George White was critically injured. But when surgeons in his Atlanta hospital found out he had black ancestry, they kicked him out mid-examination, shipping him across the street to a black hospital despite the pouring rain. He died in the overcrowded, underfunded hospital days later. The year was 1931, and like hundreds of thousands of other black people in the segregated South, White was a victim of Jim Crow segregation laws.

Between the 1870s and the 1960s, Jim Crow laws upheld a vicious racial hierarchy in southern states, circumventing protections that had been put in place after the end of the Civil War—such as the 15th Amendment, which gave black men the right to vote 150 years ago this week.