rations like Aryan-classified Germans. In many other Reichsgaue they received shortened rations. In some Reichsgaue in 1942 and 1943, privileged mixed couples, and their minor children whose father was classified as a Jew, were forced to move into houses reserved for Jews only; this effectively made a privileged mixed marriage one where the husband was the one classified as so-called 'Aryan'.

The inconsistent application of privileged mixed marriages led to different compulsions to forced labour in 1940: Sometimes it was ordered for all Jewish-classified spouses, sometimes for Jewish-classified husbands, sometimes exempting Jewish-classified wives taking care of minor children. No document or law indicated the exemption of a mixed marriage from some persecutions and especially of its Jewish-classified spouse. Thus if arrested, non-arrested relatives or friends had to prove their exemption status, hopefully fast enough to rescue the arrested from any deportation.

Systematic deportations of Jewish Germans and Gentile Germans of Jewish descent started on 18 October 1941. German Jews and German Gentiles of Jewish descent living in mixed marriage were in fact mostly spared from deportation. In case a mixed marriage ended by death of the 'Aryan' spouse or divorce, the Jewish-classified spouse residing within Germany was usually deported soon after, unless the couple still had minor children not counting as Geltungsjuden.

In March 1943, an attempt to deport the Berlin-based Jews and Gentiles of Jewish descent living in non-privileged mixed marriages, failed due to public protest by their relatives-in-law of 'Aryan kinship' (see Rosenstrasse protest). Also, the Aryan-classified husbands and Mischling-classified children (starting at the age of 16) from mixed marriages were taken by the Organisation Todt for forced labour, starting in autumn 1944.

A last attempt, undertaken in February/March 1945 ended, because the extermination camps already were liberated. However, 2,600 from all areas of the Reich, not yet captured by the Allies, were deported to Theresienstadt, of whom most survived the last months until their liberation.

With the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945 the laws banning mixed marriages were lifted again. Marriage dates could be backdated, if so desired, for couples who lived together unmarried during the Nazi era due to the legal restrictions, upon marrying after the war. Even if one spouse was already dead, the marriage could be retroactively recognised, in order to legitimise any children and enable them or the surviving spouse to inherit from their late father or partner, respectively. In the West German Federal Republic of Germany 1,823 couples applied for recognition (until 1963), which was granted in 1,255 cases.

France

In 1723, 1724 and 1774 several administrative acts forbade interracial marriages, mainly in colonies, although it is not clear if these acts were lawful. On 2 May 1746, the Parlement de Paris validated an interracial marriage.

Under King Louis XVI, the order of the Conseil du Roi of 5 April 1778, signed by Antoine de Sartine, forbade "whites of either sex to contract marriage with blacks, mulattos or other people of color" in the Kingdom, as the number of blacks had increased so much in France, mostly in the capital. Nevertheless, it was an interracial marriage prohibition, not an interracial sex prohibition. Moreover, it was an administrative act, not a law. There was never any racial law about marriage in France, with the exception of French Louisiana. But some restricted rules were applied about heritage and nobility. In any case, nobles needed the King's authorization for their marriage.

On 20 September 1792, all restrictions regarding interracial marriage were repealed by the Revolutionary government. On 8 January 1803, a Napoleonic governmental circular forbade marriages between white males and black women, or black men and white women, although the 1804 Napoleonic code did not mention anything specific about interracial marriage. In 1806, a French court validated an interracial marriage. In 1818, the highest French court (cour de cassation) validated a marriage contracted in New York between a white man and a colored woman. All administrative prohibitions were canceled by a law in 1833.

Italy

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the late 5th century, the Ostrogoths under the Theodoric the Great established the Ostrogothic Kingdom at Ravenna, ruling Italy as a dominant minority. In order to prevent the Romanization of his people, Theodoric forbade intermarriage between Goths and Romans. Theodoric's effort to separate Goths and Romans was however not successful, as intermarriages and assimilation were common. The Rugii, a Germanic tribe which supported Theodoric while preserving its independence within the Ostrogothic Kingdom, avoided intermarriage with Goths and other tribes in order to preserve the purity of their race.

