impact of jim crow laws essay

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Jim Crow Laws

By: History.com Editors

Updated: January 22, 2024 | Original: February 28, 2018

Jim Crow laws were a collection of state and local statutes that legalized racial segregation . Named after a Black minstrel show character, the laws—which existed for about 100 years, from the post- Civil War era until 1968—were meant to marginalize African Americans by denying them the right to vote, hold jobs, get an education or other opportunities. Those who attempted to defy Jim Crow laws often faced arrest, fines, jail sentences, violence and death.

Black Codes

The roots of Jim Crow laws began as early as 1865, immediately following the ratification of the 13th Amendment , which abolished slavery in the United States.

Black codes were strict local and state laws that detailed when, where and how formerly enslaved people could work, and for how much compensation. The codes appeared throughout the South as a legal way to put Black citizens into indentured servitude, to take voting rights away, to control where they lived and how they traveled and to seize children for labor purposes.

The legal system was stacked against Black citizens, with former Confederate soldiers working as police and judges, making it difficult for African Americans to win court cases and ensuring they were subject to Black codes.

These codes worked in conjunction with labor camps for the incarcerated, where prisoners were treated as enslaved people. Black offenders typically received longer sentences than their white equals, and because of the grueling work, often did not live out their entire sentence.

Ku Klux Klan

During the Reconstruction era, local governments, as well as the national Democratic Party and President Andrew Johnson , thwarted efforts to help Black Americans move forward.

Violence was on the rise, making danger a regular aspect of African American life. Black schools were vandalized and destroyed, and bands of violent white people attacked, tortured and lynched Black citizens in the night. Families were attacked and forced off their land all across the South.

The most ruthless organization of the Jim Crow era, the Ku Klux Klan , was born in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee , as a private club for Confederate veterans.

The KKK grew into a secret society terrorizing Black communities and seeping through white Southern culture, with members at the highest levels of government and in the lowest echelons of criminal back alleys.

Jim Crow Laws Expand

At the start of the 1880s, big cities in the South were not wholly beholden to Jim Crow laws and Black Americans found more freedom in them.

This led to substantial Black populations moving to the cities and, as the decade progressed, white city dwellers demanded more laws to limit opportunities for African Americans.

Jim Crow laws soon spread around the country with even more force than previously. Public parks were forbidden for African Americans to enter, and theaters and restaurants were segregated.

Segregated waiting rooms in bus and train stations were required, as well as water fountains, restrooms, building entrances, elevators, cemeteries, even amusement-park cashier windows.

Laws forbade African Americans from living in white neighborhoods. Segregation was enforced for public pools, phone booths, hospitals, asylums, jails and residential homes for the elderly and handicapped.

Some states required separate textbooks for Black and white students. New Orleans mandated the segregation of prostitutes according to race. In Atlanta, African Americans in court were given a different Bible from white people to swear on. Marriage and cohabitation between white and Black people was strictly forbidden in most Southern states.

It was not uncommon to see signs posted at town and city limits warning African Americans that they were not welcome there.

Ida B. Wells

As oppressive as the Jim Crow era was, it was also a time when many African Americans around the country stepped forward into leadership roles to vigorously oppose the laws.

Memphis teacher Ida B. Wells became a prominent activist against Jim Crow laws after refusing to leave a first-class train car designated for white people only. A conductor forcibly removed her and she successfully sued the railroad, though that decision was later reversed by a higher court.

Angry at the injustice, Wells devoted herself to fighting Jim Crow laws. Her vehicle for dissent was newspaper writing: In 1889 she became co-owner of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight and used her position to take on school segregation and sexual harassment.

Wells traveled throughout the South to publicize her work and advocated for the arming of Black citizens. Wells also investigated lynchings and wrote about her findings.

A mob destroyed her newspaper and threatened her with death, forcing her to move to the North, where she continued her efforts against Jim Crow laws and lynching.

Charlotte Hawkins Brown

Charlotte Hawkins Brown was a North Carolina-born, Massachusetts-raised Black woman who returned to her birthplace at the age of 17, in 1901, to work as a teacher for the American Missionary Association.

After funding was withdrawn for that school, Brown began fundraising to start her own school, named the Palmer Memorial Institute.

Brown became the first Black woman to create a Black school in North Carolina and through her education work became a fierce and vocal opponent of Jim Crow laws.

Isaiah Montgomery

Not everyone battled for equal rights within white society—some chose a separatist approach.

Convinced by Jim Crow laws that Black and white people could not live peaceably together, formerly enslaved Isaiah Montgomery created the African American-only town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi , in 1887.

Montgomery recruited other former enslaved people to settle in the wilderness with him, clearing the land and forging a settlement that included several schools, an Andrew Carnegie -funded library, a hospital, three cotton gins, a bank and a sawmill. Mound Bayou still exists today, and is still almost 100 percent Black.

Jim Crow Laws in the 20th Century

As the 20th century progressed, Jim Crow laws flourished within an oppressive society marked by violence.

Following World War I , the NAACP noted that lynchings had become so prevalent that it sent investigator Walter White to the South. White had lighter skin and could infiltrate white hate groups.

As lynchings increased, so did race riots, with at least 25 across the United States over several months in 1919, a period sometimes referred to as “ Red Summer .” In retaliation, white authorities charged Black communities with conspiring to conquer white America.

With Jim Crow dominating the landscape, education increasingly under attack and few opportunities for Black college graduates, the Great Migration of the 1920s saw a significant migration of educated Black people out of the South, spurred on by publications like The Chicago Defender , which encouraged Black Americans to move north.

Read by millions of Southern Black people, white people attempted to ban the newspaper and threatened violence against any caught reading or distributing it.

The poverty of the Great Depression only deepened resentment, with a rise in lynchings, and after World War II , even Black veterans returning home met with segregation and violence.

Jim Crow in the North

The North was not immune to Jim Crow-like laws. Some states required Black people to own property before they could vote, schools and neighborhoods were segregated, and businesses displayed “Whites Only” signs.

In Ohio, segregationist Allen Granbery Thurman ran for governor in 1867 promising to bar Black citizens from voting. After he narrowly lost that political race, Thurman was appointed to the U.S. Senate, where he fought to dissolve Reconstruction-era reforms benefiting African Americans.

After World War II , suburban developments in the North and South were created with legal covenants that did not allow Black families, and Black people often found it difficult or impossible to obtain mortgages for homes in certain “red-lined” neighborhoods.

When Did Jim Crow Laws End?

The post-World War II era saw an increase in civil rights activities in the African American community, with a focus on ensuring that Black citizens were able to vote. This ushered in the civil rights movement , resulting in the removal of Jim Crow laws.

In 1948 President Harry Truman ordered integration in the military, and in 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that educational segregation was unconstitutional, bringing to an end the era of “separate-but-equal” education.

In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act , which legally ended the segregation that had been institutionalized by Jim Crow laws.

And in 1965, the Voting Rights Act halted efforts to keep minorities from voting. The Fair Housing Act of 1968, which ended discrimination in renting and selling homes, followed.

Jim Crow laws were technically off the books, though that has not always guaranteed full integration or adherence to anti-racism laws throughout the United States. Several recent pieces of legislation—such as House Bill 1020 in Mississippi, which aimed to disenfranchise the majority-Black capital city of Jackson by creating a new judicial district overseen by white leaders—are often compared to Jim Crow laws.

The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow. Richard Wormser . Segregated America. Smithsonian Institute . Jim Crow Laws. National Park Service . “Exploiting Black Labor After the Abolition of Slavery.” The Conversation . “Hundreds of black Americans were killed during 'Red Summer.' A century later, still ignored.” Associated Press/USA Today . “Here's What's Become Of A Historic All-Black Town In The Mississippi Delta.” NPR . 

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Course: US history   >   Unit 6

• Life after slavery for African Americans
• The origins of Jim Crow - introduction
• Origins of Jim Crow - the Black Codes and Reconstruction
• Origins of Jim Crow - the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments
• Origins of Jim Crow - Compromise of 1877 and Plessy v. Ferguson

Plessy v. Ferguson

• The Compromise of 1877
• The New South
• The South after the Civil War
• Jim Crow laws were laws created by white southerners to enforce racial segregation across the South from the 1870s through the 1960s.
• Under the Jim Crow system, “whites only” and “colored” signs proliferated across the South at water fountains, restrooms, bus waiting areas, movie theaters, swimming pools, and public schools. African Americans who dared to challenge segregation faced arrest or violent reprisal.
• In 1896, the Supreme Court declared Jim Crow segregation legal in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision. The Court ruled that “separate but equal” accommodations African Americans were permitted under the Constitution.

Jim Crow: a symbol for racial segregation

The end of jim crow, what do you think.

• For more on Jim Crow, see C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955).
• For more on minstrel shows, see Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
• For Henry Brown's decision, see Justia, Plessy v. Ferguson . For more on the case, see Brook Thomas, Plessy v. Ferguson: A Brief History with Documents (New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1997).
• For the end of Jim Crow, see Richard Wormser, The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow (New York: St. Martin's, 2003).

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How Civil Rights Were Made—and Remade—By Black Communities In the Jim Crow South

F or more than 100 years after slavery’s end, white people maintained a legal system in the South that barred Black people from voting or holding office, held down their wages with the threat of the chain gang, and constantly reinforced their inferior status through violence and humiliating acts of discrimination. Looking back on these realities, it is tempting to imagine Black southerners as inhabiting a kind of law-free zone, shut out from the law and afraid to go anywhere near the courthouse, and that the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was the culmination of a centuries-long struggle toward freedom and full citizenship—to galvanize the power of the federal government against the white supremacists who ruled the statehouse and the county courthouse. Yet, Black people in the Jim Crow South were already using civil rights —not a federal right to protection from racial discrimination, but rather the state-level rights of property, contract, and the right to go to a court of law.

