The Civil Rights Movement

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This Debt Peonage tied the sharecropper to the land. By this system a black family farmed the land owned by whites. The blacks were allowed to keep about 10-15% of the profit and the rest went to the landowner. The blacks were kept in debt through their purchases at a General Store owned by the landowner. The blacks purchased things on credit, which kept them in debt. The story To Praise Our Bridges, by Fanny Lou Hamer, depicts the life of sharecroppers. It explains how the sharecroppers were kept in debt, and how they were sabotaged if they started to come out of debt.
Black Codes or Jim Crow laws, were put in place to limit the movement of blacks' rights and to enforce segregation. Many of these laws were put in place specifically to hinder black voting. This was done because the blacks outnumbered whites in the South and they feared that given the chance, the blacks would attempt to take control. These laws included such things as the Grandfather Clause. This stated ...

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This coined the phrase "Separate but equal" and set the way of life for almost the next sixty years.
The second phase of Civil Rights Reform came about through the educational system. The public schools were funded by property taxes. Since few blacks actually owned property, and that which was owned by blacks was of little value, the schools in black neighborhoods were always of lower quality than those in white neighborhoods. The banking industry hindered advancement. The industry engaged in what was called redlining. Where they would draw red lines on a map around black neighborhoods and colluded not to give loans in those areas.
In 1909 W.E.B. Dubois founded the National ...

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