As part of the Charter of Race in Fascist Italy, laws prohibiting marriage between Italians and non-European races were passed in Italy and its foreign colonies. A subsequent Grand Council's resolution reiterated the prohibition of marriage between Italians and people belonging to Semitic, Hamitic, African and other non-European (or "non-Aryan") races; it established also a ban on marriage between public servants and foreigners. An analogous legislation was adopted in 1942 in the fascist Republic of San Marino.

Pre-Islamic Iberia

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the late 5th century, the Visigoths established the Visigothic Kingdom in Iberia, ruling the peninsula as a dominant minority. The Visigoths were subjected to their own legal code, and were forbidden from intermarrying with indigenous Iberians. This law was abolished in the end of the 6th century however, and by that time so many intermarriages had occurred that any reality of a biologically-linked Visigothic identity were "visibly crumbling", in the words of Gavin Langmuir. The Visigothic nobles and princes married Hispano-Romans and converted to Nicean Christianity, and the connection between Visigoths, their religion and royal authority became obscure.

Jim Crow laws

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws

Violence in the 1906 Atlanta race riot

The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws enforcing racial segregation in the Southern United States. Other areas of the United States were affected by formal and informal policies of segregation as well, but many states outside the South had adopted laws, beginning in the late 19th century, banning discrimination in public accommodations and voting. Southern laws were enacted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by white Southern Democrat-dominated state legislatures to disenfranchise and remove political and economic gains made by African Americans during the Reconstruction era. Jim Crow laws were enforced until 1965.

In practice, Jim Crow laws mandated racial segregation in all public facilities in the states of the former Confederate States of America and in some others, beginning in the 1870s. Jim Crow laws were upheld in 1896 in the case of Plessy vs. Ferguson, in which the Supreme Court laid out its "separate but equal" legal doctrine concerning facilities for African Americans. Moreover, public education had essentially been segregated since its establishment in most of the South after the Civil War in 1861–1865.

Although in theory, the "equal" segregation doctrine was extended to public facilities and transportation too, facilities for African Americans were consistently inferior and underfunded compared to facilities for white Americans; sometimes, there were no facilities for the black community at all. Far from equality, as a body of law, Jim Crow institutionalized economic, educational, political and social disadvantages and second class citizenship for most African Americans living in the United States. After the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded in 1909, it became involved in a sustained public protest and campaigns against the Jim Crow laws, and the so-called "separate but equal" doctrine.

In 1954, segregation of public schools (state-sponsored) was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren in the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education. In some states, it took many years to implement this decision, while the Warren Court continued to rule against Jim Crow legislation in other cases such as Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States (1964). In general, the remaining Jim Crow laws were overruled by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Etymology

The earliest known use of the phrase "Jim Crow law" can be dated to 1884 in a newspaper article summarizing congressional debate. The term appears in 1892 in the title of a New York Times article about Louisiana requiring segregated railroad cars. The origin of the phrase "Jim Crow" has often been attributed to "Jump Jim Crow", a song-and-dance caricature of black people performed by white actor Thomas D. Rice in blackface, first performed in 1828. As a result of Rice's fame, Jim Crow had become by 1838 a pejorative expression meaning "Negro". When southern legislatures passed laws of racial segregation directed against African Americans at the end of the 19th century, these statutes became known as Jim Crow laws.

Origins

Main article: Disfranchisement after the Reconstruction era

In January 1865, an amendment to the Constitution abolishing slavery in the United States was proposed by Congress and ratified as the Thirteenth Amendment on December 18, 1865.

Cover of an early edition of "Jump Jim Crow" sheet music (c. 1832)

 

Freedmen voting in New Orleans, 1867

During the Reconstruction era of 1865–1877, federal laws provided civil rights protections in the U.S. South for freedmen, African Americans who were former slaves, and the minority of black people who had been free before the war. In the 1870s, Democrats gradually regained power in the Southern legislatures as violent insurgent paramilitary groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, White League, and Red Shirts disrupted Republican organizing, ran Republican officeholders out of town, and lynched Black voters as an intimidation tactic to suppress the Black vote. Extensive voter fraud was also used. In one instance, an outright coup or insurrection in coastal North Carolina led to the violent removal of democratically elected Republican party executive and representative officials, who were either hunted down or hounded out. Gubernatorial elections were close and had been disputed in Louisiana for years, with increasing violence against black Americans during campaigns from 1868 onward.

