The Jim Crow laws were enacted before the American Civil War.
Jim Crow laws were state and local laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States . Enacted by white Democratic-dominated state legislatures in the late nineteenth century after the Reconstruction period , these laws continued to be enforced until 1965 . Generally , the remaining Jim Crow laws were overruled by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 , but years of action and court challenges have been needed to unravel the many means of institutional discrimination . The term Reconstruction Era , in the context of the history of the United States , has two senses : the first covers the complete history of the entire country from 1865 to 1877 following the American Civil War ( 1861 to 1865 ) ; the second sense focuses on the attempted transformation of the Southern United States from 1863 to 1877 , as directed by Congress , with the reconstruction of state and society .