User:Shaygunz/sandbox

United States

(insert the following after "After the thirteenth amendment abolished slavery in America,")

the stigma associated with it was sustained for years. After the troopers in the south had ended the battle in 1875, the southerners, relentless in their goal to reverse the Republican enforced Reconstruction, mobilized their efforts towards restoring and upholding the inferior status of blacks in America. As a result, Jim Crow laws, a system that legalized segregation in America, was birthed. Apparently, Jim Crow was the name of a blackface dancing-singing-mock character that portrayed black men as childish, reckless, incompetent, sluggish, and ironically, happy; this stereotyped image of black males was prominent during the period before the liberation of slaves, and white people in southern states wanted the disposition of blacks to maintain that image.

Although the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was formulated to obstruct the Jim Crow system, in 1883 the Supreme Court of the United States revoked the act on the grounds that Jim Crow laws were constitutional since they did not violate civil rights, but only restricted intimacy or familiarity. The supreme court's ruling cleared the way for southern law makers to pass numerous segregation laws from the end of the 1880's to 1910. The statutes outlawed interracial marriage and enforced spatial segregation in schools, swimming pools, parks, theaters, trains, buses and several other state-funded social facilities. In order to put blacks "in their place", the system was enforced both by the law and unofficial forces, such as the Ku Klux Klan, through the threat of lynching.

Also, the One-drop rule was implemented to further uphold the Jim Crow system because of the confusion caused by Mulattoes. Miscegenation, which entailed coercive sexual exploitation almost exclusively between white men and black women continued even after emancipation since the population of mixed children in the black community increased from 11.2 percent in 1850 to 20.9 in 1910. The striking similarity between the complexion of whites and that of their mulatto counterparts compelled state legislators to propound a definition of "negro". Thus, the one-drop rule facilitated segregation by drawing a fine line between pure whites and blacks.

Apartheid vs Jim Crow

The Apartheid and Jim Crow systems in South Africa and America, respectively, both involved legal segregation of races. However, the two systems differed with respect to sexual norms. Until 1985 in South Africa, miscegenation was forbidden and punishable under the Immorality Amendment Act, 1950. Nonconformity, on the part of whites and non-whites; and men and women, was equally and sternly punished. On the other hand, the primary purpose of the Jim Crow rules was to protect and ensure "white" purity, but several white males participated in miscegenation, which usually involved rape. Therefore, the Apartheid system lacked the double standard that was prominent in the Jim Crow system.