A Brief History of Federal Law and Race, Because You Asked For It (Part 1)
Let's hop in the way way back machine for a second. All the way back to the aftermath of the Civil War. Black people were riding high, as slavery has been mostly outlawed. Of course, the southern whites weren't particularly pleased, and in response the Ku Klux Klan was formed, mostly as a terrorist group that intimidated and killed black people trying to lead. In response, Ulysses Grant and a Republican Congress ramped up the Reconstruction and the federal government broke the Klan and most other attempts to intimidate black people. This lasted 12 glorious years, and black people were elected to various posts.
Reconstruction ended in 1877 as a truce between Republicans and Democrats and an agreement for Rutherford B. Hayes (Go Bucks) to be president. Union troops withdrew, and everyone agreed that everything was just peachy. This allowed southern Democrats to start the Jim Crow era. States enacted all sorts of crazy schemes to keep black people from voting. Poll taxes were popular (with a grandfather exception for white people, of course). The 13th Amendment had an exception for prison labor, so coming up with fun ways to get black people sent to prison was a twofer. By enacting laws that kept certain felons from voting, and enacting laws that made it easy to declare someone a felon, you could both keep a black guy from voting and return him to slavery. These efforts were very effective - despite having a huge black population, the last black congressmen left office in 1901 and another was not elected for 72 years.
I like this.
I'll offer clarifications where I think it's appropriate.
The Ku Klux Klan and its ilk constituted the paramilitary squadron of the southern wing of the Democratic Party. Their goal was explicitly to return Democrat rule (meaning white supremacy) to the South. Just in the name of honesty and transparency, it would be nice if today's Democrats would own this part of their history.
Jim Crow, surprisingly enough, was not imposed in the immediate aftermath of Reconstruction, but 10-15 year later (it didn't all happen at once, it was state by state, and not exactly the same in every southern state, but was complete by the early 1890s), during the Populist Era. Nationally, populists made an appeal for poor whites and poor blacks to unite on the basis of similar economic interests. This was a threat to southern Democrats, so segregation in all public facilities was imposed to keep poor whites feeling superior to poor blacks and angry about any attempt by blacks to better themselves. The great southern populists like Tom Watson of Georgia ended up as little more than race-baiting demagogues. Initially, businesses like railroads opposed Jim Crow, as it made their business more expensive and less efficient.
Of course, in 1896 SCOTUS ruled in
Plessy v. Ferguson that segregation was constitutional.
