What did the southern legislatures pass after the civil war?

Answer 1

After the Civil War, the Southern state legislatures had to approve the 14th and 15th Amendments, as part of the price of being readmitted to the Union. (The 13th Amendment had already been passed by the rump states outside the South.)

Many years later, public and lobby pressure caused some state legislatures to pass certain bills that defined what the two races could and could not do (that means white and black; the others hadn't been invented yet). Most laws were just annoying. If you were white and owned a coffeeshop, say, some states wouldn't let you have your negro friend from across the street come in and talk over a cup of coffee while you rolled up the Hamburgers. That's just one example. Some laws were so silly people refused to enforce them. That sounds like a good thing but it isn't if you are trying to make a court case. It is hard to challenge a law that no one enforces. This all led to a very famous case in Louisiana in the 1890s. Someone made a law that colored people had to sit in separate train cars from whites. The conductors just laughed. They said they weren't going to move those nice colored people out. So the lawyers eventually got mad and told the conductor they'd get him fired or arrested if this time he didn't make the colored person move. The conductor reluctantly walked over to Mr. Plessy (for that was the colored man's name) and asked him to move. Mr. Plessy smiled and the lawyers smiled too. Now they had a case! They sued the railroad. They sued the state. They sued all the way to the Supreme Court! But it all went horribly wrong. The Supreme Court ruled that it was perfectly okay to have separate train cars for white and black people, if the accommodations were equally good. As a result of this case, many states decided they all had to have separate accommodations. You had to have two public water fountains, and two men's restrooms and two women's restrooms. (This is why there are 15,000 comfort stations in the Pentagon, which is in Virginia, in case you ever visit.) And you had to have separate schools for white kids and black kids, even if the whole county only had only fourteen kids. The South became very poor as a result, and their schools became bad, and the black schools were sometimes even worse than the white schools (because it takes a heap of money to pay for two sets of public schools, and the whites decided to spend their extra nickel on the white school). But the schools were equally good, basically, because everyone was poor and sat in ancient wooden desks, and had well-worn schoolbooks published before the first Cleveland administration.

This state of affairs continued till the 1950s and 60s, when other court decisions and laws overturned the mess that Mr. Plessy's friends created. Then the Southern people were told it was All Their Fault to begin with and that they were Bad Bad People. And this is where my history book ends.