Wandering the Web--Laws that Affect the Life of Americans from Slavery to the 21st Century

Abstract

Part One of the bibliography is a list of Websites where information concerns laws and cases that greatly impacted African American lives in the nineteenth century. These laws are listed chronologically beginning at slave codes to Plessy v. Ferguson. The slave codes and fugitive slave laws were meant to control the possibility of slave rebellion. As the History Channel stated, black codes and the Jim Crow laws were meant to maintain white supremacy and Southern agricultural society. The Dred Scott decision declared African Americans were not citizens. Plessy made segregation the law of the land. Laws, such as the Civil Rights Acts and Voting Rights Act, demanded that the United States government honor the Constitution, particularly the Fourteenth Amendment-"all persons born or naturalized in the United States" are citizens and "… forbids states from denying any person life, liberty or property without due process of law" or "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." 1 Part Two lists Websites of laws that attempted to reserve the centuries of oppression. These laws illustrate the small gains African Americans made to obtain de facto freedom.-ARN Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) History Channel-http://www.history. com/topics/black-history/plessy-v-ferguson-summarized the details regarding Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). In this landmark case, Homer Plessy refused to sit in a separate railway car in Louisiana. He argued that his civil rights were violated. The seven majority panel believed that Plessy's civil rights were not violated if the accommodations were "separate, but equal." As a result, Plessy v. Ferguson set the precedent of segregation in every aspect of African Americans' lives. WNET Indianapolis, Indiana PBS channel-http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/ stories_events_plessy.html-televised a series in 2002 titled the "Rise and Fall of Jim Crow." Under "About the Series" link described "Rise and Fall of Jim Crow" as a "landmark four-part series [that] explores segregation from the end of Civil War to the dawn of the modern Civil Rights movement." A Website was created to summarize the various aspects of the series. The Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), a United States Supreme Court case that created de jure of segregation, in spite of the Fourteenth Amendment.