Jim Crow laws heaped humiliation on Blacks
From 1876 to the 1960s, the American Supreme Court upheld the "separate but equal" Jim Crow laws in the South. The federal government's failure to enact anti-lynching laws or to supervise voter election methods in the South, meant that southern blacks were left to their own devices for surviving Jim Crow.
Blacks avoided looking whites in the eyes; and black males and youths knew not to look, even indirectly, at white women or to touch them accidentally. Blacks were expected to stare at the ground when addressing whites of both sexes. Black customers usually were not served first in stores when white customers were present. They usually were not allowed to try on clothing in white businesses, as it was commonly believed that white customers would not purchase clothes that black customers had tried on.
African-American parents struggled mightily to protect their children from the humiliating image of blacks depicted in circuses, minstrel shows, song, and in twentieth century films and radio programs. In popular culture, black people were portrayed as lazy and silly bumpkins, high-strutting dandies who foolishly mimicked white elites, or simple-minded and contented "darkies" who simply loved their white patrons.
Few blacks confronted Jim Crowism and the color line all around them directly or defiantly. To do so risked being lynched, turned off the place if you were a sharecropper, fired from your job, denied credit, or beaten. Not even black politicians, prosperous entrepreneurs, or successful black landowners violated the southern color line, enforced as it was by custom, law, and violence in the years from 1876 to the 1960s.
Even the most prosperous blacks learned to live in unpainted houses and to not look too successful or else they would incur the wrath of less prosperous whites in the area. To drive a new carriage or auto to town risked one's life--and the lives of one's family--in most areas of the Jim Crow South.
Many of the black colleges and normal schools serving African Americans were hardly colleges at all. Because no public high schools for black children existed in most of the southern states, the typical black teacher's college included curricula at the secondary level.
As late as 1915, no public high schools for blacks existed in Mississippi, South Carolina, North Carolina, or Louisiana.
Many racist whites believed that education only made blacks "uppity." Others feared that black schools wasted resources because black people were incapable of benefiting from education in any case.
Large numbers of whites feared that educated blacks would compete for the better-paying jobs available to the handful of skilled whites.
In Churches, there was a pattern of inferiority and humiliation felt by most African Americans with the white practices of "discrimination at the altar,"
segregated seating arrangements, prejudice during services, and patronizing sermons that urged blacks to accept slavery or a status of inferiority to whites.
