African Americans faced very rough conditions in the South in 1900. White attitudes toward African Americans were very negative and had changed very little since the end of the Civil War. Many whites thought that African Americans were inferior. Laws known as the "Jim Crow laws" were passed to reflect this way of thinking. As a result of the “separate but equal” doctrine established in the Plessy v Ferguson Supreme Court case, African Americans were legally segregated from whites in many places, including educational settings, train cars, bathrooms, and other places of public accommodation. African American men also had a difficult time getting well-paying jobs and were often forced to work on farms as hired laborers.
Additionally, African Americans faced other obstacles. The pursuit of equal rights could not advance, and in many cases, the struggle to be seen as human was a matter of life and death—Southern whites were regularly lynching blacks with impunity. African Americans also found it difficult to vote, as poll taxes and literacy tests, instated specifically to suppress the black vote, served their purpose. Many African Americans couldn't afford to pay the taxes and/or couldn’t pass the literacy tests because they had little income and/or little to no educational training. African Americans were also threatened and intimidated by groups like the Ku Klux Klan that tried to terrorize them and committed heinous crimes against them. Life was very difficult for most African Americans in the South in 1900.
Around the turn of the twentieth century, African Americans lived under Jim Crow laws in the South. They faced racial segregation in every category of life. For example, public places were segregated, and there were separate schools, sections of public transportation, and sections of waiting rooms and movie theaters for blacks and whites. Though these facilities were supposed to be "separate but equal," the facilities for blacks, including schools, were inferior, as far less public money was spent on paying black teachers and building black schools.
In addition, African Americans faced far fewer job prospects and were kept out of white colleges and other forms of education. For the most part, black women worked outside the home as badly paid domestics in white houses, and black men and their families worked as sharecroppers and did not, for the most part, own their own land. Black people were also largely disenfranchised and were not allowed to vote. Black people largely formed their own churches, which were areas of strength and pride and would later help support the Civil Rights movement.
Life was extremely hard for African-Americans in the South at that time. Although slavery had long since been abolished, the substance of slavery had been reintroduced by the back door, as it were, by Southern state legislatures. After Reconstruction, they systematically built an apparatus of legalized racial prejudice and discrimination which became known as the Jim Crow laws. Under these laws, African Americans were, among other things, denied the right to vote, to hold public office, or in some cases, serve on a jury. Essentially, the most important elements of American citizenship were taken away from African Americans, one by one, simply on the basis of the color of their skin.
As a result of the Jim Crow laws, segregation also became widespread in the South at that time. Laws to keep the races apart placed severe restrictions on African Americans' freedom of movement: where they could and couldn't go, whereabouts they had to sit on a bus or at a lunch counter, even which beaches they could visit.
Formally, the provision of public services and facilities was made on the principle of "separate, but equal." This was supposed to mean that though the races would be kept apart, they were still entitled to equal standards of provision. In reality, however, that simply didn't happen, and African Americans had to make do with often vastly inferior facilities, whether it was in relation to schools, hospitals, or train compartments.
https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/brown/brown-segregation.html
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