Nowhere did the promise and peril of these fundamental rights loom larger than in the borrowing and lending of money. Nearly everyone in the rural South was simultaneously a debtor and a creditor, signing promises on scraps of paper to cover small debts like a month’s worth of flour and salt, co-signing on bonds for bigger debts, or on deeds of trust (which worked roughly like a mortgage) to buy land.

Nate Shaw, a tenant farmer in Alabama in the early 1900s, relied on a steady flow of credit to buy the things that kept his family’s business (the farm) running. Shaw borrowed his money using a pair of legal agreements called a “promissory note,” a written promise to pay a certain sum of money on a certain date (or dates), and a “deed of trust,” the mortgage-like document that secures the note with collateral. Today, the collateral (or security) typically covers only the asset you are buying. If you default on a car loan, GMAC takes the car; if you default on a mortgage, Citibank takes the house. You negotiate over the interest rate or points, not the collateral.

Farm credit in 1900 was different: Shaw had to negotiate over the collateral too. What those twin papers really did was allocate risk in the frighteningly risky business of farming. By seizing control and oversight of the credit process, a white landlord and his network of white merchants were able to shift the risk onto tenants, dictate where tenants shopped, and inflate the prices tenants paid. Shaw kept an eagle eye not only on his note (the interest rate) but also on his deed of trust (the debt paper), because if the crop failed or if prices fell, the deed of trust showed which of Shaw’s assets could be sold to pay off his debt. All the notorious abuses—the infamous peonage laws, which criminalized the nonpayment of certain debts, the landlords who made people sign a note for $1,250 but actually handed over only $1,000, or who charged 35 percent interest for a week-long loan, secured by the borrowers’ “household effects,” meaning that the borrower could lose everything—all of it stood atop this fundamental struggle over credit, waged through the civil rights of property and contract.

Read More: The Forgotten Northern Origins of Jim Crow

The note and the deed of trust were the battleground of Black legal life, the place where a family’s fortunes rose or fell. The problem for people like Nate Shaw wasn’t ignorance or fear of getting tangled up in the law. He dealt with legal matters all the time, and he knew a bad loan when he saw one. He took bad loans because there were no good ones. He tried to protect himself, first, by attempting to keep as much of his property off the deed of trust as possible. And second, by shifting his debts around, asking one person after another to “take up” the note for him, the same way that people today juggle credit cards, looking for a lower interest rate or a way to stretch out their payments. That hunt for decent credit was one of the things that propelled Black people out of the countryside toward southern cities like Richmond or Memphis, then north to Chicago and Cleveland and Syracuse. Predatory lending would follow the Great Migration north, disguised as payday loans and contract-selling furniture stores, and so would the migrants’ coping strategies. “Friendship business amongst the white folks,” is what Shaw called the predatory lending he faced in Alabama. It was a spider’s web, spun to control and profit from Black farmers, but the web touched whites, too, and could chafe them if anybody tugged too hard on its filaments.

To credit literally means “to believe,” and every credit transaction is, at bottom, one person putting his faith in another that he will be repaid. What channels that faith and puts the power of the state behind its enforcement are those twin legal acts—the deed and the promissory note. In the Jim Crow South, ordinary people used promissory notes like money: instead of paying cash for your flour and fertilizer, you took a note that someone else had written out to you (that is, someone’s February promise to pay you $100 in May) and you “endorsed” it over to a shopkeeper who could then collect the $100 in May. Usually that endorsee would take it at a discount, so that you got only $95 worth of groceries or $95 taken off your debt, which meant you were effectively paying a 20% interest rate. The resulting daisy chain of “IOUs” represented—and worsened—the region’s economic inequality, grinding millions of Black people into poverty. But there was another dimension to the Jim Crow credit economy: it required whites to recognize Black people’s legal personhood.

A contract is only binding if both parties know what they are doing and enter into it of their own free will— if the words “I accept,” or “I promise to pay” mean something legally. The fact that Black people were now putting their X marks to notes and deeds was both a sign of how vulnerable they were in the New South, and a signal that the rights revolution that had begun during Reconstruction was now fully mature. The South’s small population of free African Americans had signed deeds and notes back in the days of slavery, but by the early 1900s Black people’s capacities and understanding mattered more than ever to white people. And here is another crucial thing: most people did their borrowing and lending without any lawyers.

As a result, the law was full of rules that spelled out how voluntary an assent had to be and how much knowledge and understanding a person needed for a court to say he was legally bound by his promise. For example, the “duty to read” was a set of rules that generally made it hard for people to get out of contracts by saying they hadn’t understood what they signed. But the duty to read also constrained those who wrote deeds and read them aloud: those literate people owed a “confidence” to anyone who did not understand technical legal language. So if the person offering the contract lied about what was in it, or hid important provisions in the “fine print,” then “the minds of the parties did not meet” and he shouldn’t expect a judge to enforce it. Testimony in trial courts and other documents suggests that these official rules, and their underlying assumptions about knowledge and understanding, were more than a figment of law professors’ imagination—that adults, including Black people, generally knew that “it was illegal to force a man to sign a note without readin it to him, tellin him what he’s signin,” that a person should say “whether she understood” what she was about to sign, and that a binding signature could be made by “touch[ing] the pen.” In fact, it is likely that the judges and law professors derived their rules about the duty to read in part from what they knew about how people actually made deals.

In the Jim Crow South, life’s ordinary business could not go on if you could not make contracts with Black people. White people needed to be able to treat African Americans as competent, reasonable people. They needed Black people to have a working legal knowledge. It was an example of what the late Derrick Bell called “interest-convergence” —the system makes room for Black people’s interests only when it converges with the interests of whites.

Every day, Black people used their legal commonsense, their intuitions about how a judge might apply a legal rule, to make sense of what it took to make a binding contract, the difference between a lawful and an unlawful eviction, a borrower’s obligations under a promissory note and deed of trust, and more. They stood at a disadvantage, of course. But not because they were ignorant of the law or scared of the law, and not even primarily because white officials cheated or intimidated them out of their rights. Rather, they stood at a disadvantage because under the ordinary rules of property and contract—the civil rights that belonged to all free people—people on one side of the table started with a bigger pile of bargaining chips. Landlords had more of them than renters, creditors more than borrowers. In the early-20th-century United States, civil rights were vindicated in courts, but they were made and remade by people pursuing their everyday lives, on front porches, in church basements, streets, and fields.

Adapted from Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights by Dylan C. Penningroth. Copyright © 2023 by Dylan C. Penningroth. Used with permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Introductory Essay: The Lost Promise of Reconstruction and Rise of Jim Crow, 1860-1896

To what extent did Founding principles of liberty, equality, and justice become a reality for African Americans from Reconstruction to the end of the nineteenth century?

• I can explain how the Reconstruction Amendments and federal laws sought to protect the rights of African Americans after the Civil War.
• I can identify examples of Jim Crow laws and explain how these laws undermined the rights of African Americans.
• I can explain how violence and intimidation were used to threaten African Americans from exercising their political and civil rights.
• I can analyze Reconstruction’s effectiveness in ensuring the faithful application of Founding principles of liberty, equality, and justice to African Americans.
• I can explain the various ways that African American leaders and intellectuals supported their communities and worked to end segregation and racism.

Essential Vocabulary

The lost promise of reconstruction and rise of jim crow, 1860-1896.

After more than two centuries, race-based chattel slavery was abolished during the Civil War. The long struggle for emancipation finally ended thanks to constitutional reform and the joint efforts of Black and white Americans fighting for Black freedom. The next 30 years, however, were a constant struggle to preserve the freedom achieved through emancipation and to ensure for Blacks the equality and justice of U.S. citizens in the face of opposition, violence, and various forms of discrimination.

The Civil War created conditions for the demise of slavery. Early in the war, Congress passed two Confiscation Acts that allowed the federal government to seize and later free enslaved persons in conquered Confederate territory. On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln used his wartime executive powers to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Enslaved persons ran away from their owners and joined free Blacks enlisting in the Union Army to fight for freedom and human equality. The 54th Massachusetts Regiment was the most famous Black unit to fight in the war, but almost 200,000 Black soldiers fought for the Union. Black abolitionists joined the cause, with Harriet Tubman joining Union raids that helped liberate enslaved persons and Frederick Douglass recruiting Black troops. By the end of 1865, the requisite number of states had ratified the Thirteenth Amendment to confirm the end of slavery.

Slavery may have been banned, but Black Americans faced an uncertain future during the process of restoring the Union, called Reconstruction . The Civil Rights Act of 1866 protected basic rights of citizenship, and the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) provided for Black U.S. citizenship and equal protection under the law. Congress established the Freedmen’s Bureau as a federal agency in order to give practical help to freed people in the form of immediate aid and economic and educational opportunities. The efforts of the Freedmen’s Bureau to grant Blacks confiscated land and open Black schools in the South were frustrated by President Andrew Johnson’s vetoes of the Bureau bill and by the opposition of white supremacists.

Storming Fort Wagner by Kurz & Allison, 1890

This print shows soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment attacking the walls of Fort Wagner on Morris Island, South Carolina. The Massachusetts 54th was one of the first African American Union regiments formed in the Civil War. The regiment fought valiantly during the attack on Fort Wagner while suffering nearly 40 percent casualties. The bravery and sacrifice of the 54th became one of the most famous and inspirational parts of the Civil War.

Johnson succeeded Lincoln, and while he supported the restoration of the national union, he impeded the protection of equal rights for Black Americans. He vetoed numerous laws intended to promote Black equality, including the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the extension of the Freedmen’s Bureau, the Reconstruction Acts, and the Tenure of Office Act, among several others. While Congress overrode most of his vetoes, Johnson proved himself a consistent opponent of Black rights. In his third annual message in December 1867, he asserted, “Negroes have shown less capacity for government than any other race of people. No independent government of any form has ever been successful in their hands.” When he fired Secretary of War Edwin Stanton for resisting his policies, Congress impeached President Johnson, but the vote to remove him from office failed by one vote.