The Compromise of 1877 to gain Southern support in the presidential election (a corrupt bargain) resulted in the government withdrawing the last of the federal troops from the South. White Democrats had regained political power in every Southern state. These Southern, white, "Redeemer" governments legislated Jim Crow laws, officially segregating the country's population. Jim Crow laws were a manifestation of authoritarian rule specifically directed at one racial group.

Blacks were still elected to local offices throughout the 1880s in local areas with large black populations, but their voting was suppressed for state and national elections. States passed laws to make voter registration and electoral rules more restrictive, with the result that political participation by most black people and many poor white people began to decrease. Between 1890 and 1910, ten of the eleven former Confederate states, beginning with Mississippi, passed new constitutions or amendments that effectively disenfranchised most black people and tens of thousands of poor white people through a combination of poll taxes, literacy and comprehension tests, and residency and record-keeping requirements. Grandfather clauses temporarily permitted some illiterate white people to vote but gave no relief to most black people.

Voter turnout dropped dramatically through the South as a result of these measures. In Louisiana, by 1900, black voters were reduced to 5,320 on the rolls, although they comprised the majority of the state's population. By 1910, only 730 black people were registered, less than 0.5% of eligible black men. "In 27 of the state's 60 parishes, not a single black voter was registered any longer; in 9 more parishes, only one black voter was." The cumulative effect in North Carolina meant that black voters were completely eliminated from voter rolls during the period from 1896 to 1904. The growth of their thriving middle class was slowed. In North Carolina and other Southern states, black people suffered from being made invisible in the political system: "[W]ithin a decade of disfranchisement, the white supremacy campaign had erased the image of the black middle class from the minds of white North Carolinians." In Alabama, tens of thousands of poor whites were also disenfranchised, although initially legislators had promised them they would not be affected adversely by the new restrictions.

Those who could not vote were not eligible to serve on juries and could not run for local offices. They effectively disappeared from political life, as they could not influence the state legislatures, and their interests were overlooked. While public schools had been established by Reconstruction legislatures for the first time in most Southern states, those for black children were consistently underfunded compared to schools for white children, even when considered within the strained finances of the postwar South where the decreasing price of cotton kept the agricultural economy at a low.

Like schools, public libraries for black people were underfunded, if they existed at all, and they were often stocked with secondhand books and other resources. These facilities were not introduced for African Americans in the South until the first decade of the 20th century. Throughout the Jim Crow era, libraries were only available sporadically. Prior to the 20th century, most libraries established for African Americans were school-library combinations. Many public libraries for both European-American and African-American patrons in this period were founded as the result of middle-class activism aided by matching grants from the Carnegie Foundation.

In some cases, progressive measures intended to reduce election fraud, such as the Eight Box Law in South Carolina, acted against black and white voters who were illiterate, as they could not follow the directions. While the separation of African Americans from the white general population was becoming legalized and formalized during the Progressive Era (1890s–1920s), it was also becoming customary. Even in cases in which Jim Crow laws did not expressly forbid black people from participating in sports or recreation, a segregated culture had become common.

In the Jim Crow context, the presidential election of 1912 was steeply slanted against the interests of African Americans. Most black Americans still lived in the South, where they had been effectively disfranchised, so they could not vote at all. While poll taxes and literacy requirements banned many poor or illiterate people from voting, these stipulations frequently had loopholes that exempted European Americans from meeting the requirements. In Oklahoma, for instance, anyone qualified to vote before 1866, or related to someone qualified to vote before 1866 (a kind of "grandfather clause"), was exempted from the literacy requirement; but the only men who had the franchise before that year were white or European-American. European Americans were effectively exempted from the literacy testing, whereas black Americans were effectively singled out by the law.

Woodrow Wilson was a Democrat elected from New Jersey, but he was born and raised in the South, and was the first Southern-born president of the post-Civil War period. He appointed Southerners to his Cabinet. Some quickly began to press for segregated workplaces, although the city of Washington, D.C., and federal offices had been integrated since after the Civil War. In 1913, Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo – an appointee of the President – was heard to express his opinion of black and white women working together in one government office: "I feel sure that this must go against the grain of the white women. Is there any reason why the white women should not have only white women working across from them on the machines?"

