statute.
He appealed to the U. S. Supreme Court, but it upheld his conviction by
claiming that "separate but equal" facilities were not a violation of his
rights. Because the court did not define what it meant by equal and did
not insist on enforcing that equality in concrete terms, its decision
was, in fact, a blatant justification for separate and inferior
facilities for Negroes.

Segregation was accompanied by a new wave of race hatred. White Americans
came to believe that all Negroes were alike and therefore could be
treated as a group. An identical stereotype of the Negro fixed itself on
the white mind throughout the entire country. If the Northerner hated
this stereotype somewhat less than did the Southerner, it was only
because the number of Negroes in the North was considerably smaller. At
the end of the century only two percent of the total number of
Afro-Americans was to be found in the North. The great northern migration
had not yet begun.

Both the Northern press and the genteel literary magazines contained the
same vulgar image of the Negro which was to be found in openly racist
communities in the South. Whether he appeared in news articles,
editorials, cartoons, or works of fiction, he was universally portrayed
as superstitious, stupid, lazy, happy-go-lucky, a liar, a thief, and a
drunkard. He loved fun, clothes, and trinkets as well as chickens,
watermelons, and sweet potatoes. Usually he was depicted as having been a
faithful and loving slave before Emancipation, but, unfortunately, he was
unable to adjust to his new freedom News stories and editorials referred
to Negroes in slanderous terms without any apparent sense of
embarrassment. Phrases like "barbarian," "Negro ruffian," "African
Annie," "colored cannibal," "coon," and "darkie" were standard epithets.
Whenever blacks were depicted in cartoons or photographs, the stereotype
presented them as having thick lips, flat noses, big ears, big feet, and
kinky woolly hair. News items concerning those involved in criminal
activities almost always identified them by color. This contributed to
the development of the stereotype of the criminal Negro.

Throughout its history, America had been predominantly an Anglo-Saxon and
Protestant country. The Afro-American stood out in sharp distinction to
this picture both because of his color and his African heritage. By the
end of the nineteenth century America was being flooded with immigrants
from Southern and