Initial protections for Blacks were also weakened by restrictions and opposition to equal civil rights. The new constitutions of former Confederate states did not protect Black citizenship or suffrage. Indeed, the states passed Black Codes that severely curtailed the legal and economic rights of Black citizens. Moreover, the codes penalized Blacks unfairly for committing the same crimes as whites.

The Union As It Was by Thomas Nast, 1874

Klan violence was documented in the press. “The Union as It Was,” an 1874 Harper’s Weekly cartoon by Thomas Nast, shows a Klan member and a White League member shaking hands over an African American family huddled together in fear. A schoolhouse burns and a man is lynched in the background.

Black Americans were also the victims of horrific violence perpetrated by white mobs and local authorities. White supremacists killed thousands of Blacks to intimidate them, prevent them from voting, and stop them from exercising their rights. The Ku Klux Klan and other groups such as the White League were organized to terrorize Blacks and keep them in a constant state of fear. The Colfax Massacre of 1873 and mass killings in places like Memphis and New Orleans were only a few examples of the wave of violence Black Americans suffered. Black and white leaders wrote to state and national officials about the violence in their communities. Congress, with the support of President Ulysses S. Grant, passed several acts aimed at protecting freed people from politically motivated violence. Such enforcement legislation was quickly challenged in the courts, and the withdrawal of all federal troops from the South in 1876 effectively ended federal intervention on behalf of the rights of freed people.

The first Black senator and representatives – in the 41st and 42nd Congress of the United States by Currier and Ives, 1872

This 1872 lithograph by Currier and Ives depicts several of the African American men who served in Congress.

Left to right: Senator Hiram Revels (MS), Representatives Benjamin Turner (AL), Robert DeLarge (SC), Josiah Walls (FL), Jefferson Long (GA), Joseph Rainey (SC), and Robert Elliott (SC).

In 1870, the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment protected the right of Black male suffrage when it banned states from denying voting rights on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Despite violence and intimidation, Blacks exercised their right to vote and served in local offices, state legislatures, and Congress. During Reconstruction, 14 African Americans served in the House of Representatives and 2 in the Senate. Nine of these leaders had been born enslaved. Local governments, however, increasingly found ways to subvert the exercise of the constitutional right to vote. Grandfather clauses , poll taxes , and literacy tests were applied to prevent Blacks from voting.

Many southern Blacks were farmers who lived under the crushing economic burdens of the sharecropping system, which forced them into a state of peonage in which they had little control over their economic destinies. In this system, white landowners rented land, tools, seed, livestock, and housing to laborers in exchange for a significant portion of the crop. As a result, Blacks barely earned a living and suffered perpetual debt that limited their economic prospects for the future.

In the later decades of the nineteenth century, Blacks also lived under confining social constraints that effectively made them second-class citizens. Segregation laws legally separated the races in public facilities, including trains, schools, churches, and hotels. These “ Jim Crow ” laws humiliated Blacks with a public badge of inferiority. Black members of Congress Robert B. Elliott and James T. Rapier made eloquent speeches in support of legislation to protect African Americans’ civil rights. Congress passed a Civil Rights Act in 1875 that protected equal access to public facilities, but the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in the Civil Rights Cases (1883), arguing that while states could not engage in discriminatory actions, the law incorrectly tried to regulate private acts. Frederick Douglass called the decision an “utter and flagrant disregard of the objects and intentions of the National legislature by which it was enacted, and of the rights plainly secured by the Constitution.” In 1896, however, the Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that segregation laws were constitutional if local and state governments provided Blacks with “separate but equal” facilities. Separate was never equal, particularly in the eyes of Black Americans.

Watch this BRI Homework Help video for a review of the Plessy v. Ferguson case.

Blacks endured escalating violence in the Jim Crow era of the 1890s. White mobs of the time lynched more than 100 Blacks a year. Lynching was summary execution by angry mobs in which the victim was tortured and killed and the body mutilated. Ida B. Wells was a courageous Black journalist who cataloged the horrors of almost 250 lynchings in two pamphlets, A Red Record: Lynchings in the United States and Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases . Despite her efforts, lynching of Black Americans continued into the twentieth century.

The shackle broken by the genius of freedom by E. Sachse & Co., 1874

This 1874 lithograph, “The shackle broken by the genius of freedom,” memorialized Congressional representative Robert B. Elliott’s famous speech in favor of the 1875 Civil Rights Act. Elliott is shown in the center of the image, while the banner at the top contains a quotation from his speech: “What you give to one class you must give to all. What you deny to one you deny to all.”

Black leaders and intellectuals like Wells, Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Du Bois advocated for education as the means to achieve advancement and equality. Black newspapers and citizens’ groups supported their communities and fought back against segregation and racism. Though their strategies differed, their goal was the same: a fuller realization of the Founding principles of equality and justice for all.

W. E. B. Du Bois summed up the Black experience after the Civil War when he stated, “The slave went free, stood a brief moment in the sun; and then moved back again toward slavery.” Du Bois points to the fact that whatever constitutional amendments were intended to protect the natural and civil rights of Blacks, and however determined Blacks were to fight to preserve those rights, they struggled to overcome the numerous legal, political, economic, and social obstacles that white supremacists erected to keep them in a subordinate position. Slavery had distorted republicanism and American ideals before the Civil War, and segregation continued to undermine republican government and equal rights after the conflict had ended.

Black leaders such as Ida B. Wells, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Du Bois worked for Black rights in a variety of ways.

Reading Comprehension Questions

• How did the Reconstruction Amendments and federal laws protect the natural and civil rights of African Americans during the Civil War and Reconstruction?
• Despite constitutional and legal protections, how were Blacks’ constitutional rights restricted during Reconstruction?
• Reflecting on Reconstruction, W. E. B. Du Bois stated: “The slave went free, stood a brief moment in the sun; and then moved back again toward slavery.” In what ways do you think this conclusion was accurate? In what ways might have Du Bois been wrong?

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Jim Crow Laws and Racial Segregation

Introduction : Immediately following the Civil War and adoption of the 13th Amendment, most states of the former Confederacy adopted Black Codes, laws modeled on former slave laws. These laws were intended to limit the new freedom of emancipated African Americans by restricting their movement and by forcing them into a labor economy based on low wages and debt. Vagrancy laws allowed blacks to be arrested for minor infractions. A system of penal labor known as convict leasing was established at this time. Black men convicted for vagrancy would be used as unpaid laborers, and thus effectively re-enslaved.

The Black Codes outraged public opinion in the North and resulted in Congress placing the former Confederate states under Army occupation during Reconstruction. Nevertheless, many laws restricting the freedom of African Americans remained on the books for years. The Black Codes laid the foundation for the system of laws and customs supporting a system of white supremacy that would be known as Jim Crow.

The majority of states and local communities passed “Jim Crow” laws that mandated “separate but equal” status for African Americans.  Jim Crow Laws were statutes and ordinances established between 1874 and 1975 to separate the white and black races in the American South. In theory, it was to create “separate but equal” treatment, but in practice Jim Crow Laws condemned black citizens to inferior treatment and facilities. Education was segregated as were public facilities such as hotels and restaurants under Jim Crow Laws. In reality, Jim Crow laws led to treatment and accommodations that were almost always inferior to those provided to white Americans.

The most important Jim Crow laws required that public schools, public facilities, e.g., water fountains, toilets, and public transportation, like trains and buses, have separate facilities for whites and blacks. These laws meant that black people were legally required to:

• attend separate schools and churches • use public bathrooms marked “for colored only” • eat in a separate section of a restaurant • sit in the rear of a bus

Background : The term “Jim Crow” originally referred to a black character in an old song, and was the name of a popular dance in the 1820s. Around 1828, a minstrel show performer named Thomas “Daddy” Rice developed a routine in which he blacked his face, sang and danced in imitation of an old black man in ragged clothes. By the early 1830s, Rice’s character became tremendously popular, and eventually gave its name to a stereotypical negative view of African Americans as uneducated, shiftless, and dishonest.

Beginning in the 1880s, the term Jim Crow was used as a reference to practices, laws or institutions related to the physical separation of black people from white people. Jim Crow laws in various states required the segregation of races in such common areas as restaurants and theaters. The “separate but equal” standard established by the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Fergurson (1896) supported racial segregation for public facilities across the nation.

A Montgomery, Alabama ordinance compelled black residents to take seats apart from whites on municipal buses. At the time, the “separate but equal” standard applied, but the actual separation practiced by the Montgomery City Lines was hardly equal. Montgomery bus operators were supposed to separate their coaches into two sections: whites up front and blacks in back. As more whites boarded, the white section was assumed to extend toward the back. On paper, the bus company’s policy was that the middle of the bus became the limit if all the seats farther back were occupied. Nevertheless, that was not the everyday reality. During the early 1950s, a white person never had to stand on a Montgomery bus. In addition, it frequently occurred that blacks boarding the bus were forced to stand in the back if all seats were taken there, even if seats were available in the white section.

The Beginning of the End of Segregation

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Louise Parks (February 4, 1913 – October 24, 2005), a resident of Montgomery, Alabama refused to obey bus driver James Blake’s demand that she relinquish her seat to a white man. She was arrested, fingerprinted, and incarcerated. When Parks agreed to have her case contested, it became a cause célèbre in the fight against Jim Crow laws. Her trial for this act of civil disobedience triggered the Montgomery Bus Boycott , one of the largest and most successful mass movements against racial segregation in history, and launched Martin Luther King , Jr., one of the organizers of the boycott, to the forefront of the civil rights movement that fostered peaceful protests to Jim Crow laws.