The Wilson administration introduced segregation in federal offices, despite much protest from African-American leaders and white progressive groups in the north and midwest. He appointed segregationist Southern politicians because of his own firm belief that racial segregation was in the best interest of black and European Americans alike. At the Great Reunion of 1913 at Gettysburg, Wilson addressed the crowd on July 4, the semi-centennial of Abraham Lincoln's declaration that "all men are created equal":

How complete the union has become and how dear to all of us, how unquestioned, how benign and majestic, as state after state has been added to this, our great family of free men!

In sharp contrast to Wilson, a Washington Bee editorial wondered if the "reunion" of 1913 was a reunion of those who fought for "the extinction of slavery" or a reunion of those who fought to "perpetuate slavery and who are now employing every artifice and argument known to deceit" to present emancipation as a failed venture. Historian David W. Blight observed that the "Peace Jubilee" at which Wilson presided at Gettysburg in 1913 "was a Jim Crow reunion, and white supremacy might be said to have been the silent, invisible master of ceremonies".

In Texas, several towns adopted residential segregation laws between 1910 and the 1920s. Legal strictures called for segregated water fountains and restrooms. The exclusion of African Americans also found support in the Republican lily-white movement.

Historical development

Early attempts to break Jim Crow

Sign for the "colored" waiting room at a bus station in Durham, North Carolina, May 1940

The Civil Rights Act of 1875, introduced by Charles Sumner and Benjamin F. Butler, stipulated a guarantee that everyone, regardless of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, was entitled to the same treatment in public accommodations, such as inns, public transportation, theaters, and other places of recreation. This Act had little effect in practice. An 1883 Supreme Court decision ruled that the act was unconstitutional in some respects, saying Congress was not afforded control over private persons or corporations. With white southern Democrats forming a solid voting bloc in Congress, due to having outsize power from keeping seats apportioned for the total population in the South (although hundreds of thousands had been disenfranchised), Congress did not pass another civil rights law until 1957.

In 1887, Rev. W. H. Heard lodged a complaint with the Interstate Commerce Commission against the Georgia Railroad company for discrimination, citing its provision of different cars for white and black/colored passengers. The company successfully appealed for relief on the grounds it offered "separate but equal" accommodation.

In 1890, Louisiana passed a law requiring separate accommodations for colored and white passengers on railroads. Louisiana law distinguished between "white", "black" and "colored" (that is, people of mixed European and African ancestry). The law had already specified that black people could not ride with white people, but colored people could ride with white people before 1890. A group of concerned black, colored and white citizens in New Orleans formed an association dedicated to rescinding the law. The group persuaded Homer Plessy to test it; he was a man of color who was of fair complexion and one-eighth "Negro" in ancestry.

In 1892, Plessy bought a first-class ticket from New Orleans on the East Louisiana Railway. Once he had boarded the train, he informed the train conductor of his racial lineage and took a seat in the whites-only car. He was directed to leave that car and sit instead in the "coloreds only" car. Plessy refused and was immediately arrested. The Citizens Committee of New Orleans fought the case all the way to the United States Supreme Court. They lost in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), in which the Court ruled that "separate but equal" facilities were constitutional. The finding contributed to 58 more years of legalized discrimination against black and colored people in the United States.

In 1908, Congress defeated an attempt to introduce segregated streetcars into the capital.

Racism in the United States and defenses of Jim Crow

1904 caricature of "White" and "Jim Crow" rail cars by John T. McCutcheon. Despite Jim Crow's legal pretense that the races be "separate but equal" under the law, non-whites were given inferior facilities and treatment.

White Southerners encountered problems in learning free labor management after the end of slavery, and they resented African Americans, who represented the Confederacy's Civil War defeat: "With white supremacy being challenged throughout the South, many whites sought to protect their former status by threatening African Americans who exercised their new rights." White Southerners used their power to segregate public spaces and facilities in law and reestablish social dominance over black people in the South.

One rationale for the systematic exclusion of African Americans from southern public society was that it was for their own protection. An early 20th-century scholar suggested that allowing black people to attend white schools would mean "constantly subjecting them to adverse feeling and opinion", which might lead to "a morbid race consciousness". This perspective took anti-black sentiment for granted, because bigotry was widespread in the South after slavery became a racial caste system.

Justifications for white supremacy were provided by scientific racism and negative stereotypes of African Americans. Social segregation, from housing to laws against interracial chess games, was justified as a way to prevent black men from having sex with white women and in particular the rapacious Black Buck stereotype.

