The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow 18651964 Author:Frank B. Latham The Negro's long struggle to win "the Equal Protection of the laws". — After the Civil War, the Negro found that he was a freedman - but not truly a free man. And efforts by Congress to give him the equal protection of the laws were blocked by the Supreme Court of the United States. In 1883, the Court declared unconstitutional the Civil Rights Ac... more »t of 1875, which required for all races the full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations in inns, theaters...and public conveyances on land and water. Then, in 1896, the Court upheld, in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson, a Louisiana law requiring all railroads to provide "equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races." For nearly sixty years after the Plessy case, the Southern states were free - in fact, were encouraged - to pass a wide range of so-called Jim Crow laws denying the Negro equal treatment. The lone dissenter in 1883 and 1896 was Justice John Marshall Harlan, a former slave owner. His famous dissent in the Plessy case warned the nation of trouble to come. "In my opinion, the judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott case, which all but made the Civil War inevitable."« less