They were eager to know about conditions, to find housing, and to learn more about their new lives in cities. Most were from rural areas of the South. From 1890 to 1908 all the southern states had passed constitutions or laws that raised barriers to voter registration and effectively disenfranchised most blacks and many poor whites. They were utterly closed out of the political systems. Schools and other public facilities reserved for blacks were typically underfunded and ill-maintained. Legislatures imposed Jim Crow conditions, producing facilities for blacks that were "separate" but never "equal" (referring to the "Plessy v. Ferguson" (1896) case, in which the US Supreme Court ruled that segregated facilities, such as railroad cars providing "separate but equal" conditions, were constitutional). The northern and midwestern industrial centers, where blacks could vote and send children to school, were recruiting workers based on expansion of manufacturing and infrastructure to supply the US's expanding population as well as the war in Europe, which started in 1914. The Pennsylvania Railroad and others were expanding at a rapid rate across the North, needing workers for construction and later to serve the train passengers.