During the early 1960s numerous civil rights demonstrations and protests were held, particularly in the south. On February 1, 1960, in a Woolworth department store in Greensboro, N.C, four black freshmen from North Carolina A & T College asked to be served at the store’s segregated lunch counter .  The manager refused, and the young men remained seated until closing time. The next day, the protesters returned with 15 other students, and the third day with 300. Before long the idea of nonviolent  sit-in protests spread across the country.

Building on the success of the “sit-ins,” another type of protest was planned using “Freedom Riders.” The Freedom Riders were a volunteer group of activists: men and women, black and white (many from university and college campuses) who roade interstate buses into the deep south to challenge the region’s non-compliance with U.S. Supreme Court decisions ( Morgan v. Virginia and Boynton v. Virginia ) that prohibited segregation in all interstate public transportation facilities. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) sponsored most Freedom Rides, but some were also organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

These and other civil rights demonstrations moved President John F. Kennedy to send to Congress a civil rights bill on June 19, 1963. The proposed legislation offered federal protection to African Americans seeking to vote, to shop, to eat out, and to be educated on equal terms.

To capitalize on the growing public support for the civil rights movement and to put pressure Congress to adopt civil rights legislation, a coalition of the major civil rights groups was formed to plan and organize a large national demonstration in the nation’s capital. The hope was to enlist a hundred thousand people to come to attend a March on Washington DC .

Eventually, the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act made racial segregation and discrimination illegal. The impact of the long history of Jim Crow, however, continues to be felt and assessed in the United States.

For further reading:

Blackmon, D. A. (2008),  Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.  New York, NY: Doubleday.

Brown, N. L. M., & Stentiford, B. M. (Eds). (2014). Jim Crow: A Historical Encyclopedia of the American Mosaic. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood.

Editorial Board(2018) .  Documenting ‘Slavery by Another Name’ in Texas. An African-American burial ground recently unearthed in Texas reveals details about an ugly chapter in the history of the American South. The New York Times,  April 13, 2018. Retrieved from  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/13/opinion/texas-slavery-african-american-graveyard.html

The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University, Big Rapids, MI.  Virtual tour . From website, “The Museum uses objects of intolerance to teach tolerance and promote a more just society.”

Kruesi, K. (2022 October 20). Slavery is on the ballot for voters in 5 US states . Associated Press News

Slavery by Another Name . (Documentary film)

Morrison, A. (2020 December 2). US lawmakers unveil anti-slavery constitutional amendment . Associated Press News.

Virginia Writers Project. (1940) The Negro in Virginia. New York: Hastings House. (See especially Chapter XXII, Black Laws ).

Woodward, C. V. (1966). The Strange Career of Jim Crow.  (2nd rev. ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.

How to Cite this Article (APA Format):  Hansan, J.E. (2011). Jim Crow laws and racial segregation. Social Welfare History Project.  Retrieved [date accessed]  from https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/eras/civil-war-reconstruction/jim-crow-laws-andracial-segregation/

Resources related to this topic may be found in the Social Welfare History Image Portal.

33 Replies to “Jim Crow Laws and Racial Segregation”

How did Jim Crow laws affect black business owners? Were they allowed to operate in white areas? Also Nativ4e-Americans. Cou;ld they only own businesses in the reservations during Jim Crow period? Writing a book. N4eed info urgently. Thank you so much.

This is an important question and a much more involved question than can be answered here. Jim Crow laws had a great impact of economic activity in African American communities. You might start researching the history of African American businesses and black entrepreneurs during Jim Crow by looking at the bibliography in this Wikipedia article, this Smithsonian piece , or this story posted by the Harvard Business School. You might investigate the National Negro Business League (founded in 1900) too. The work of Juliet E. K. Walker may be of interest to you.

Thank you so much for the information you provided. It helped me a great deal. I love reading these pieces of such black spirit in such difficult times. To know that there were black entrepreneurs that rose to great heights despite all the obstacles is very inspiring.

This information should be reposted to ensure it is never lost. So much history can be forgotten if it isn’t kept where it can be seen. All this needs to be heard. I will share this link as far as my reach can go. Thank You.

Why were the Jim Crow Laws legal? Please help!

Jim Crow laws were legal because they were laws passed by state legislatures and communities that were empowered to make laws. They were legal because they were the law until the courts declared them unconstitutional.

I suspect fear may be an indicator. Consider, you have these humans, angry humans that were once treated like animals and were slaves. Then, they gain freedom from their indenture. While it was completely racist at the time, Jim Crow laws went into effect to “suppress” good black people from ever really getting out from under the thumb of the white man – even if not a slave.

The whole affair is distasteful overall.

The way I see it, you have a human heart ? You must be a human, part of the HUMAN RACE. There is no other distinction nor reason to downplay others.

This made me cry. I see how black people still see whites as racists now. I didn’t realize this happened so recent in history.

As mentioned, racial segregation was required in southern states in laws enacted thru 1890. The north did not have such laws, though trains from New York to the south had segregated seating even as they left New York. Most fine restaurant and hotels in the north would not serve blacks, even though it wasn’t required by law. And I don’t believe air travel was ever segregated, even purely within the south, as the laws were developed before air travel and not many blacks (or even whites) could afford air travel.

Was this just in the south? How about the north, or the west?

As described in the article the creation of “Jim Crow” legislation and policies were a product of the Southern states defeated in the Civil War. While it is possible there were similar practices of discrimination in isolation on minorities in other states, such as Native Americans and recent immigrants,those practices do not fit the definition of Jim Crow racial discrimination. For more information, I suggest you search the files of BlackPast or Google “history of racial discrimination”. Best wishes, Jack Hansan

im in school and have to do the jim crow laws which i think is really sad

Jim Crow laws are a very sad part of American history. Good luck with your studies.

My best suggestion is to “Google” the subject and do the research for what you are seeking. Best wishes, JEH

Dear Taniyah Davis: The SWH Project is not the source for what you requested. My suggestion is you Google the matter you want to explore further and follow the leads provided. Regards, Jack Hansan

Last night I watched the movie “Race” about Jesse Owens. Early in the movie, there is a scene showing Owens boarding a bus in Cleveland, Ohio and sitting in the segregated section at the rear of the bus. I know that this was the practice of bus and railroad companies serving southern states, but did northern intercity carriers also segregate accommodations during the 1930s? I tried, unsuccessfully, researching this on the Internet.

Thanks, in advance, for any information you can provide.

Dear David: Like you, I did not realize there was such segregation policies in effect in Northern States. I will look into it when I have the opportunity. In the meantime, you might find some more information on the web site “www.blackpast.org.” Good hunting, Jack Hansan

WF: The best answer is to Google MLA style book. Jack Hansan

[…] overruled because of that. One of these cases introduced the ‘separate but equal’ policy, and racial segregation began. Black people, and all colored people, could not share many facilities, like schools, water […]

this is a very good source for jim crow laws especially for school research projects

Thanks, Jack Hansan

I need information about segregation in restaurants, schools(education), and buses. Thanks

At this time, I am unable to search for what you requested. Good luck with Google. Jack Hansan

[…] Around 1828, Thomas “Daddy” Rice developed a routine in which he blacked his face, dressed in old clothes, and sang and danced in imitation of an old and decrepit black man. Rice published the words to the song, “Jump, Jim Crow,” in 1830. In the 1880s, the term “Jim Crow” (by now a derisive slang for a black man) saw wide usage as a reference to practices, laws or institutions that arise from or sanction, the physical separation of black people from white people.(1) […]

all i need to know is when the jim crows law protest began and ended. i need help. please

After the Civil War Southern states enacted Jim Crow Laws. For example,the State of Tennessee enacted 20 Jim Crow laws between 1866 and 1955, including six requiring school segregation, four which outlawed miscegenation, three which segregated railroads, two requiring segregation for public accommodations, and one which mandated segregation on streetcars. The 1869 law declared that no citizen could be excluded from the University of Tennessee because of race or color but then mandated that instructional facilities for black students be separate from those used by white students. You will have to search for dates other Jim Crow Laws were enacted. Thank you, Jack Hansan

Great information! Thank you!

I loved this source because it gave you specific laws. Maybe some more laws.

The laws listed were great! Maybe more info on specific, straight foward laws.

Can anyone tell me if Greyhound buses had toilets in the buses in 1960? If so, did they have one for “colored” and one for “white” ? If they only had one toilet in the bus, could only the whites use it? Thanks!!!

My suggestion is that you contact Greyhound Bus Line directly.

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Events, news & press, the long shadows of slavery and jim crow: uncovering the economic impact on black americans.

Present-day economic disparities between Black and White Americans are rooted in their ancestral histories, revealing that families enslaved until the Civil War are significantly more disadvantaged than those freed earlier. Education had transformative power: families who gained access to schools after slavery made significant and long-lasting economic progress even when they lived under restrictive Jim Crow regimes.

This essay is based on the working paper “ Jim Crow and Black Economic Progress After Slavery ” by Lukas Althoff and Hugo Reichardt.

Racial inequality has been one of the most stubborn challenges confronting American society. Black Americans continue to face significant disadvantages in economic opportunity and prosperity. For instance, the average wealth of a Black person today is less than one-fifth of that of a White person. Large gaps also prevail in education, income, and numerous other socioeconomic indicators, where Black Americans consistently lag behind their White counterparts.

The roots of these disparities reach deep into America's history, into the dark periods of slavery and Jim Crow. The repercussions of these eras continue to affect the lives of Black Americans. Our study, "Jim Crow and Black Economic Progress After Slavery," sheds light on the long-term economic impact of these historical injustices, revealing a stark economic divide among Black families based on their ancestral history.

My colleague Hugo Reichardt and I delved into millions of records spanning 150 years for individual Black families, providing insights into their evolving economic status and the institutional factors their ancestors encountered. This data allowed us to assess whether a Black family had been enslaved until the Civil War and, after the abolition of slavery, to which specific Jim Crow regimes they were subjected until the 1960s.