World War II and post-war era

In 1944, Associate Justice Frank Murphy introduced the word "racism" into the lexicon of U.S. Supreme Court opinions in Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944). In his dissenting opinion, Murphy stated that by upholding the forced relocation of Japanese Americans during World War II, the Court was sinking into "the ugly abyss of racism". This was the first time that "racism" was used in Supreme Court opinion (Murphy used it twice in a concurring opinion in Steele v Louisville & Nashville Railway Co 323 192 (1944) issued that day). Murphy used the word in five separate opinions, but after he left the court, "racism" was not used again in an opinion for two decades. It next appeared in the landmark decision of Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967).

Numerous boycotts and demonstrations against segregation had occurred throughout the 1930s and 1940s. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had been engaged in a series of litigation cases since the early 20th century in efforts to combat laws that disenfranchised black voters across the South. Some of the early demonstrations achieved positive results, strengthening political activism, especially in the post-World War II years. Black veterans were impatient with social oppression after having fought for the United States and freedom across the world. In 1947 K. Leroy Irvis of Pittsburgh's Urban League, for instance, led a demonstration against employment discrimination by the city's department stores. It was the beginning of his own influential political career.

After World War II, people of color increasingly challenged segregation, as they believed they had more than earned the right to be treated as full citizens because of their military service and sacrifices. The civil rights movement was energized by a number of flashpoints, including the 1946 police beating and blinding of World War II veteran Isaac Woodard while he was in U.S. Army uniform. In 1948 President Harry S. Truman issued Executive Order 9981, ending racial discrimination in the armed services. That same year, Silas Herbert Hunt enrolled in the University of Arkansas, effectively starting the desegregation of education in the South.

As the civil rights movement gained momentum and used federal courts to attack Jim Crow statutes, the white-dominated governments of many of the southern states countered by passing alternative forms of resistance.

Decline and removal

Historian William Chafe has explored the defensive techniques developed inside the African-American community to avoid the worst features of Jim Crow as expressed in the legal system, unbalanced economic power, and intimidation and psychological pressure. Chafe says "protective socialization by black people themselves" was created inside the community in order to accommodate white-imposed sanctions while subtly encouraging challenges to those sanctions. Known as "walking the tightrope," such efforts at bringing about change were only slightly effective before the 1920s.

However, this did build the foundation for later generations to advance racial equality and de-segregation. Chafe argued that the places essential for change to begin were institutions, particularly black churches, which functioned as centers for community-building and discussion of politics. Additionally, some all-black communities, such as Mound Bayou, Mississippi and Ruthville, Virginia served as sources of pride and inspiration for black society as a whole. Over time, pushback and open defiance of the oppressive existing laws grew, until it reached a boiling point in the aggressive, large-scale activism of the 1950s civil rights movement.

Brown v. Board of Education

Main article: Brown v. Board of Education

 

In the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren ruled unanimously that public school segregation was unconstitutional.

The NAACP Legal Defense Committee (a group that became independent of the NAACP) – and its lawyer, Thurgood Marshall – brought the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) before the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren. In its pivotal 1954 decision, the Warren Court unanimously (9–0) overturned the 1896 Plessy decision. The Supreme Court found that legally mandated (de jure) public school segregation was unconstitutional. The decision had far-reaching social ramifications.

Integrating collegiate sports

Racial integration of all-white collegiate sports teams was high on the Southern agenda in the 1950s and 1960s. Involved were issues of equality, racism, and the alumni demand for the top players needed to win high-profile games. The Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) of flagship state universities in the Southeast took the lead. First they started to schedule integrated teams from the North. Finally, ACC schools – typically under pressure from boosters and civil rights groups – integrated their teams. With an alumni base that dominated local and state politics, society and business, the ACC schools were successful in their endeavor – as Pamela Grundy argues, they had learned how to win:

The widespread admiration that athletic ability inspired would help transform athletic fields from grounds of symbolic play to forces for social change, places where a wide range of citizens could publicly and at times effectively challenge the assumptions that cast them as unworthy of full participation in U.S. society. While athletic successes would not rid society of prejudice or stereotype – black athletes would continue to confront racial slurs...[minority star players demonstrated] the discipline, intelligence, and poise to contend for position or influence in every arena of national life.

