After the end of the Civil War, and the Act of the Reconstruction in 1867 it was given the Ratification of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution, supposedly to confirm the equal rights of colored people. In the South for stopping the constant encouragements of them surged a racist group called the Ku Klux Klan created to discourage black voting, they terrorized black political leaders, and lots of them got killed or lynched. According to the Civil Rights Act in 1875 Federal troops were supposed to stay in the South to be sure colored people could assure their right to vote and elect a political leader of their own. It had been formed a bi-racial government to confirm the equality but in 1877 it collapsed and Federal troops abandoned South territory ensuring the prohibition for black people to vote.
After the end of Reconstruction it surged a new kind of segregation called “Equal but separate” that established how black people could receive the same services as white ones, obviously in a different kind of ways and in a lower quality. In the case of schools, the ones for white people received a lot more money and support than the ones of African-Americans. In 1896 the Supreme Court legitimized such laws and giving the first steps to segregated education, or even prohibition in the case of Universities. It was also implemented a kind of “new feudalism” in which jobs for colored people were very hard to get, in the South they had work in cotton plantations for the owner and the payment was way beneath of what they needed.
At the beginning of the 20th century the government took big measurements to institutionalize segregation, black people was moved into the center of cities and white people convinced by the extremely low mortgages moved into the suburbs. Why did this happen? At the beginning of the century it was a common believe that black presence in white neighborhoods could bring a low in the property values, that’s how the government got involved in the segregation politic. It wasn’t that explicit but the low mortgages only applied for people with a level of incomes and it couldn’t get to people from “areas in decline”, in those times black people could only afford the sow told “areas” in decline.
In 1913 the federal Civil Service was segregated: black people had to eat separately, use separate schools, public toilets, park benches, train and restaurant seating, etc. In some locales, in addition to segregated seating, it could be forbidden for stores or restaurants to serve different races under the same roof. In the movie Forrest Gump this theme is touched from to central points of view, the first black student in the University of Alabama, and the treat that they received in the army.