We found that Black families enslaved until the Civil War have significantly lower income, education, and wealth today than those whose ancestors were free before the war. These "Free-Enslaved gaps" account for 20 to 70 percent of the corresponding Black-White gaps. Our findings emphasize the enduring effects of slavery and Jim Crow. Racial inequality in the United States is not merely the result of current policies or individual choices. It is deeply rooted in the nation's history.

While the first roots of these disparities among Black families trace back to the era of slavery, we found that state institutions after the end of slavery drove their persistence—regimes called Jim Crow.

Upon gaining freedom from slavery, Black families were eager to pursue formal education. As Booker T. Washington stated in 1907, "It was a whole race trying to go to school." However, Black Americans' ambition was met with fierce resistance, fueling the rise of the new anti-Black institution of Jim Crow.

Jim Crow aimed to lower Black economic progress by racially segregating virtually all areas of life, disenfranchising Black voters, and limiting Black Americans' geographic mobility. 

The intensity of Jim Crow regimes often varied drastically across states. For example, Louisiana passed almost one hundred Jim Crow laws through 1950, while its neighboring state of Texas passed fewer than one-third of that number. 

The largest category of Jim Crow laws targeted education directly. These laws racially segregated schools, unequally divided educational resources between Black and White children, and barred Black parents from participating in the local bodies that governed their children's education. Consistent with the difference in the number of Jim Crow laws that were passed, the quality of Black schools in Louisiana was far worse than in Texas.

Enforced in the Southern states until the mid-twentieth century, Jim Crow systematically disadvantaged descendants of enslaved people. Most families who had been enslaved until the Civil War resided in the states that adopted the strictest regimes after slavery ended. 

This lack of economic opportunities during the Jim Crow era—especially the lack of access to education—is the leading factor in why those Black families have lower levels of education, income, and wealth today.

However, our study also offers hope: access to education can significantly improve the long-run economic outcomes for Black families, even for descendants of those who lived under the most restrictive Jim Crow regimes. 

Around the 1920s, a philanthropic program started to build approximately five thousand schools across the rural South. These schools aimed to undo some of the harm caused by Jim Crow's restrictions on Black education. We compared the long-term outcomes of families whose children could attend such a school with those who could not. Our findings reveal that gaining access to a newly built school in the 1920s and 1930s closed the vast majority of the loss in human capital caused by exposure to strict Jim Crow regimes. 

Even Black Americans today whose fathers had attended such a school in the mid-twentieth century are far more educated and have higher incomes and wealth than Black Americans whose fathers had not been able to attend. This discovery underscores the transformative power of education and its potential to help reduce racial inequality.

Our research has significant implications for present-day policy makers who aim to mitigate the disadvantages faced by the descendants of enslaved people. 

First, our findings underscore the significance of disparities within racial groups that race-specific policies may not adequately address. Take college affirmative action as an example. Studies have shown that the more selective a college, the less likely it is that Black students are descendants of enslaved people. 

While affirmative action enhances racial diversity on campuses, it may fall short of reducing the disadvantages experienced by descendants of families enslaved until the Civil War. Considering an applicant's race and socioeconomic background could make affirmative action more effective.

Second, our study highlights the importance of ensuring access to quality education for all. Policies to improve educational opportunities for Black Americans could play a crucial role in addressing the racial income and wealth gaps. 

During the Jim Crow era, the new construction of schools was especially effective in regions where Black children were most deprived of educational resources. Our research also indicates that such interventions can have substantial effects across generations. Overlooking these effects could result in policies with a smaller scale than optimal ones.

Third, there has been a recent resurgence in discussions around the concept of reparations, or wealth transfers, to the descendants of enslaved individuals. In our study, we emphasize that any evaluation of slavery's legacy should consider both the timing and location of a family's emancipation—how long they were enslaved and the extent of their exposure to Jim Crow laws following slavery. Our research reveals that the present-day circumstances of Black families are significantly influenced by the timing and location of their ancestors' freedom.

It's important to reiterate that our study primarily quantifies the additional challenges faced by those whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War compared to those who gained freedom earlier. It's worth noting that many free Black Americans had been enslaved in earlier periods, and all Black Americans faced discrimination due to slavery and Jim Crow, regardless of their specific family history.

While some argue that reparations should only be given to those who can trace their lineage back to enslaved ancestors, our findings suggest that post-slavery institutions also negatively impacted Black Americans whose ancestors were free before the Civil War. This group may find it more challenging to provide proof of their ancestors' enslavement, as it occurred decades before the Civil War.

In sum, our results serve as a reminder of the enduring economic impact of slavery and Jim Crow laws on racial inequality. It underscores the need for policies that address these historical injustices and promote economic equity. As we strive to build a fairer society, we must understand and address the historical roots of today's economic disparities. 

Indeed, even "race-blind" policies can inadvertently interact with differences caused by historical institutions. Without this crucial understanding, systemic discrimination—the exposure to ongoing discrimination because of past injustices—will likely continue to be at the core of racial inequality in America.

Read the full working paper here .

Lukas Althoff is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR). He will be joining Yale School of Management as an Assistant Professor of Economics in 2024.

Research briefings highlight the findings of research featured in the  Long-Run Prosperity Working Paper Series and broaden our understanding of what drives long-run economic growth.

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Jim Crow Laws: a Historical Overview

This essay about the Jim Crow laws offers an overview of their historical context, implementation, and eventual abolition. Originating in the post-Reconstruction era, these laws institutionalized racial segregation and discrimination in the American South, affecting every aspect of African Americans’ lives. The essay highlights how the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision legitimized these practices under the guise of “separate but equal.” It also touches on the significant impact of these laws, including their role in the Great Migration and the ignition of the Civil Rights Movement, leading to landmark legislation like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The piece concludes by reflecting on the lasting legacy of Jim Crow laws and the continued fight against racial injustice, emphasizing the importance of learning from this dark period in American history.

How it works

The phrase “Jim Crow laws” hearkens back to a somber epoch in American annals, where racial segregation was not merely customary but enshrined in legislation. Originating in the latter part of the 19th century and lingering until the civil rights triumphs of the 1960s, these statutes were a harsh reality for African Americans, particularly in the Southern regions. This in-depth exploration of the Jim Crow era unveils the genesis of these laws, the daily hardships they imposed, and the relentless struggle that culminated in their eventual dissolution.

Named after a character from minstrel shows that derided African Americans, Jim Crow became synonymous with the legal enshrinement of racial bias. The United States Supreme Court’s 1896 verdict in Plessy v. Ferguson sanctioned these statutes, birthing the “separate but equal” doctrine that, in practice, was anything but equal. Existence under Jim Crow laws was a perpetual reminder of one’s designated inferiority, influencing every facet of life from educational opportunities and public transportation to suffrage.

The reverberations of these statutes were far-reaching. They spurred the Great Migration, as African Americans sought solace and respect away from the oppressive South, and they ignited the Civil Rights Movement. Icons such as Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. not only contested these laws but also challenged the moral conscience of a nation, leading to pivotal reforms like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. These legislative measures didn’t merely annul the statutes; they heralded a transformative shift towards parity.

Contemplating the Jim Crow laws today serves as more than a historical exercise; it serves as a poignant reminder of the battle against entrenched racism and the ongoing odyssey towards authentic equality. While significant progress has been made, the specter of Jim Crow persists as a reminder of the necessity for unwavering vigilance and advocacy in combating racial inequity. It remains a chapter of American history that, though concluded, still whispers instructive lessons we would do well to heed.

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Home — Essay Samples — Social Issues — Racism — Jim Crow Laws

Essays on Jim Crow Laws

What makes a good jim crow laws essay topics.

When it comes to writing an essay on Jim Crow Laws, choosing the right topic is crucial. A good essay topic should be thought-provoking, relevant, and engaging. To brainstorm and choose an essay topic, consider the historical significance of the Jim Crow Laws, the impact on society, and the relevance to current events. Additionally, think about the specific aspect of the Jim Crow Laws that you find interesting and want to explore further. A good essay topic should also be specific enough to allow for in-depth analysis and research, but broad enough to provide room for discussion and interpretation. Ultimately, a good essay topic should spark interest and curiosity in the reader, and offer a fresh perspective on the subject matter.

Best Jim Crow Laws Essay Topics

• The role of music in the fight against Jim Crow Laws
• The impact of the Jim Crow Laws on education
• The portrayal of Jim Crow Laws in literature and media
• The intersection of gender and race under Jim Crow Laws
• The influence of the Jim Crow Laws on the civil rights movement
• The economic implications of the Jim Crow Laws
• The legacy of the Jim Crow Laws in today's society
• The psychological effects of living under Jim Crow Laws
• The resistance and resilience of individuals under Jim Crow Laws
• The role of religion in justifying the Jim Crow Laws
• The global impact of the Jim Crow Laws
• The parallels between the Jim Crow Laws and modern-day discrimination
• The role of the Supreme Court in challenging the Jim Crow Laws
• The impact of Jim Crow Laws on healthcare and public health
• The representation of Jim Crow Laws in visual arts
• The cultural impact of Jim Crow Laws on African American communities
• The role of grassroots activism in challenging the Jim Crow Laws
• The intersection of class and race under Jim Crow Laws
• The influence of Jim Crow Laws on voting rights and political participation
• The role of white allies in the fight against Jim Crow Laws

Jim Crow Laws essay topics Prompts

• Imagine you are a musician during the Jim Crow era. How would you use your platform to challenge the racial segregation and discrimination imposed by the Jim Crow Laws?
• Write a letter to a young student living under the Jim Crow Laws, offering advice and guidance on navigating the challenges and injustices they face.
• Create a visual art piece that captures the essence of resistance and resilience in the face of the Jim Crow Laws.
• Imagine you are a journalist reporting on the impact of the Jim Crow Laws. What stories would you tell and how would you use your platform to advocate for change?
• Write a short story from the perspective of an individual living under the Jim Crow Laws, highlighting the everyday struggles and moments of defiance in the face of oppression.