Public arena

In 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a city bus to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama. This was not the first time this happened – for example, Parks was inspired by 15-year-old Claudette Colvin doing the same thing nine months earlier – but the Parks act of civil disobedience was chosen, symbolically, as an important catalyst in the growth of the post-1954 civil rights movement; activists built the Montgomery bus boycott around it, which lasted more than a year and resulted in desegregation of the privately run buses in the city. Civil rights protests and actions, together with legal challenges, resulted in a series of legislative and court decisions which contributed to undermining the Jim Crow system.

End of legal segregation

President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964

The decisive action ending segregation came when Congress in bipartisan fashion overcame Southern filibusters to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. A complex interaction of factors came together unexpectedly in the period 1954–1965 to make the momentous changes possible. The Supreme Court had taken the first initiative in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), declaring segregation of public schools unconstitutional. Enforcement was rapid in the North and border states, but was deliberately stopped in the South by the movement called Massive Resistance, sponsored by rural segregationists who largely controlled the state legislatures. Southern liberals, who counseled moderation, were shouted down by both sides and had limited impact. Much more significant was the civil rights movement, especially the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) headed by Martin Luther King Jr. It largely displaced the old, much more moderate NAACP in taking leadership roles. King organized massive demonstrations, that seized massive media attention in an era when network television news was an innovative and universally watched phenomenon.

SCLC, student activists and smaller local organizations staged demonstrations across the South. National attention focused on Birmingham, Alabama, where protesters deliberately provoked Bull Connor and his police forces by using young teenagers as demonstrators – and Connor arrested 900 on one day alone. The next day Connor unleashed billy clubs, police dogs, and high-pressure water hoses to disperse and punish the young demonstrators with a brutality that horrified the nation. It was very bad for business, and for the image of a modernizing progressive urban South. President John F. Kennedy, who had been calling for moderation, threatened to use federal troops to restore order in Birmingham. The result in Birmingham was compromise by which the new mayor opened the library, golf courses, and other city facilities to both races, against the backdrop of church bombings and assassinations.

In summer 1963, there were 800 demonstrations in 200 southern cities and towns, with over 100,000 participants, and 15,000 arrests. In Alabama in June 1963, Governor George Wallace escalated the crisis by defying court orders to admit the first two black students to the University of Alabama. Kennedy responded by sending Congress a comprehensive civil rights bill, and ordered Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to file federal lawsuits against segregated schools, and to deny funds for discriminatory programs. Martin Luther King launched a huge march on Washington in August 1963, bringing out 200,000 demonstrators in front of the Lincoln Memorial, at the time the largest political assembly in the nation's history. The Kennedy administration now gave full-fledged support to the civil rights movement, but powerful southern congressmen blocked any legislation.

After Kennedy was assassinated, President Lyndon B. Johnson called for immediate passage of Kennedy civil rights legislation as a memorial to the martyred president. Johnson formed a coalition with Northern Republicans that led to passage in the House, and with the help of Republican Senate leader Everett Dirksen with passage in the Senate early in 1964. For the first time in history, the southern filibuster was broken and the Senate finally passed its version on June 19 by vote of 73 to 27.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the most powerful affirmation of equal rights ever made by Congress. It guaranteed access to public accommodations such as restaurants and places of amusement, authorized the Justice Department to bring suits to desegregate facilities in schools, gave new powers to the Civil Rights Commission; and allowed federal funds to be cut off in cases of discrimination. Furthermore, racial, religious and gender discrimination was outlawed for businesses with 25 or more employees, as well as apartment houses. The South resisted until the last moment, but as soon as the new law was signed by President Johnson on July 2, 1964, it was widely accepted across the nation. There was only a scattering of diehard opposition, typified by restaurant owner Lester Maddox in Georgia.

In January 1964, President Lyndon Johnson met with civil rights leaders. On January 8, during his first State of the Union address, Johnson asked Congress to "let this session of Congress be known as the session which did more for civil rights than the last hundred sessions combined." On June 21, civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney disappeared in Neshoba County, Mississippi, where they were volunteering in the registration of African American voters as part of the Freedom Summer project. The disappearance of the three activists captured national attention and the ensuing outrage was used by Johnson and civil rights activists to build a coalition of northern and western Democrats and Republicans and push Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

On July 2, 1964, Johnson signed the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964. It invoked the Commerce Clause to outlaw discrimination in public accommodations (privately owned restaurants, hotels, and stores, and in private schools and workplaces). This use of the Commerce Clause was upheld by the Warren Court in the landmark case Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States 379 US 241 (1964).

