The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws introduced in the Southern United States from the late 19th century to the mid-20th century that enforced racial segregation. The origin of the term Jim Crow is obscure, but probably refers to a minstrel show song called "Jump Jim Crow".Duane T. Loynes, Sr., "Jim Crow" in Encyclopedia of Critical Whiteness Studies in Education (2021) pp.331–340 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004444836_044 Formal and informal racial segregation policies were present in other areas of the United States as well, even as several states outside the South had banned discrimination in public accommodations and voting.Bubar, Joe (March 9, 2020). "The Jim Crow North", Upfront Magazine - Scholastic. Retrieved June 7, 2021.Discrimination in Access to Public Places: A Survey of State and Federal Accommodations Laws, 7 N.Y.U. Rev.L. & Soc.Change 215, 238 (1978). Southern laws were enacted by white-dominated state legislatures (Redeemers) to disenfranchise and remove political and economic gains made by African Americans during the Reconstruction era. Such continuing racial segregation was also supported by the successful Lily-white movement.
In practice, Jim Crow laws mandated racial segregation in all public facilities in the South, beginning in the 1870s. Jim Crow laws were upheld in 1896 in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the Supreme Court laid out its "separate but equal" legal doctrine concerning facilities for African Americans. Public education had essentially been segregated since it began during the Reconstruction era after 1863. Companion laws excluded most African Americans from the vote in the South.
Although in theory the "equal" segregation doctrine governed public facilities and transportation, facilities for African Americans were consistently inferior and underfunded compared to facilities for white Americans; sometimes, there were no facilities for black people at all. Far from equality, as a body of law, Jim Crow institutionalized economic, educational, political and social disadvantages and second-class citizenship for most African Americans living in the United States. After the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded in 1909, it became involved in a sustained public protest and campaigns against the Jim Crow laws, and the so-called "separate but equal" doctrine.
In 1954, segregation of public schools (state-sponsored) was declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. In some states, it took many years to implement this decision, while the Warren Court continued to rule against Jim Crow legislation in other cases such as Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States (1964). Most remaining Jim Crow laws were overturned by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and Southern states' anti-miscegenation laws were overturned in the 1967 case of Loving v. Virginia.
Etymology
The origin of the term "Jim Crow" is obscure, but probably refers to slave singing that incorporated an African dance called "Jump Jim Crow". "Jump Jim Crow" became a minstrel show dance performed by white actor Thomas D. Rice in blackface, first performed in 1828. Many other white minstrel dancers in blackface copied it for white audiences. According to The Jim Crow Encyclopedia:The routine was immensely popular during the antebellum period, and the figure of Jim Crow became a recognizable and enduring icon in American popular culture. In the 1840s, abolitionists used the phrase Jim Crow to describe segregated railroad cars. By the end of the 19th century, the term came to signify the social separation of the races.See The Jim Crow Encyclopedia. edited by Nikki L.M. Brown and Barry M. Stentiford (2008) p.417Louis Ruchames, "Jim Crow Railroads in Massachusetts" American Quarterly 8#1 (1956), pp. 61-75, especially pp 70, 72. online The name also appears on the last line of the 1837 poem by Richard Harris Barham entitled The Jackaw of Rheims.
The earliest known use of the phrase "Jim Crow law" can be dated to 1884 in a newspaper article summarizing congressional debate. The term appears in 1892, in the title of a New York Times article about Louisiana requiring segregated railroad cars.Woodward, C. Vann, and McFeely, William S. (2001), The Strange Career of Jim Crow. p. 7.
Origins
In January 1865, an amendment to the Constitution abolishing slavery in the United States was proposed by Congress and ratified as the Thirteenth Amendment on December 18, 1865. During the Reconstruction era of 1865–1877, federal laws provided civil rights protections in the U.S. South for freedmen, African Americans who were former slaves, and the minority of black people who had been free before the war. In the 1870s, Democrats gradually regained power in the Southern legislatures as violent insurgent paramilitary groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, White League, and Red Shirts disrupted Republican organizing, ran Republican officeholders out of town, and lynched black voters as an intimidation tactic to suppress the black vote. Extensive voter fraud was also used. In one instance, an outright coup or insurrection in coastal North Carolina led to the violent removal of democratically elected Republican party executive and representative officials, who were either hunted down or hounded out. Gubernatorial elections were close and had been disputed in Louisiana for years, with increasing violence against black Americans during campaigns from 1868 onward.