Jim Crow Laws

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The History and Development of Jim Crow Laws in America

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Analysis of "The New Jim Crow" by Michelle Alexander

Segregation in schools: crumbling jim crow law, jim crow - a symbol for racial oppression of african americans, race issue in the united states from civil rights movement, relevant topics.

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The ‘Lost Cause’ That Built Jim Crow

Southern “Redeemers” snuffed out the first black power movement.

By Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Professor Gates is the host of the documentary “ Reconstruction: America After the Civil War. ”

Joe Biden launched his presidential bid in April with a bold defense of the principle that “all men are created equal,” a principle he rightly argued that, from Thomas Jefferson on, “we haven’t always lived up to.” But, Mr. Biden added, this is something “we have never before walked away from,” and that’s where he went wrong. Like most Americans, the former vice president forgets the period ironically known as Redemption, the movement that followed the abolition of slavery and ended 12 years of America’s first experiment in interracial democracy — Reconstruction — with a systematic, multitiered, terrorist-backed rollback, when the defeated Confederate South, as the saying went, “rose again.”

The Redeemer base consisted primarily of white Southern Democrats whose most urgent intention was to neutralize the black vote, which under the protection of United States troops during Reconstruction had shown astonishing power in sending Republican majorities to Southern s tatehouses. (It is worth remembering that Democrats and Republicans occupied positions opposite to those of today’s parties with regard to “states’ rights” until around 1964 . ) In what we might think of as the first “Freedom Summer,” in 1867, some 80 percent of the black men eligible to vote in 10 of the 11 former Confederate states registered, and soon they were sending delegates to new state constitutional conventions on the basis of equal citizenship. Almost no one had anticipated the passion of the freedmen for the franchise (women didn’t get the vote until 1920), and in the 1868 presidential election, the ballots marked by these black men provided the margin of victory in the popular vote for Ulysses S. Grant. Black power had reared its head, and with it came more muscular state governments embracing investments in infrastructure and the region’s first statewide public school systems.

In our post-Great Migration America, it’s easy to forget that 90 percent of all African-American people lived in the South as late as 1910, and their presence represented a formidable threat to the former Confederates. This was especially so in South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana, which had majority-black populations, as well as in nearby Florida, Alabama and Georgia. During Reconstruction, South Carolinians made black officeholders a majority in the lower house of the state’s General Assembly and celebrated the service of black lieutenant governors, a secretary of state, a treasurer, a state Supreme Court justice and a speaker of the House. Overall, more than 2,000 black officeholders would be elected during Reconstruction throughout the South, including, by 1901, a total of 20 black congressmen and two United States senators, both from Mississippi. The year 1901 denoted a mournful milestone in black history. By that year, Southern efforts to disenfranchise black men had been brutally effective, and no African-American would represent a Southern state in Congress again for more than 70 years.

White supremacists feared black Republican domination; they viewed it as the gravest threat to white supremacy since the nation’s founding (besides “brute” black masculinity and miscegenation, that is). There was nothing they wouldn’t do to overthrow it, constitutional amendments and proclamations of the federal government be damned. “So determined were most white Southerners to maintain their own way of life that they resorted to fraud, intimidation and murder in order to re-establish their own control of the state governments,” the historian Rayford W. Logan wrote in his classic work, “The Betrayal of the Negro.” In essence, he said, “the new civil war within the Southern states stemmed from an adamant determination to restore white supremacy.”

The first step in the Redeemers’ plan was to win back Southern statehouses by any means necessary. “Nothing but bloodshed and a good deal of it could answer the purpose of redeeming the state from Negro and carpetbag rule,” said the notoriously racist South Carolina governor and United States senator Ben Tillman in 1909, pondering the causes of a massacre of black people more than a quarter-century before, in 1876, in Hamburg, S.C. The outcome of that massacre : The Democrats took back the state in that year’s elections through intimidation, and one of their first actions was to close the integrated state university and reopen it for white students only.

Though Reconstruction’s end is often identified as the Hayes-Tilden Compromise of 1877, the final blow would be the Supreme Court’s decision in 1883 to strike down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, to which black leaders responded immediately with grave dismay. At what we might think of as the race’s funeral for freedom, at a gathering held at Washington’s First Congregational Church on Oct. 19, 1883, the minister resident to Haiti and future congressman John Mercer Langston spoke. Backed onstage by other leaders of the race, including Frederick Douglass, the former senator Blanche K. Bruce and Richard T. Greener, Harvard’s first black graduate, Langston intoned, “The Supreme Court would seem desirous of remanding us back to that old passed condition” of slavery. “This is incomprehensible.”

The next step in the rollback was to suppress the black vote itself. With the federal government in full retreat from its responsibilities to protect African-American voters, coupled with a complicit Supreme Court in Washington, white Southern Democrats, beginning with the “Mississippi Plan” in 1890, called for new state constitutions that would impose a variety of voting restrictions to subvert the 15th Amendment’s ban on racial discrimination. Among them were poll taxes, literacy tests and residency requirements. As Mississippi’s future governor James Vardaman succinctly admitted in 1900: “There is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter. Mississippi’s constitutional convention was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the nigger from politics. Not the ‘ignorant and vicious’ … but the nigger. ” Other Southern states followed this blueprint, culminating with Georgia in 1908.

Whatever the terms of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender to General Grant at Appomattox, the Confederacy didn’t die in April 1865; it simply morphed. Frederick Douglass put it this way in 1894 in “Lessons of the Hour,” his last major speech: “The cause lost in the war is the cause regained in peace, and the cause gained in peace is the cause lost in war.” Redemption was “the defeat of emancipation,” he continued, “the determination of slavery to perpetuate itself, if not under one form, then under another,” and, he added, “the folly of endeavoring to retain the new wine of liberty in the old bottles of slavery.”

Those “old bottles” of the dawning Jim Crow era included the development of sharecropping and the nefarious convict lease system, to which we can trace the roots of mass black incarceration; the lynching of more than 4,000 black people by 1950, according to Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative; segregation in public places and in every field of opportunity; and a brilliantly executed propaganda campaign that successfully changed the narrative of the cause of the Civil War from freeing the slaves to preserving states’ rights and a people’s noble way of life, the so-called Lost Cause.

Central to that propaganda campaign was the proliferation of an ocean of images of black people as subhuman, as well as what was in effect our country’s first culture war. It was masterfully executed by Mildred Lewis Rutherford, the “historian general” of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, who published a textbook “measuring rod” to verify that any account of the Civil War or Reconstruction fell within the “proper” guidelines. Not only were black achievements of Reconstruction to be undone; even their memory was so dangerous that it, too, had to be edited and erased.

So urgent was the rollback of Reconstruction that it became the subject of Hollywood’s first blockbuster movie, D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” a silent film that silenced the truth. We tend to think of it as a defense of slavery, but it was actually a radically racist critique of black achievement during Reconstruction, especially of black lawmakers, who were the living embodiment of the Reconstruction amendments — in particular the 14th, with its promise of birthright citizenship, which President Trump dreams of undoing. Rutherford on her front and Griffith on his sought to fulfill the mission of Redemption, and succeeded: to memorialize the Old South in the new mythology of the Lost Cause — indeed, to make America great again. Out of this movement to take control of the narrative came the Confederate monuments that have been generating such heated debate in recent years, particularly since President Trump took office, barking out a narrative frighteningly similar to that of Redemption.

J ust over a month before Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, in a speech at New York’s Carnegie Hall commemorating the centenary of the birth of W.E.B. Du Bois and the significance of Du Bois’s own defiant defense of what he called “Black Reconstruction,” he paused to reflect on the lasting impact of the Redemptionist narrative about “the Negro’s role in the Reconstruction years.” Where Du Bois had implored the freedmen to “fight against ridicule and monstrous caricature, against every refinement of cruelty and gross insult,” King, too, sought to make his audience see that “it was a conscious and deliberate manipulation of history and the stakes were high.” If “Negroes wallowed in corruption, opportunism, displayed spectacular stupidity, were wanton, evil and ignorant, their case was made. They would have proved that freedom was dangerous in the hands of inferior beings.” The hideous, lingering result was that “the collective mind of America became poisoned with racism and stunted with myths.”

The story of the Redemptionist overthrow of Reconstruction shatters all notions that history is a straight line drawn inexorably toward progress, and in that shattering there is a lesson for us all: vigilance. Perhaps the most surprising fact about Reconstruction is that its rollback has lasted far longer than Reconstruction itself, and it continues to this day. President Barack Obama’s eight years in office unleashed tremendous racial resentment and fear, capitalized upon shamelessly first by Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign and then, mercilessly and unendingly, in his presidency. We can count on Mr. Trump to outdo himself in his campaign for a second term. As we look to resist this Neo-Redemption era, we owe it to ourselves and our children to study again and again the history of the rise and fall of Reconstruction, because the problems that emerged after the Civil War have never been adequately resolved. And the South’s Redemption teaches us that achievements thought to be permanent and lasting — including the Reconstruction amendments themselves — can be diminished and even demolished.

“Strange things have happened of late and are still happening,” Douglass himself worried aloud in that last major speech of his. More than 200 years after his birth, I can’t help wondering what he’d say about the current state of affairs in our democracy. Horrified by the scourge of lynching a generation on from what was supposed to have been a “new birth of freedom” for black and white Americans, Douglass, in surveying the devastating shadows cast over the final years of his life, said that “some of these” developments “tend to dim the luster of the American name, and chill the hopes once entertained for the cause of American liberty.” He continued: “When the moral sense of a nation begins to decline and the wheel of progress to roll backward, there is no telling how low the one will fall or where the other may stop. The downward tendency already manifest has swept away some of the most important safeguards.”

