State legislatures

• Jim Crow laws = Segregation laws. Tennessee segregated rail travel in 1881. Spread to the south
• Measures to prevent African Americans from voting : illiteracy tests, excluded from 'grandfather' clauses, lynching
• United States v Harris 1883= Supreme Court ruled the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional. It held that private discrimination didn't fall under federal jurisdiction
• Wilkins v Mississippi 1898 = court declared that discriminatory voter registration laws weren't unconstitutional, there was no specific mention of face in voting qualifications
• Plessy v Ferguson 1896= Separate but not equal. Enshrined in a legal ruling . In both public and private everything but equal. Holmer Plessy challenged the law and travelled in a whites only railway carriage . Plessy was punished in New Orleans court by Judge Ferguson and appealed to US Supreme Court which ruled 7-1 that Louisiana wasn't going against the Constitution by segregation
• Smith v Allwright 1944= it was seen as a small step in the right direction. it led to a ruling that was unconstitutional for black voters to be excluded from party primary voting
• Brown v Topeka Board of Education 1954= A group of parents with NAACP sued Board of Education for not providing appropriate education. The District Court ruled against them, NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall took the case to the Supreme Court . Ended the legal basis for segregation by an unanimous court decision
• Boyton v Virginia 1960= Confirmed that segregation on interstate bus transportation was unconstitutional, giving the rise to the Freedom of Rides
• Swann v Charlotte Mecklenburg Board of Education 1971= Approved plans for enforced desegregation by busing children from white suburbs into inner city areas with more black people
• Griggs v Duke Power Company 1971= Court protected African Americans from implicit discrimination by firms who insisted on high school diploma qualifications for jobs which didn't really need them. Many African Americans didn't have these qualifications but were capable of doing the work, so were losing higher paid jobs to white workers