Jim Crow was the colloquial term for forms of systematic discrimination employed by whites against African Americans from the second half of the nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth. The expression insinuates the legal components of the color line (e.g., Jim Crow laws), but also encompasses the cultural and symbolic conventions of hierarchical race relations.
OVERVIEW
The roots of Jim Crow lay deep in the American landscape of slavery. Despite its jocular allusion to a persona, Jim Crow articulated ideologies of black inferiority, which, wrapped in racist rhetoric, signified white supremacy, the control of virtually every aspect of black public life, and access to black private life. As shorthand for the malice of race relations in America, Jim Crow lived out a "strange career," the historian C. Vann Woodward (1908-1999) wrote. "Jim Crow … did not assign the subordinate group to a fixed status in society. [It was] constantly pushing the Negro further down" (Woodward [1955] 2002, p. 108).
The scholar W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) used the term "the veil" in reference to the barrier separating blacks and whites. Penetrable but immovable, the veil provided African Americans with a view outward, while limiting the ability of whites to see into black society. "Within and without the somber veil of color," Du Bois wrote of black life in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), "vast social forces have been at work,—efforts for human betterment, movements toward disintegration and despair, tragedies and comedies in social and economic life, and a swaying and lifting and sinking of human hearts which have made this land a land of mingled sorrow and joy, of change and excitement and unrest" (pp. 181-182). Behind the veil, then, African Americans engaged in the discourse and action of daily life, often unconcerned with white life. Here, they forged lively communities, built strong institutions, and nurtured generations of activists who took part in the long civil rights movement to "destroy Jim Crow."
As a period of history, the "Jim Crow era" can be set off by two significant decisions made by the U.S. Supreme Court, each determining the constitutionality of racial segregation. On one end, Homer Plessy v. John H. Ferguson 163 U.S. 537 (1896) sanctioned racial segregation and discrimination with the doctrine of "separate but equal," arguing that the Fourteenth Amendment "could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either." On the other end of a timeline, Oliver Brown, et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka, et al. 387 U.S. 483 (1954) outlawed racial segregation in public schools arguing that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." Brown opened the door to question and to challenge other forms of racial inequity.
THE HISTORY OF JIM CROW
Jim Crow far exceeds the temporal markers of Supreme Court decisions, reaching back to the mid-nineteenth century and beyond the modern civil rights movement. Moreover, although Jim Crow is associated mostly with the intractable South, similar patterns, indeed its cultural origins, can be found in the North. The term was being used by the mid-nineteenth century by African Americans and abolitionists to describe the unfair practice of directing black passengers to separate substandard railroad cars. Jimcrow or jimcrowing referred to the injustice of segregating blacks to lesser facilities.
The term Jim Crow originated in American popular culture, specifically in a stage performance, a mocking imitation of a black plantation slave by Thomas Dartmouth "Daddy" Rice (1808-1860), a white entertainer. In the tradition of minstrelsy, Rice blackened his face with burned cork or black wax, wore ragged clothes as a costume, shuffled as he danced, and sang:
Come listen all you galls and boys I’s jist from Tuckyhoe, I’m going to sing a little song, my name’s Jim Crow, Weel about and turn about and do jis so, Eb’ry time I weel about I jump Jim Crow.
A popular little ditty, "Jump Jim Crow" was a centerpiece of an emerging American popular culture. Popularized, the character Jim Crow and his stage counterpart Zip Coon—an urban dandy from the North—caricatured African Americans as foolish, dim, lazy, sneaky, incompetent, untrustworthy, dishonorable, and without the strength of character required to be an American citizen and white. These degrading stereotypes, infused by distortion and propaganda, provided a substantial base on which to create a rationale for slavery: that African Americans required close supervision, and that only under the control of whites could such people be restrained.
Jim Crow entered a new phase after the Civil War (1861-1865) with enactment of the Black Codes. At the end of the war, in the political chaos that followed Abraham Lincoln’s death in 1865, Confederates claimed southern legislatures and passed laws that restricted the freedom of freedpeople. Replicating slavery in all ways except name, the Black Codes required blacks to accept unfavorable work contracts, limited their mobility, and denied them citizenship rights. As traditional powers collapsed at the beginning of Reconstruction, African Americans claimed and exercised the citizenship rights guaranteed by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments. Southern whites viewed this new societal arrangement as a corruption of race and gender relations that historically favored white males.