And then he posed a question still haunting us today: “What’s next?”

Henry Louis Gates Jr. ( @HenryLouisGates ), a university professor and the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African-American Research at Harvard, is the author, most recently of “ Stony the Road : Reconstruction, White Supremacy and the Rise of Jim Crow.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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Black Codes, Jim Crow, and Segregation Impact on African Americans in the US Essay

Introduction.

Among the most significant icons in the US history was the slavery incident that loomed before and to some extent after the civil war. Slavery had various social, economic cultural and political implications for both the African Americans and the Whites after the civil war and in as much as it was officially abolished by the Lincoln administration, the African Americans still suffered the same if not worse unjust treatment in the hands of the whites as before when the trade was legal.

This paper shall therefore set out to discuss slavery in American after the civil war. The social, political, economic, and cultural effect that this institute had on African Americans shall be discussed so as to further provide more understanding to this dark section in our country’s history.

After the civil war, the united state government undertook a nearly impossible task in a bid to abolish slavery. To facilitate this, they incorporated various amendments into the constitution to further assist in accomplishing this objective. The first notion steered towards this directive was the thirteenth amendment which was enacted on December 18 th 1865 under the proclamation of the then secretary of state.

It stated that, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, nor any place subject to their jurisdiction [1] .” This amendment aimed at abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude of the Blacks. It was the first of the reconstruction acts enacted post the civil war.

However, little to no change was experienced by the Black Americans as they were still being treated as slaves. As such, this amendment was soon after improved by the 14 th amendment which stated that, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws [2] .” This amendment gave the African Americans citizenship and a right to own property but little constitution rights.

It was later abridged by the 15 th amendment which stated that; “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. [3] ” this amendment gave the African American males right to vote in the general elections during the reconstruction era post civil war.

Despite these changes, no visible change was experienced by the African Americans as compared to the time before the civil war when slavery was still a legal practice.

The political Impact of Black Codes, Jim Crow, and Segregation on African Americans in the United States

The term “reconstruction era” refers to the period between 1865 and 1877 after the great American civil war. It is the time in the US history whereby the governments of the various states put in motion efforts in a bid to solve the social, economic and political problems that came about due to the establishment of the 11 confederate states union that had disintegrated before or during the war.

This was a very important period in the history of the African Americans as it presented them with an opportunity to transit from bondage to freedmen all the while experiencing for the first time complete integration into the American society as citizens. Kennedo states that; “It was the period where blacks were first completely freed from slavery and tasted the fruits of citizenship for a while.

During Reconstruction, blacks were granted civil rights, the right to sue and sit on juries, the right to vote and hold office, the right to own property, and all of the other benefits that all other citizens in America had. There was even a black Governor of Louisiana [4] .” The decision to abolish slavery after the wart was crucial to the US if it intended to maintain and rebuild the confederate union.

Most of the southern states did not agree with the idea of granting the African Americans freedom. As a result, the Black Codes were established in 1866 with a clear purpose of limiting the rights given to the freed African Americans.

Within these codes were strict regulations prohibiting “Negros” and freedmen from visiting the towns without permission from their masters, owning property within the city limits, preaching or holding meetings without permission from the mayor and sitting or contributing in meetings attended by white people [5] .

This southern reaction is believed to have emanated from the emancipation proclamation passed in congress. These codes made the lives of the Blacks even harder than it was during slavery because they were now being targeted by the laws that had sworn to protect them.

The civil right bill did not suffice in protecting the African Americans from the racial injustices and inequalities. In a bid to justify these racial tendencies, governments in the US enacted the Jim Crow laws between 1876 and 1965. These were state and local laws in the US that supported racial segregation in public places such as public schools, transportation, restaurants and entertainment venues as well as restrooms for Whites and Blacks [6] .

These laws by default resulted in inferior treatment of the Blacks in terms of accommodations, resource allocation, quality of products and services and even prices. Consequently the Black community in the States experienced a number of economic and social disadvantages due to the enactment of these laws in comparison to the Whites. Despite all these hardships, the African Americans still increased in numbers and managed to survive under these conditions.

To counter this, the segregation worsened to a point where the Blacks were not allowed in some premises owned by whites, localities (residential estates occupied by whites), or even churches. This means that the Blacks lived in different areas away from the White communities and had their own religious and economic systems different from that of the Whites.

In 1896, the Supreme Court decided that the Louisiana law supporting racial segregation under the doctrine of separate but equal was constitutional. This ruling was brought about in the Plessy v. Ferguson case. According to the Jim Crow laws, transportation of the Blacks was also segregated and as such, they had their own railway cars different from the ones used by the whites.

However, several people in the Black community disagreed with the “act 111” which supported this segregation. In a bid to over turn it, they planned a way through which they would have a chance to air their petitions in the Supreme Court and consequently, have this act removed.

They used Plessy who was light skinned to buy a ticket for a white’s only train car. Plessy being a 1/8 th black American citizen was arrested in 1892 for boarding a car designated for the whites. Under the Louisiana laws, he was considered as a black person and as such was arrested for civil disobedience.

The case managed to get to the Supreme Court and after the proceedings, Ferguson won the case. In 1879, Plessy pleaded guilty to the crime. This case sealed the foundation of the segregation laws and was used to further justify the segregation of color practiced thereafter [7] . In fact, it clarified the fact that segregation was legal as long as the facilities provided to both races were of the same quality.

The southern States however did not provide the Blacks with quality facilities or even equal resources. This case actually justified the separation of race and inequalities in the States up to 1954 when it was overturned by the ruling made by the Supreme Court as pertaining to the “Brown v. Board of Education” case.

In addition to this, the congress passed the freedman act post civil war in March 1865. This act was established in order to punish the confederates who refused to surrender 60 days after the civil war [8] .

The act stipulated that the slaves of such people would be freed. The congress therefore established this bureau to help the refugees and slaves left destitute due to the civil war. The main aim of this bureau was to assist these people settle, acquire land and to protect them from their former masters during their transition to freedom.

Additionally, this bureau helped in developing schools, hospitals and other social amenities for the slaves and the citizens who had participated in the war but were displaced or otherwise left penniless by the whole ordeal. However, the Jim Crow laws to a large extent prohibited the effectiveness of this act through the limitations pertaining to land ownership and segregations.

The social Impact

Most laws that were enacted to advocate for racial equality post civil war had adverse negative effects on the social lives of the blacks in the United States after the civil war. They all seemed to fuel racism among the people. Collectively, these laws were designed to oppress the blacks and restrict their rights.

As such, there were wide spread inequalities based on color (race). Generally, there was no equality especially since the facilities offered to the whites were far more superior as compared to those afforded to the Blacks. Also the fact that the Blacks went to different schools, restaurants, restrooms and even used different transport systems clearly showed increased racism in the United States.

The second class status was also prevalent to the African Americans after the civil war. This was mainly brought about by the fact that the Whites believed that they were a more superior race than the Black Americans and even though they (blacks) were citizens and entitled to the same rights, they were lower than the whites in terms of intellect and social status.

As such, the Blacks could not work in certain positions reserved for the whites, they drunk from different water fountains, stayed in poor environments and houses as compared to the whites and also were not allowed to contribute in any discussions chaired by the white people.

In addition to this, some faction groups and organizations were formed in order to terrorize and oppress the Blacks. One such group was the Ku Klux Klan which was established in 1866 in Tennessee with a set goal to ensure that the Blacks who had won the right to vote in the 1867 elections did not exercise this right.

It was a violent and racist group composed of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASP) who envisioned on a white protestant south [9] . Their main intent was to spread fear among the blacks who lived in the south and they did this by raping, castrating murdering and burning of the churches and houses of the poor black people.

The members claimed to undo what the civil war and the voting commissions had done to the US. In 1915, the organization diverted its wrath to the immigrants and Catholic Church who they claimed were anti US activists by supporting the Blacks. The presence of such violent groups instilled fear into the African Americans to an Extent whereby they were afraid of walking the streets, going to church or even interacting with each other factors which greatly impaired their social lives.

The rise of such factions brought about various human injustices like lynching of the Blacks, brutalities some leading to death and various forms of intimidation. In particular, lynching involved mob justice where one person would be beaten to a pulp by a crowd of people as a form of punishment. These acts of lawlessness were further fueled by the fact that even the law enforcement agencies were not fond of the Black communities.

Many cases were reported where crosses were burnt in the Black communities by members of the KKK as an intimidation technique used to scare the Blacks from voting or interacting with the whites. In addition to this, the whites used signs and symbols to separate the places that these races were allowed to visit.

Consequently, this led to regional segregation whereby markets and entertainment venues as well as residential areas for the blacks were isolated far from those of the whites. In some states, the use of signs was supported by the laws to further dictate and enforce the segregation laws.

The economic Impact

After the civil war, most of the blacks demanded for repatriations for the slavery. However these pleas fell into deaf ears and as such, poverty loomed among the Black community. This situation was worsened by the establishment of the Black code laws which prohibited the Blacks from property ownership including land and housing [10] .

In addition to this, Blacks under these laws were not allowed to work in certain positions and were left with very few options such as working in the white farms and other odd jobs which attracted very low salaries and wages. On the same note, their businesses could not thrive due to the fact that the whites could not buy from the blacks or even supply them with the products to sell. All these factors led to an increase in poverty amongst the Black community.

Since the Blacks could not own land, they had no choice but to rent out pieces of land from the whites a fact that led to the rise of sharecropping. This system seemed to thrive since most white farmers had large chunks of land and little money to pay laborers especially after the war.

