Analyze the rise of Jim Crow and disenfranchisement in Louisiana and the South, including the Louisiana Separate Car Act, Plessy v. Ferguson, the grandfather clause, and the New South economy (Louisiana Student Standards for Social Studies, US History Standard 2: Western Expansion to Progressivism).

What this topic is asking

Louisiana sits at the center of this story, because the Supreme Court case that made segregation legal across the nation began in New Orleans. Standard 2 (Western Expansion to Progressivism) wants you to analyze how the New South rebuilt white supremacy after Reconstruction through segregation laws, disenfranchisement, and an economy of sharecropping, and how Plessy v. Ferguson gave it constitutional cover. Because LEAP is a Louisiana test, expect items that connect Louisiana's role to the national pattern, often through a court excerpt, a "colored" and "white" signage photograph, or a voting-law document.

The New South and segregation

The phrase "New South" promised a modern, industrial region, and there was some growth in textiles, tobacco, and railroads. But politically the New South meant the restoration of white control after the brief multiracial democracy of Reconstruction. Southern states passed Jim Crow laws segregating railroads, schools, restaurants, and nearly every public space, marking facilities "white" and "colored" and enforcing the divide with law and violence.

Louisiana and Plessy v. Ferguson

Louisiana produced the case that nationalized segregation.

The lasting LEAP point is that the facilities were almost never actually equal; "separate but equal" was a legal fiction that protected segregation while ignoring its inequality.

Disenfranchisement in Louisiana

Taking away the vote was as important to white supremacy as segregation, because Black voters could otherwise overturn it. Louisiana led the way.

• Poll taxes charged a fee to vote that many poor Black (and white) citizens could not pay.
• Literacy tests required reading or interpreting a document, administered unfairly to fail Black applicants.
• The grandfather clause, introduced in Louisiana's 1898 constitution, let a man vote only if his grandfather had been eligible, which exempted whites from the tests while excluding African Americans whose grandfathers had been enslaved.

Together these devices cut Black voter registration in Louisiana from tens of thousands to a tiny fraction within a few years, all written to avoid openly naming race and thus to evade the Fifteenth Amendment.

The sharecropping economy

Most freed people did not gain land, so they farmed someone else's. Under sharecropping, a family worked a landowner's plot in exchange for a share of the crop, but high rents, interest, and store debts usually left them owing more each year. The result was a cycle of debt peonage that bound Black (and many poor white) Southerners to the land in a condition of dependence not far from the servitude slavery had imposed. The New South economy thus reinforced the racial hierarchy that its laws and voting rules enforced.