The Compromise of 1877 to gain Southern support in the presidential election resulted in the government withdrawing the last of the federal troops from the South. White Democrats had regained political power in every Southern state.Woodward, C. Vann, and McFeely, William S. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. 2001, p. 6. These Southern, white, "Redeemer" governments legislated Jim Crow laws, officially segregating the country's population. Jim Crow laws were a manifestation of authoritarian rule specifically directed at one racial group.
Black people were still elected to local offices throughout the 1880s in local areas with large black populations, but their voting was suppressed for state and national elections. States passed laws to make voter registration and electoral rules more restrictive, with the result that political participation by most black people and many poor white people began to decrease.Perman, Michael. Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001, Introduction.Kousser, J. Morgan,The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974. Between 1890 and 1910, ten of the eleven former Confederate states, beginning with Mississippi, passed new constitutions or amendments that effectively disenfranchised most black people and tens of thousands of poor white people through a combination of poll taxes, literacy and comprehension tests, and residency and record-keeping requirements. Grandfather clauses temporarily permitted some illiterate white people to vote but gave no relief to most black people.
Voter turnout dropped dramatically through the South as a result of these measures. In Louisiana, by 1900, black voters were reduced to 5,320 on the rolls, although they comprised the majority of the state's population. By 1910, only 730 black people were registered, less than 0.5% of eligible black men. "In 27 of the state's 60 parishes, not a single black voter was registered any longer; in 9 more parishes, only one black voter was." The cumulative effect in North Carolina meant that black voters were eliminated from voter rolls during the period from 1896 to 1904. The growth of their thriving middle class was slowed. In North Carolina and other Southern states, black people suffered from being made invisible in the political system: "[W]ithin a decade of disfranchisement, the white supremacy campaign had erased the image of the black middle class from the minds of white North Carolinians."Richard H. Pildes, "Democracy, Anti-Democracy, and the Canon", 2000, pp. 12, 27. Retrieved March 10, 2008. In Alabama, tens of thousands of poor whites were also disenfranchised, although initially legislators had promised them they would not be affected adversely by the new restrictions.Glenn Feldman, The Disfranchisement Myth: Poor Whites and Suffrage Restriction in Alabama, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004, pp. 135–36.
Those who could not vote were not eligible to serve on juries and could not run for local offices. They effectively disappeared from political life, as they could not influence the state legislatures, and their interests were overlooked. While public schools had been established by Reconstruction legislatures for the first time in most Southern states, those for black children were consistently underfunded compared to schools for white children, even when considered within the strained finances of the postwar South where the decreasing price of cotton kept the agricultural economy at a low.
Like schools, public libraries for black people were underfunded, if they existed at all, and they were often stocked with secondhand books and other resources.Buddy, J., & Williams, M. (2005). "A dream deferred: school libraries and segregation", American Libraries, 36(2), 33–35. These facilities were not introduced for African Americans in the South until the first decade of the 20th century.Battles, D. M. (2009). The History of Public Library Access for African Americans in the South, or, Leaving Behind the Plow. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press. Throughout the Jim Crow era, libraries were only available sporadically.Fultz, M. (2006). "Black Public Libraries in the South in the Era of De Jure Segregation". Libraries & The Cultural Record, 41(3), 338. Prior to the 20th century, most libraries established for African Americans were school-library combinations. Many public libraries for both European-American and African-American patrons in this period were founded as the result of middle-class activism aided by matching grants from the Carnegie Foundation.
In some cases, progressive measures intended to reduce election fraud, such as the Eight Box Law in South Carolina, acted against black and white voters who were illiterate, as they could not follow the directions. While the separation of African Americans from the white general population was becoming legalized and formalized during the Progressive Era (1890s–1920s), it was also becoming customary. Even in cases in which Jim Crow laws did not expressly forbid black people from participating in sports or recreation, a segregated culture had become common.
In the Jim Crow context, the presidential election of 1912 was steeply slanted against the interests of African Americans. Most black Americans still lived in the South, where they had been effectively disfranchised, so they could not vote at all. While poll taxes and literacy requirements banned many poor or illiterate people from voting, these stipulations frequently had loopholes that exempted European Americans from meeting the requirements. In Oklahoma, for instance, anyone qualified to vote before 1866, or related to someone qualified to vote before 1866 (a kind of "grandfather clause"), was exempted from the literacy requirement; but the only men who had the franchise before that year were white or European-American. European Americans were effectively exempted from the literacy testing, whereas black Americans were effectively singled out by the law.Tomlins, Christopher L. The United States Supreme Court: The Pursuit of Justice. 2005, p. 195.