Consequently, they struck a bargain with the black laborers entailing that they attend to the land for a small fee, shelter and basic provisions a factor that seemed to cater for the immediate needs of both races under the prevailing circumstances.

To further ensure that the Blacks were occupied at all times, the governments and local states put in place vagrancy laws. These were among the black code laws and dictated that all unemployed or wandering Blacks be arrested.

These laws were specifically designed to arrest the Blacks since the penalty fees were too high and most of them could not foot the bill. As a result, they could be sent to county labor or be hired as workers for private people. As such, the laws ensured that there was enough labor to go around for the white farmers.

The cultural Impact of Black Codes, Jim Crow, and Segregation on African Americans in the United States

As mentioned earlier, these laws seemed to advocate for racism and segregation against the blacks. As a result, they affected the cultural bearing of the African Americans in all aspects. For example, the racism and segregation led to the establishment of “black churches”.

Since the Blacks were not allowed to attend white churches, they had to establish their own religious foundations. These protestant churches focused on developing hope for the blacks who experienced hardships and oppression for the whites [11] . Eventually, as the churches grew larger, they offered education to their members in a bid to improve their status and chances of bettering their lives.

The music developed by the Blacks during this era was mainly of blues and jazz nature. These were somber songs sang to provide hope to the Blacks through the hardships that they faced. In addition to this, the rhythms were thought to have originated from the African continent and were perfected in the states. The Blacks were known to sing as they worked in the fields. These songs were later modified and improved over the years to form the now known Blues and jazz.

As per the sports, the African Americans were still segregated and discriminated upon. However, there were some exceptions such as Moses Fleetwood who was known as the first Black player to play the baseball major leagues with the whites despite his race, or other athletes who showed exceptional talent in the sporting arenas.

In addition to this, the Blacks also developed their own Negro league which they used to facilitate communication and interactions amongst themselves since visiting each other was risky under the vagrancy laws.

The food common to the African Americans was called soul food. The term originated from the fact that the term “soul” referred to the Black culture for example soul music or soul train. The origin of the food traces its roots back to the African continent and was introduced to America through the transatlantic slave trade in the late 1870s. The cuisine included meals made of sorghum, rice, cassavas and turnips. As such, these meals became the dietary staples common to the enslaved Africans.

During the Jim Crow era, education to the African Americans was viewed as a source of inspiration to fight for change against the oppression that prevailed for a very long time.

In as much as the Blacks faced various challenges in accessing educational facilities, the church played a pivotal role in providing access to such amenities. The Blacks were realized to be high academic achievers due to their motivation and persistence in a bid to get a better life and to fight for a better future for the generations to come.

Due to the oppressive state that the blacks were experiencing in the states, most of them opted to find ways to migrate back to their mother land. The whites on the other hand oppressed and harassed the Black folks with an aim of pushing them back to Africa. As such, the Blacks believed that the whites were superior to them and figured that there would be more chances and opportunities for them back in Africa.

Consequently, this led to an increase in migration of the Blacks to other countries such as Liberia where they felt less intimidated by the whites and at the same time got a feeling of belonging after the hard and struggle full life [12] .

On the same note, most of these African Americans migrated from the south to escape the heightened discrimination and danger that prevailed in those areas. They moved to the north hoping to get better lives especially due to the fact that industrialization in the north was on the emerging stages and required lots of laborers.

Slavery and segregation tormented the lives of the African Americans at the wake of the 19 th century. Soon after the end of the civil war, slavery was abolished by law but was still practiced by most whites and felt by the black community who instead of enjoying their hard earned freedom lived in fear and anxiety all the while facing racism, social discrimination, injustices and violent crimes which were directed to them by the same people who had sworn through the constitution to protect them and value their lives and humanity as equals.

However, the African Americans surprised the whole world by persisting through it all until such a time that they would realize true freedom and equality among the various races.

Bibliography

Lomotey, K. Encyclopedia of African American Education. SAGE, 2009.

Mink, G. and O’Connor, A. Poverty in the United States: an encyclopedia of history, politics, and policy, Volume 1. ABC-CLIO, 2004.

Pinn, A., B. African American Religious Cultures. ABC-CLIO, 2009.

Shulman, S. The impact of immigration on African Americans. Transaction Publishers, 2004.

Appiah, K., A. and Gates, H., L. Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience 5-Volume Set. Oxford University Press, 2005.

United States senate. Thirteenth Amendment-Slavery and Involuntary Servitude. Web.

The charters of freedom. AMENDMENT XIV. Web.

U.S. Constitution Online. U.S. Constitution Online. Amendment 15 . Web.

Kennedo, D. Reconstruction and its Effects on African Americans. Web.

Page Smith. Trial by fire: a people’s history of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Penguin Books, 1990.

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• History learning. The KKK and racial problems.
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• Steven Shulman. The impact of immigration on African Americans. (Transaction Publishers, 2004), 127.
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• Jim Crow Laws in the Reconstruction Era
• Jim Crow Laws and Their Effect on the Black American Community
• Jim Crow Laws for African Americans in the South
• Law History From Jim Crow to Civil Rights Movement
• Lynching, Segregation, and Jim Crow Laws
• Jim Crow Policy and Black Power Movement
• The New Jim Crow System Related to the Black Population
• Growing Up in Jim Crow Times
• Glenda Gilmore: Gender and Jim Crow
• Institutionalized Racism From John Brown Raid to Jim Crow Laws
• Perspectives in African American History and Culture
• Civil Rights Movement
• The American Civil Right Movement
• Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade History
• Martin Luther King's “Letter From a Birmingham Jail”

Who Was Jim Crow?

Fifty years ago, the voting Rights Act targeted the laws and practices of Jim Crow. Here’s where the name came from.

Geography, Social Studies, U.S. History

Thomas Dartmouth Rice was a white American stage performer in the early 1830s. He is best known for popularizing the derogatory practice of blackface with an act called “Jump, Jim Crow” (or “Jumping Jim Crow”).

Portrait from the New York Public Library Digital Collections

In 1944, the Detroit, Michigan, chapter of the NAACP held a mock-funeral for him. In 1963, participants in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom symbolically buried him. Racial discrimination existed throughout the United States in the 20th century, but it had a special name in the South— Jim Crow . Fifty years ago, this Thursday [August 6,2015], U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson tried to bury Jim Crow  by signing the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law. The Voting Rights Act and its predecessor, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, fought racial discrimination laws in the South by banning legal segregation in public accommodations and outlawing the poll taxes and tests that were used to stop African Americans from voting. Today, we still use the term “ Jim Crow ” to describe that system of segregation and discrimination in the South. But the system’s namesake isn’t actually southern. Jim Crow came from the North. “Jump, Jim Crow” Thomas Dartmouth Rice, a white man, was born in New York City in 1808. He devoted himself to the theater in his 20s, and in the early 1830s, he began performing the act that would make him famous: He painted his face black and did a song and dance he claimed were inspired by an enslaved Black person he saw. The act was called “Jump, Jim Crow” (or “Jumping Jim Crow”). “He would put on not only blackface makeup, but shabby dress that imitated in his mind—and white people’s minds of the time—the dress and aspect and demeanor of the southern enslaved black person,” says Eric Lott, author of  Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class,  and professor of English and American Studies at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Rice’s routine was a hit in New York City, New York, one of many of places in the North where working-class whites could see blackface minstrelsy , which was quickly becoming a dominant form of theater and a leading source for popular music in the United States. (Performing in blackface is highly offensive to this day.) Rice took his act on tour, even going as far as England; and as his popularity grew, his stage name seeped into the culture. Jim Crow was a harmful caricature . The show exploited stereotyped speech, movement, and physical features attributed to Black people to mock them. It entertained, and miseducated, whites at the expense of Blacks, all for Rice's financial benefit. “‘Jumping Jim Crow ’ and just ‘ Jim Crow ’ generally sort of became shorthand—or one shorthand, anyway—for describing African Americans in this country,” Lott says. “So much so,” he says, “that by the time of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s  Uncle Tom’s Cabin , which was twenty years later in 1852,” one character refers to another as Jim Crow . (In a strange full-circle, Rice later played Uncle Tom in blackface stage adaptations of the novel, which often reversed the book’s abolitionist message.) Regardless of whether the term “ Jim Crow ” existed before Rice took it to the stage, his act helped popularize it as a derogatory term for African Americans. To call someone “ Jim Crow ” wasn’t just to point out his or her skin color: It was to reduce that person to the kind of caricature that Rice performed on stage. From the Theater to the Legislature After the Civil War , southern states passed laws that discriminated against African Americans who had just been released from slavery; and as early as the 1890s, these laws had gained a nickname. In 1899, North Carolina’s  Goldsboro Daily Argus  published an article subtitled “How ‘Capt. Tilley’ of the A. & N.C. Road Enforces the Jim Crow Law.” “Travelers on the Atlantic & North Carolina Railroad during the present month have noted the drawing of the color line in the passenger coaches,” the paper reported. “Captain Tilley … is unceasing in his efforts to see that the color line, otherwise the Jim Crow law, is literally and fearfully enforced.” Experts don’t really know how a racist performance in the North came to represent racist laws and policies in the South. But they can speculate . Since the phrase originated in blackface minstrelsy , Lott says that it’s almost “perversely accurate … that it should come to be the name for official segregation and state-sponsored racism .” “I think probably in the popular white mind,” he says, “it was just used because that’s just how they referred to black people.” “Sometimes in history a movie comes out or a book comes out and it just changes the language … and you can point at it,” says David Pilgrim, Director of the  Jim Crow Museum and Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan. “And in just this case,” he says, “I think it just evolved. And I think it was from many sources.” However, it happened, the new meaning stuck. Blackface minstrelsy ’s popularity faded (but never died) and T.D. Rice is barely remembered. Most people today don’t know his name. But everybody knows Jim Crow . This article was originally published August 6, 2015.

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October 19, 2023

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