White Southerners expected blacks to keep to themselves, to socialize and worship in separate venues, to work for white people in menial jobs and for meager wages, and to never request or demand anything, including equal rights. When slaves were emancipated, the white South lost its labor supply and the slaves lost their shelter. Instead of owning the slaves, white men became landlords, charging high rent to slave families who often could not pay with cash. These slaves effectively became indentured servants to their former owners as they tried to pay off their debts through service. This became an impossible task, with the interest tacked on by the landlords.Freedmen also encountered the difficulties of sharecropping. With little land available to purchase and few skills other than knowing how to work in the fields, former slaves participated in the sharecropping system that provided a share of the crop for the worker’s service. Sharecropping was an idealistic plan used by crooked bookkeepers and white land owners who kept black men in perpetual debt.The redeemers were Democratic politicians who came to power in the southern states after Reconstruction. They won support from two groups: the business community and the white supremacists. The group favored policies of segregating public facilities for blacks and whites as a means of treating African Americans as social inferiors. The redeemers often used race as a rallying cry to deflect attention away from the real concerns of tenant farmers and the working poor.They discovered that they could gain and keep political power by playing on the racial fears of white.During Reconstruction, federal laws protected southern blacks from discriminatory acts by local and state governments. However, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down one Reconstruction act after another applying to civil rights. In the Civil Rights cases of 1883, the Court ruled that Congress could not legislate against the racial discrimination practiced by private citizens, which included railroads, hotels, and other businesses used by the public. Then in the landmark case of Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court upheld a Louisiana law requiring “separate but equal accommodations” for white and black passengers on railroads.Soon after this decision, a wave of segregation laws, commonly known as Jim Crow laws, were adopted by southern states. These laws required segregated washrooms, drinking fountains, park benches, and other facilities in virtually all public places. Only the use of streets and most stores were not restricted according to a person’s race.