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 Although the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments promised African
Americans legal equality, white Americans opposed to racial equality found ways to
circumvent the amendments by passing a series of "Jim Crow" laws in the
1870s. Delaware's legislation, the first in the country, allowed store owners,
innkeepers, and theater owners to refuse to serve any person "deemed offensive by a
major part of the establishment's customers." In 1896, the United States
Supreme Court's ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson legalized racial segregation as
written in state Jim Crow laws. |
