北京英文导游词200词:美国奴隶制废除的影响的材料

With the demise of the institution of slavery, it was the hope of many that blacks would quickly rise in their citizen status. However, there were several problems with this hope. The first was the bitterness the South felt about the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, and the Radical Republicans. The second was basic prejudice. For centuries, most blacks had been relegated to a sub-human status, and that feeling, even among many Northerners, was not going to go away with slavery. Once the Southern states regained control of their own governments again, following Reconstruction, the Black Codes were quickly enacted.

The 14th and 15th Amendments were actually national reactions to Black Codes enacted in the South just after the Civil War. Legally, constitutionally, blacks were equal. Many of the Black Code provisions were illegal under the new amendments, and black voters, and even legislators, gained power in the immediate aftermath. But to counter the freedoms gained, eventually new Black Codes were enacted, most of which aimed to deny blacks the vote by means that did not rely on race on their face, but which relied on race at their root. Organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan also rose, intimidating black voters from exercising their new suffrage rights. Poll taxes, literacy tests, and other tactics, both legal and extra-legal, were used to deny blacks the vote. With no voice in the government, the rate of black voters, and any sign of black legislators, quickly disappeared.

Following the Plessy v Ferguson decision in 1896, where the Supreme Court ruled that while blacks had equal right under the law, but that separation of the races was legal as long as facilities were equal, throughout the South, and elsewhere, more laws were enacted to keep blacks on one side and whites on the other. These laws, known as Jim Crow laws, affected every aspect of the lives of blacks.

The term "Jim Crow" comes from popular minstrel shows around the time of the Civil War. The Jim Crow character was a stereotypical black man. The term was picked up to describe laws which segregated whites and blacks in everyday personal life, and to describe laws aimed at denying blacks the vote. By 1910, each state that had been a part of the Confederacy had a complex and complete system of Jim Crow laws in place. This legal separation continued to be buttressed by extra-legal acts, such as widespread lynchings and other terrorist acts committed upon any one who spoke out, or, often, on random blacks for the sake of pure terror.

The unfairness of the "separate but equal" doctrine seems obvious to us today, and the effects of the Plessy case on the lives of ordinary blacks seems to be very direct and incontrovertible. But it took 60 years before the courts were ready to part with the Plessy case. In that time, numerous people were killed, millions were denied the right to vote, some blacks being born and dying without even having voted, and segregation dug its claws ever deeper into American society.

For example, a 1958 Alabama law stated that "It shall be unlawful for white and colored persons to play together ... in any game of cards, dice, dominoes, checkers, pool, billiards, softball, basketball, football, golf, track, and at swimming pools or in any athletic conference." Prejudice extended past the law into the jury box, too. According to the Jim Crow Guide, "three white youths who confessed to a Christmas Eve rape of a 17-year-old Negro girl at Decatur, Georgia, were nevertheless acquitted by the DeKalb County jury."

In the end, as prejudices were seen to be as arbitrary as they are, the tide began to turn, especially in higher legal circles. In the North, organizations like the NAACP were formed to better the lives of blacks, and in doing so, they brought more and more legal challenges to segregation. When black soldiers returned from Europe after World War One, they were shocked to return to segregation, which did not exist across the Atlantic. These men were the first large group to agitate against segregation. In World War Two, threats of unrest in the military industry and within the ranks forced President Roosevelt to equalize, though not desegregate, jobs and ranks. Blacks were enticed away from the South by the promise of jobs in the Mid-West and Northeast, where they enjoyed much more freedom.

Eventually, the federal courts, the Supreme Court in particular, began to see cases of segregation and discrimination as counter to the 14th Amendment and one by one, entire categories of Jim Crow laws began to fall. White opposition in the South to many of the rulings, such as those integrating schools and universities, was strong and militant. In several cases, U.S. Marshals or National Guardsmen had to be called out to protect pioneering black students.

Finally, the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act were passed, in 1964 and 1965 respectively, ending legalized segregation and disenfranchisement. Jim Crow was dead, at least in the law. The last vestiges of legalized slavery were removed from the American legal system, for good. Jim Crow does live on, however, in the continuing, but seemingly dwindling, personal prejudice. America will not be able to say that the legacy of slavery has truly been eradicated until race is as irrelevant as eye color. In this, we still have work to do.