Jim Crow Laws



Introduction:

Jim Crow Laws were local laws of the United States of America issued between 1876 and 1965. In fact, these laws served to create and maintain racial segregation in all public services, establishing a defined status of "separate but equal" for American blacks and members of other racial groups other than white.

Some examples of Jim Crow laws were the separation in public schools, public places and on public transport and differentiation of bathrooms and restaurants, and those for whites than for blacks. These laws were applied even within the army of U.S. to avoid racial segregation.

Discussion:

Jim Crow Laws were separate from black codes of the period 1800-1866, which in turn had reduced rights and civil liberties of African Americans. Racial segregation in schools organized by the states was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1954 with Brown v. Board of Education. In general, the remaining Jim Crow laws were repealed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 [1] and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Desegregation is perhaps the most major and well-known example of court-driven reform in education, and the literature examining desegregation showcases how courts can employ a commandant- control approach to affect educational governance in cases involving large-scale reform aimed at equal educational opportunity. Although the U.S. Supreme Court has made the most major rulings over the past 50 years in desegregation and has been the primary governmental institution responsible for enacting changes in interpretations of the Constitution to drive desegregation, federal district courts also have been charged with overseeing desegregation at local levels The character of the courts' involvement with educational governance changed dramatically in the second half of the 20th century.

Largely beginning with the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that segregation in public schools is unconstitutional; the courts began to get involved in “public law litigation,” a form of litigation aimed at reforming fundamental institutional structures of policy and governance. In public law litigation, the legal process proceeds in a nontraditional fashion. Traditional lawsuits generally involve two private parties and focus on claims of a particular harm that was caused in the past when determining legal liability (whether a legal right has been violated). Once liability has been found, litigation proceeds to the remedial phase, in which courts generally focus on the assignment of a concrete and particular remedy. The type of nontraditional legal process embodied by public law litigation is quite different. Public law cases often involve a wide range of parties, deal with broader legal principles and sometimes unrepresented parties, and address perceived harms resulting from often diffuse institutional behavior that is hard to pinpoint concretely when determining liability.

As a result, courts that have found liability exercise much flexibility in creating broad, forward-looking remedies that appear legislative in character and involve broader goals such as restructuring school governance. As discussed in the following sections, public law litigation can entail fundamental changes in educational governance and have often resulted in courts assuming ...