- [Voiceover] So we've been talking about the system
of Jim Crow segregation
and in the last video we left off in 1876.
And in 1876 there was a contested presidential election
between a Republican candidate named Rutherford B. Hayes
and a Democratic candidate named Samuel J. Tilden.
And in this election there was one of the rare cases
where Tilden actually won the popular vote
whereas Hayes won the electoral vote.
So there's a standoff in Congress for months
over how this presidential election is going to end
and eventually they make kind of a backroom deal
known as the Compromise of 1877.
And in this compromise the Democrats and the Republicans
agree that Hayes, a Republican,
will get to be President of the United States.
In exchange the military forces
that have been occupying the South,
especially the last two states
of Louisiana and South Carolina
and have been enforcing the 14th Amendment
or the equal citizenship of African Americans in the South
they're going to leave,
they're going to go back to their barracks
and will no longer interfere
in the political system of the South.
So with the Compromise of 1877
the Republican Party which has been standing behind
the rights of African Americans,
remember the Republicans were the Party of Abraham Lincoln,
pretty much gives up as a Party on trying to ensure
the racial equality of African Americans.
Now why did they do this?
Well, I think mainly this was a question of weariness
and giving up on their part.
Remember that the Civil War ended in 1865,
now it's 12 years later in 1877
and there are still Federal troops in the South.
So imagine if you were a parent in Massachusetts
and you thought that your son
who was enlisted in the Union Army was going to come home
in 1865 and now it's 1877 and he's still in South Carolina
it seems like a long time to fight a war.
So that's one part of it.
The other part of it is that in 1873
there is an economic panic, this is an early Depression.
You know we often think of the Great Depression
as the only time the United States was stricken
with an economic downturn but before the Depression
there were about 20 year cycles of boom and bust.
So in 1873 there was an economic bust that meant
that people had less money to throw at the problem
of reconstruction in the South.
And I would say the last part of this is a combination
of racism and the new labor movement in the North.
So as whites in the North got farther and farther away
from the Civil War the animating spirit
of abolition started to fade among many Northerners.
The late 19th century was an era of increasing racialization
especially as new ethnic classes came into the United States
from Southern and Eastern Europe
and so there was a new interpretation of race
that really came to the foreground in this time period
which we call Social Darwinism
and we'll talk more about that in other videos.
But the interpretation of racial difference
and hierarchy among the races became more broadly accepted
throughout the United States not just in the South.
So in 1877 the Federal troops in the South,
that are remaining, pack their bags and go home
meaning that African Americans in the South
have no one to protect them from the Southern governments
and so within months many of these governments pass the laws
which we now call Jim Crow laws.
And these are the laws
which prevent African Americans from voting,
prevent intermarriage between whites and blacks,
and also enact all of these separations
of public accommodations
that we now associate with Jim Crow,
sitting in the back of the bus,
using a separate water fountain.
Now if it sounds like these sorts of laws
are directly in contradiction with the 14th Amendment
which says that laws cannot target a specific race,
that there's equal protection under the law
for everyone born in the United States
you're right that's exactly what these laws are.
They are a contradiction of the 14th Amendment.
And in 1896 a man named Homer Plessy was arrested
for sitting in a white train compartment.
You thought Rosa Parks was the first
but in fact it's Homer Plessy
who tries to desegregate trains.
In fact he's trying to test the constitutionality
of having segregated train compartments in 1896
and his case goes all the way to the Supreme Court
which rules that it is fine to separate the races
as long as separate accommodations are equal.
So this is the place where separate but equal comes in.
Now in theory, separate accommodations for whites and blacks
were supposed to be equal,
in reality they almost never were and in fact it was the
very separation itself that implied the inequality
and that is what the NAACP is going to argue
in the Brown versus Board of Education case in 1954
which overturns this doctrine of separate but equal.
But in-between this period of 1877 and 1954
Jim Crow laws were on the books
in all of the Southern states.
But I don't want you to come away thinking
that things were terrible in the South
and that the North was a racial utopia
even though segregation laws and violence such as lynching
to enforce segregation laws existed mainly in the South,
de facto segregation and widespread racial prejudice
also existed in the North particularly in housing
and job discrimination.
And of course, 1954,
the Brown versus Board of Education decision
didn't end segregation or end racial prejudice
in the United States, it's enforcing the end of segregation
and enforcing the end of some of these de facto forms
of segregation and racial prejudice in the North
that will be the real focus of the Civil Rights Movement.
So I think the real tragedy of the Jim Crow era
was that it didn't have to be this way, in fact,
it was just in this presidential election of 1876
that the Federal government more or less gave up
on protecting the rights of African Americans.
It's interesting to imagine what life in the South
might have been like
had the Federal government not given up.
Perhaps it would be very different, perhaps it would not
but it's hard not to mourn
the lost opportunity of reconstruction, this 12 year period
where African Americans had voting rights
and often served in public office.
Instead, the United States doomed African American citizens
in the South to another almost 100 years
of second class status in our society.