There is no question that racism and white supremacy
were the major causes of the Jim Crow laws in the South.
No other causes were nearly as important as racism.
If you
have to try to say that other causes were important, you could point to anger at the
North after the Civil War. You could say that the South felt that black rights had been
imposed upon it by the North. You could argue that the motivation behind the Jim Crow
laws was not to say that blacks were inferior, but rather to say that the North could
not tell the South what to do. If you look at it like this, these laws were an act of
defiance against the North, not an act of hatred towards
blacks.
However, I do not know of any reputable historians
who argue that the Jim Crow laws were mainly motivated by
anything but racism.
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