The "Jim Crow" laws were made by Democrats and enforced by the KKK.


...Radical Republicans passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 which gave freed men legal rights (but not the right to vote). The country, by 1870, passed the 14th and 15th Amendments to the United States Constitution, guaranteeing civil rights and the right to vote. The southern states came under Republican control--a party comprising the Freedmen, white Southerners ("Scalawags") and migrants from the North ("Carpetbaggers"). The Ku Klux Klan and related groups reacted violently, but they were suppressed by President Ulysses S. Grant using the federal courts and troops. By 1877, the conservatives and Democrats, forming a Redeemer coalition,

(The Redeemers were a loose political coalition in the southern United States during the Reconstruction era, who sought to re-establish the rule of white supremacy by overthrowing the Radical Republican coalition of Freedmen, carpetbaggers and Scalawags. They were the southern wing of the Bourbon Democrats, the conservative, pro-business wing of the Democratic Party. Their membership was from diverse social, economic and political backgrounds.)

ousted all the Republican governments. From 1877 down to the 1970s, the Southern Democrats controlled every Southern state nearly all the time.

After 1877, the Redeemers reversed many of the civil rights gains that black Americans had made during Reconstruction, passing laws that mandated discrimination by both local governments and by private citizens. Since "Jim Crow law" is a blanket term for any of this type of legislation, the exact date of inception for the laws varies by state. The most important laws came in the 1890s and the adoption of legislation segregating railroad cars in New Orleans as the first genuine Jim Crow law. By 1915, every Southern state had effectively destroyed the gains in civil rights and liberties that blacks had enjoyed due to the Reconstructionist efforts.

Between 1890 and 1910, many state governments prevented most blacks from voting by various techniques, such as poll taxes and literacy tests. (These could be waived for whites due to grandfather clauses.) It is estimated that of 181,000 African-American males of voting age in Alabama in 1900, only 3,000 were registered to vote....