Jim Crow
The term Jim Crow evolved out of a variety of cultural expressions and legislative
actions until it came to represent the system of separation by color or race practiced
throughout the United States from the latter half of the 1800s to the 1960s. State and
local laws passed to enforce this separation between races became known as “Jim Crow
laws.” It was a routine occurrence to see whites only or blacks only stores, services,
bathrooms, and schools.
As a cultural expression the term referred to both a song and a dance practiced by
slaves in the United States in the 1800s. It was later personified as an actual character
featured in minstrel shows during the late 1800s.
Despite the emancipation of American slaves in 1865, a succession of legislative
acts and Supreme Court rulings upheld the notion that blacks and whites would live in
greater harmony if they lived as separately as possible. At the core of such reasoning was
the belief that whites were innately superior to blacks, and too much interaction
between the two groups would somehow contaminate the former. The hard-won
freedom of African Americans was all but nullified by the body of laws called Black
Codes that were adopted by southern states in the years immediately following the Civil
War. While the codes granted former slaves such rights as marriage within one's race
and the ownership of limited amounts of land, many of them also restricted the types of
professions that blacks could pursue, required employment with a white person, and
allowed African Americans to be beaten by whites for any perceived transgression,
among other measures.
The official political status of African Americans swung back and forth between
full equality and legislated inequality, or apartheid. The Thirteenth Amendment in 1865,
the Fourteenth Amendment in 1866, and the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, along with
Civil Rights Acts in 1866 and 1875, combined to place black Americans on the same
footing as white Americans. However, the Black Codes, for a time at least, effectively
countered those measures and were reinforced by the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling
in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. That ruling, in a case specifically targeting public
transportation, announced that separate but equal public facilities for the races were
legal. As such, it provided the legal justification for and encouragement of the various
forms of racial discrimination and segregation that would plague the United States for
the next half century.
Jim Crow segregation impacted every sphere of life in the United States.
Religious observation, education, entertainment, personal relationships, politics,
shopping, housing, military service, and employment were all determined by skin color.
At its mildest, the result was pained humiliation. At its most extreme, it was murder in
the form of lynching, disproportionate rates of disease due to a lack of medical facilities
specifically for blacks, and excessive sentencing for blacks in the courts. To avoid the
public humiliation of Jim Crow practices, most blacks limited their interaction with
whites as much as possible. Madame C. J. Walker had a movie theater included in her
company's Indiana plant to avoid the discriminatory practice of white-owned theaters.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was started
in large measure to dismantle the legal and social structures of Jim Crow.
The era of Jim Crow has often been described as absurd because of the many
incongruent and irrational situations it produced. For example, white partygoers were
privileged to be entertained at clubs in black neighborhoods such as Harlem and by
black entertainers such as Duke Ellington while consciously avoiding socializing with
blacks in the very same establishments.
In his autobiography The Big Sea, Langston Hughes recounts traveling through
Savannah, Georgia, and going into a restroom reserved for whites in order to purchase
a Sunday New York Times because the restroom for blacks did not have a newsstand.
Upon leaving the restroom, he is stopped by a white policeman who forbids him to exit
the whites-only section even though he is already in it, while simultaneously forbidding
him to go back into the restroom. Hughes's only remaining option is to hop onto the
nearby railroad tracks and walk the rails back to the boarding platform, laughing as he
does so at the stupidity of the situation. Many of those who could not laugh at such
incidents during the 1920s made their way overseas to Paris. There, they joined a group
of black and white American expatriates, including black soldiers and musicians who
had remained in France after World War I, who were free to ignore color differences.
World War I and World War II provided opportunities for organizations such as the
NAACP and newspapers such as the Pittsburgh Courier to dramatize the hypocrisy of
Americans fighting abroad for democracy while African Americans continued to suffer
discrimination in their homeland, not to mention within the very armed forces in which
they served. In 1948, President Harry S. Truman agreed that blacks in the military at
least would no longer be subject to segregation and issued Executive Order 9981 to
abolish racial separation in the armed forces.
Labor leader A. Philip Randolph's success in establishing the Brotherhood of
Sleeping Car Porters as the first black-run union to negotiate a contract with a major
company provided a modern platform for the discussion of racial inequalities.
Moreover, in 1954, the NAACP scored a direct hit against the 1896 Plessy v.
Ferguson ruling in their case Brown v. Board of Education. Specifically addressing the
inequality of educational facilities for African Americans, the Supreme Court ruled that
such facilities were inherently unequal under segregation. That ruling, combined
with Rosa Parks's refusal to relinquish her bus seat to a white passenger, ushered in the
1950s and 1960s Civil Rights movement.
With millions of black and white Americans protesting the
ongoing Jim Crow system, the U.S. Congress in the 1960s effectively removed any
remaining legal foundations for segregation. The 1965 Voting Rights Act outlawed
attempts to deprive African Americans of their right to vote, and the 1964 Civil Rights
Act made discrimination in federal hiring, public accommodations, transportation, and
other areas illegal.
References and Further Information
Dinley, Jane E., and Glenda E. Gilmore. Jumpin' Jim Crow. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 2000.
Hoskins, Charles Lwanga. Yet with a Steady Beat. Savannah, Ga.: The Gullah Press,
2001.