POLS Week 5

Policies or programs designed to expand opportunities for minorities and women and usually requiring that an organization take measures to increase the number or proportion of minorities and women in its membership or employment.

Laws enacted by southern legislatures after the Civil War that prevented former enslaved people from voting and holding certain jobs, among other prohibitions.

Constitutional and legal protections from government interference with personal rights and freedoms such as freedom of assembly, speech, and religion.

The powers or privileges conferred on citizens by the Constitution and the courts that entitle them to make claims upon the government. Civil rights protect individuals from arbitrary or discriminatory treatment at the hands of the government.

Segregation that results from practice rather than from law.

Segregation enacted into law and imposed by the government.

The 1850 law compelling northerners to honor southerners’ property claims to slaves, passed in return for the South’s agreeing to admit California as a free state (and hence lose its ability to block legislation in the Senate).

Statutes stating that only those people whose grandfather had voted before Reconstruction could vote, unless they passed a literacy or wealth test. After the Civil War this mechanism was used to disenfranchise African Americans.

A violent crime directed against individuals, property, or organizations solely because of the victims’ race, gender, national origin, or sexual orientation.

A series of laws enacted in the late nineteenth century by southern states to institute segregation. These laws created “whites only” public accommodations such as schools, hotels, and restaurants.

A legal barrier used to exclude African Americans from voting. Local white registrars would require prospective black voters to read and interpret arcane passages of the state’s constitution. Because few satisfied these registrars’ rigorous demands, by 1910 fewer than 10 percent of black men were voting in the South.

A political convention used to select a candidate to run in an upcoming election.

A tax imposed on people when they register to vote. In the decades after the Civil War this tax was used primarily to disenfranchise black voters. With passage of the Twenty-Fourth Amendment, in 1964, it became unconstitutional.

Specific shares of college admissions, government contracts, and jobs set aside for population groups that have suffered from past discrimination. The Supreme Court has rejected the use of quotas wherever it has encountered them.

The political and social practice of separating whites and blacks into dual and highly unequal schools, hospitals, prisons, public parks, housing, and public transportation.

Women who campaigned in the early twentieth century for the right of women to vote.

A practice that permitted political parties to exclude African Americans from voting in primary elections. Because historically in the South winning the Democratic primary was tantamount to winning the general election, this law in effect disenfranchised black voters in southern states.