When the president issued the Emancipation Proclamation,
it was not really something that had effect in Georgia
because it was more aspirational, and it was more strategic.
President Lincoln was trying to increase
the number of freed slaves
in parts of the South who could fight against the Confederacy.
But the Emancipation Proclamation
did very little in terms of freeing slaves
at the time it was issued in 1863.
And finally, in April of 1865,
when General Lee surrendered to General Grant in Virginia,
we began to see in Georgia
a real movement towards the freeing of slaves.
But it was a slow process.
Emancipation came almost
place by place slowly
because there were, in many parts of Georgia,
not enough federal troops to enforce the end of slavery,
to enforce the Emancipation.
So it became a very slow process.
By 1868, in Georgia,
there were enough federal troops
to enforce the US Constitution.
And there was the beginning, the passage
of federal amendments to the US Constitution.
There was what we call today a Reconstruction Constitution
adopted in Georgia in 1868.
And that recognized the equality of people.
It recognized the right of people to work and be paid for their work.
And at that point, there began to be some African Americans
who were actually elected to office
because they were then able to have the vote.
And there was great white resistance to this.
The whole society in Georgia was built on the notion
that white people were superior and black people were inferior.
And between 1876
and 1896,
there was a back and forth.
It was a 20-year period in which this whole notion
of the equality of every citizen
was in play every day.
Whether it was someone trying to vote, someone trying to go to school,
someone trying to get a job that paid a decent wage,
someone trying to get a house that they could own themselves.
Every part of society,
there was an uncertainty about just how much equality
under the law the state would permit.
And white folks generally wanted no equality for African Americans.
And black folks obviously wanted their full citizenship,
the rights that they were entitled to
under the new Reconstruction Amendments.
And generally, that fight went on,
and there was an uncertainty about what it actually meant,
until a case went before the US Supreme Court.
And that case we now remember as Plessy vs. Ferguson.
Plessy vs. Ferguson was a Supreme Court case in 1896
involving an African-American man named Homer Plessy.
It took place in Louisiana.
And Homer Plessy sat in a white-only railroad car.
In Louisiana, this railroad car company,
they had separate cars for whites and blacks.
And so he sat in the white-only railroad car,
refused to leave, the case ends up going through the lower court.
It gets to the US Supreme Court.
And the US Supreme Court decided that it did not violate
the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
So what they decided is separate-but-equal doctrine came to be.
That as long as you have equal facilities,
and they were anything but equal in the South,
as long as you had equal facilities, it was okay to separate the races.
Basically, what it allowed the southern states to do
were some things they were already doing with their Jim Crow laws.
They make African Americans to be second-class citizens.
Jim Crow separated folks on streetcars.
They separated folks in bathrooms.
Black folks would not be allowed to use a spigot
where water was flowing just to get a drink,
even if it was used by white folks in any way.
They just simply wanted to separate black people
from all of white folks.
And then assure that in Jim Crow laws
that they were unable to influence society
so that they could change any of this.
Some Jim Crow laws were passed during this time
to disenfranchise African Americans.
Disenfranchise means to deny African Americans the right to vote,
to deny a certain group of people.
And we associate it with our society to deny African Americans right to vote.
There were several different ways to disenfranchise.
One of the laws was the poll tax.
Well, these former slaves just coming out of slavery did not have a lot of money.
They could not afford the fee to pay in all these different elections.
Another was the white primary.
In the white primaries, you had to be a white person to vote in it.
So African Americans were not even allowed to vote in the primary elections
to even pick the candidate that they wanted.
And then you had literacy tests, which again,
it was illegal as slaves to learn how to read and write,
to teach a slave to read and write.
So the majority of African Americans could not pass these literacy tests
because they could not read and write legibly.
What Jim Crow era did
was establish a way with the sanction
of the Supreme Court in Plessy vs. Ferguson,
in which to indirectly
infringe upon those rights,
with the blessings of the rest of the country
and the US Supreme Court...
until Brown vs. the Board.