ke could legally practice segregation. Eventually, the Court also validated state legislation that discriminated against blacks. In 1896 it legitimized the principle of "separate but equal" in its ruling Plessy v. Ferguson. The Court held that separate accommodations did not deprive blacks of equal rights if the accommodations were equal. In 1899, the Court went even further declaring in Cumming v. County Board of Education: Laws establishing separate schools for whites were valid even if they provided no comparable schools for blacks. The high court rulings led to a profusion of Jim Crow laws. By 1914 every Southern state had passed laws that created two separate societies; one black, the other white. Blacks and whites could not ride together in the same railroad cars, sit in the same waiting rooms, use the same washrooms, eat in the same restaurants, or sit in the same theaters. Blacks were denied access to parks, beaches, and picnic areas; they were barred from many hospitals. What had been maintained by custom in the rural South was to be maintained by law in the urban South. Starting in 1915, victories in the Supreme Court began to chip away at the Jim Crow Laws. In Guinn v. United States (1915), the Supreme Court supported the position that a statute in Oklahoma law denying the right to vote to any citizen whose ancestors had not been enfranchised in 1860 (grandfather clause) was unconstitutional. In Buchanan v. Worley(1917), the Court struck down a Louisville, Kentucky, law requiring residential segregation. The first major blow against the Jim Crow system of racial segregation was struck in 1954 by the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, which declared segregation in the public schools unconstitutional. This began what is known as the "Civil Rights Movement" and began the end of the Jim Crow Laws. Number 6: The Cotton ClubUntil the 1930’s, celebrities and gangsters rubbed shoulders at...
