Jim Crow.

In 1914, 90 percent of African Americans lived in the states of the former Confederacy, where socalled Jim Crow statutes had legalized the segregation of Americans by race. These statutes had been validated by a series of Supreme Court rulings in the 1890s, culminating in the famous 1896 "separate but equal" doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson, which made segregation the law of the United States. To make matters worse, President Woodrow Wilson appointed to his cabinet officials who were openly prejudiced, and who extended segregation within federal departments. Nowhere was the separation of races more strict, more prone to violence, or more hypocritical than in the American armed forces that were supposedly fighting for freedom and democracy in Europe. Nonetheless, the social upheavals created by World War I reshaped race relations in the United States in fundamental ways.

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