Jim Crow Matures.

By 1900 southern segregationists had completed much of their legislative agenda. Through legal devices such as poll taxes, literacy tests, and the grandfather clause (which denied suffrage to anyone whose grandfather had been ineligible to vote) voter rolls had been reduced, and the disfranchisement of blacks was virtually complete. The Supreme Court tacitly approved the creation of a separate society with its 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld the Louisiana law requiring "separate but equal" railroad facilities for blacks and whites. Starting around 1900, this notion of "separate but equal" was quickly applied to all facets of southern life, though never with any effort to make things equal. By 1915, for example, South Carolina was spending twelve times as much per capita for the education of white children as it did for black children. Throughout the South movie theaters, water...