By 1965, efforts to break the grip of state disenfranchisement by education for voter registration in southern counties had been underway for some time, but had achieved only modest success overall. In some areas of the Deep South, white resistance made these efforts almost entirely ineffectual. The murder of the three voting-rights activists in Mississippi in 1964 and the state's refusal to prosecute the murderers, along with numerous other acts of violence and terrorism against black people, had gained national attention. Finally, the unprovoked attack on March 7, 1965, by county and state troopers on peaceful Alabama marchers crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge en route from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery, persuaded the President and Congress to overcome Southern legislators' resistance to effective voting rights enforcement legislation. President Johnson issued a call for a strong voting rights law and hearings soon began on the bill that would become the Voting Rights Act.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 ended legally sanctioned state barriers to voting for all federal, state and local elections. It also provided for federal oversight and monitoring of counties with historically low minority voter turnout. Years of enforcement have been needed to overcome resistance, and additional legal challenges have been made in the courts to ensure the ability of voters to elect candidates of their choice. For instance, many cities and counties introduced at-large election of council members, which resulted in many cases of diluting minority votes and preventing election of minority-supported candidates.

In 2013, the Roberts Court, in Shelby County v. Holder, removed the requirement established by the Voting Rights Act that Southern states needed Federal approval for changes in voting policies. Several states immediately made changes in their laws restricting voting access.

Influence and aftermath

African American life

An African American man drinking at a "colored" drinking fountain in a streetcar terminal in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, 1939

The Jim Crow laws and the high rate of lynchings in the South were major factors that led to the Great Migration during the first half of the 20th century. Because opportunities were very limited in the South, African Americans moved in great numbers to cities in Northeastern, Midwestern, and Western states to seek better lives.

African American athletes faced much discrimination during the Jim Crow era with White opposition leading to their exclusion from most organized sporting competitions. The boxers Jack Johnson and Joe Louis (both of whom became world heavyweight boxing champions) and track and field athlete Jesse Owens (who won four gold medals at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin) gained prominence during the era. In baseball, a color line instituted in the 1880s had informally barred black people from playing in the major leagues, leading to the development of the Negro leagues, which featured many fine players. A major breakthrough occurred in 1947, when Jackie Robinson was hired as the first African American to play in Major League Baseball; he permanently broke the color bar. Baseball teams continued to integrate in the following years, leading to the full participation of black baseball players in the Major Leagues in the 1960s.

Interracial marriage

Main article: Anti-miscegenation laws in the United States

See also: Interracial marriage in the United States

Although sometimes counted among Jim Crow laws of the South, statutes such as anti-miscegenation laws were also passed by other states. Anti-miscegenation laws were not repealed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but were declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court (the Warren Court) in a unanimous ruling Loving v. Virginia (1967). Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in the court opinion that "the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the State."

Jury trials

The Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution grants criminal defendants the right to a trial by a jury of their peers. While federal law required that convictions could only be granted by a unanimous jury for federal crimes, states were free to set their own jury requirements. All but two states, Oregon and Louisiana, opted for unanimous juries for conviction. Oregon and Louisiana, however, allowed juries of at least 10–2 to decide a criminal conviction. Louisiana's law was amended in 2018 to require a unanimous jury for criminal convictions, effective in 2019. Prior to that amendment, the law had been seen as a remnant of Jim Crow laws, because it allowed minority voices on a jury to be marginalized. In 2020, the Supreme Court found, in Ramos v. Louisiana, that unanimous jury votes are required for criminal convictions at state levels, thereby nullifying Oregon's remaining law, and overturning previous cases in Louisiana.

Later court cases

In 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court (the Burger Court), in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, upheld desegregation busing of students to achieve integration.

Interpretation of the Constitution and its application to minority rights continues to be controversial as Court membership changes. Observers such as Ian F. Lopez believe that in the 2000s, the Supreme Court has become more protective of the status quo.

International

There is evidence that the government of Nazi Germany took inspiration from the Jim Crow laws when writing the Nuremberg Laws.

Remembrance

Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan, houses the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, an extensive collection of everyday items that promoted racial segregation or presented racial stereotypes of African Americans, for the purpose of academic research and education about their cultural influence.