Jim Crow to Civil Rights in Virginia

White attempts to reinstitute control culminated in the 1896 Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson. In Plessy, the Supreme Court upheld racial segregation under the doctrine of separate-but-equal. In all of the former Confederate states, constitutions were rewritten or amended to conform to Plessy. Virginia's Constitution of 1902 instituted poll taxes and literacy tests and mandated separate schools. Although Virginia public schools were racially segregated from the beginning, the Constitution of 1902 was the state's first constitution to require segregation. In 1904, the General Assembly gave streetcar companies the power to segregate passengers by race. Two years later, in the wake of protests and boycotts organized by African Americans in almost every major city in the state, the assembly enacted legislation that required racial segregation on streetcars.

Excluded from the whites-only economic system, black Virginians relied on each other. In every major city in the state, black businesses sprang up. Hotels, restaurants, theaters, and retail shops all existed in segregated urban areas. Maggie Lena Walker is widely known as the first woman to found and become president of a chartered bank in the United States. Her St. Luke Penny Savings Bank, however, was part of a larger network of businesses that both served and employed African Americans who would otherwise have been left outside the economic mainstream. In Richmond, the most important of these mutual-aid societies was the Grand Fountain of the United Order of True Reformers.

Although African Americans were confined to the lowest-paying industrial jobs, the need to provide services to other African Americans led to the emergence of a black middle class that included physicians, lawyers, funeral parlor directors, teachers, and ministers. Although the Renaissance may have been centered in Harlem in New York City, the growth of black cultural life emerged in urban communities throughout Virginia as well.

Beginning in the 1930s, black plaintiffs filed lawsuits to break down segregation at the graduate and professional school level. They also sought to equalize facilities in public high schools and elementary schools. These suits often focused on teacher salaries because these were the easiest disparities to prove. Between 1940 and 1954, many localities in Virginia were under court order to make separate educational facilities equal. In 1951, an equalization case arose in Prince Edward County, Virginia. Led by Barbara Johns, black students at Robert R. Moton High School staged a strike to protest the poor facilities at their school. The case, Davis v. Prince Edward County, became one of five that comprised the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. The Brown decision overturned Plessy, and the implementation of Brown became a major goal of the civil rights movement.