The Segregation System

I. The origins of the system

The establishment of segregation was a response by white southern leaders to the abolition of slavery and the humiliation of the civil war (1861-1865). After 1865 follow a period of reconstruction. During reconstruction, the federal government took measures to protect Black people but the southern states did not accept it.
They were determined to “put the Black man in his place” with Jim Crow laws, segregation laws which were meant to preserve what they called “white supremacy”.

* The Ante-bellum South

Slavery was qualified as a “positive good” before the civil war, also presented as a peculiar institution. Slavery was a pillar of the southern society and its elimination would have lead to the destruction of the South.
The decades before the civil war were a period of prosperity thanks to cotton in the South. The condition for those profits was slavery; slaves were needed in the fields.
The industrialization in the North led to fierce criticism of slavery which was an unfair competition. The abolitionist movement spread and called for the immediate abolition of slavery on an individual basis. Southerners felt threatened by the Federal Government.

From the 1830s on, the southerners leaders elaborated and developed a complex demonstration to prove that slavery was a good thing: racial arguments, better for them to be enslaved than to work as free-workers in Northern industry, comparison with the Ancient Greece and Rome, without slavery it was impossible to develop but also the States Rights Doctrine.
According to this Doctrine, the US was a federation of States in which the Federal Government had limited power and the States could resist the decisions taken by the Federal Government. The states had the right to secede from the Union. This doctrine was based on a strict interpretation of the Constitution. The 10th amendment guaranteed that all power not delegated to the Government are