At the end of Reconstruction, when power returned to white southerners, distorted descriptions of Reconstruction governments signified whites’ resentment for their losses and provided the tinder for racial fires to burn through the turn of the century. Referring to black political participation as "Negro rule" or "Negro domination," and distorting the work of Reconstruction legislatures as corrupt and immoral, white politicians determined that black power would neither continue nor return. By the end of the nineteenth century, every southern state and community had forged a set of constitutional amendments, legislation, or legal maneuvers to disfranchise African American men by force of law and intimidation. Almost every school was racially segregated and disparate in condition. Consistently, blacks were employed in the most difficult jobs for the lowest of wages.
As the color line itself solidified at the turn of the nineteenth century, Jim Crow imposed on black people clear tactical disadvantages: restricted economic possibilities, narrow educational opportunities, inadequate housing options, high rates of death and disablement, persistent unemployment, and unrelenting poverty. Inasmuch as Jim Crow represented the race problem described by Gunnar Myrdal (1898-1987) in his 1944 treatise The American Dilemma, it was Jim Crow that created the race quandary; whites constructed the obstacles African Americans confronted, while also blaming them for their conditions, denying them access to the resources of problem solving, and daring them—under threat of violence— to complain, protest, or advance.
Jim Crow laws segregated not only public venues but also restaurants, restrooms, hospitals, churches, libraries, schoolbooks, waiting rooms, housing, prisons, cemeteries, and asylums. Customary signs noting "colored" and "white" or "white only" marked off the southern landscape, dividing public conveyances, public accommodations, and birth, residence, and death. Purportedly equal, these circumstances usually were unequal. Laws regulated not only segregation but also social relations. In most states, blacks and whites could not marry by law, or socialize by custom. According to a Maryland law, "all marriages between a white person and a negro, or between a white person and a person of negro descent, to the third generation, inclusive … are forever prohibited, and shall be void." Blacks and whites could not compete against each other, whether at checkers or college sports. A Mississippi law read, "any person guilty of printing, publishing or circulating matter urging or presenting arguments in favor of social equality or of intermarriage between whites and negroes, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor."
ENFORCEMENT
Jim Crow could be fluid, amorphous, and nuanced. Because the laws and practices of Jim Crow varied from place to place, the scheme was confusing, and African Americans were careful to learn the racial etiquette of the locales to which they traveled. In addition, different groups of African Americans, rural and urban, women and men, and people of varying classes, experienced Jim Crow in different ways. Inasmuch as women and men faced differential limitations of Jim Crow, civil rights and women’s movement activist Pauli Murray (1910-1985) coined the term Jane Crow to describe sex discrimination against women, and race and sex discrimination against black women. African Americans could not always unify against Jim Crow because segregation could benefit some to the detriment of others. Black colleges thrived, for example, but most segregated public elementary and secondary schools struggled with inadequate resources to prepare students for higher education.
Finally, protests or challenges to Jim Crow often proved futile, given law enforcement’s complicity in the structure. From emancipation to the turn of the century, the Ku Klux Klan operated as a paramilitary arm of the Democratic Party in the South. The Klan, nightriders, red shirts, and other white terrorists intimidated African Americans with personal attacks, school burnings, and lynchings. African Americans rarely served as policemen, sheriffs, or deputies before the late 1940s. During the 1950s and 1960s, the connections between municipal and state governments, law enforcement, and racial violence were well known by officials and citizens alike. White officers were known to harass black people, disrupt black neighborhoods, and assault black women. Arrested for inflated charges, denied satisfactory counsel, and serving harsh sentences, African Americans were further disadvantaged in the courtroom. Rarely did they receive good counsel, nor could they serve on juries. When black lawyers could appear in the courtroom to argue cases, white judges and juries rarely listened. All-white juries decided against black defendants, even in the most obvious cases of innocence, but rarely convicted white defendants, despite evidence of guilt. African Americans—including the innocent—suffered the harsher punishments of extended jail time, forced farm labor, and peonage. Even women could be placed on the chain gangs working the roads and tracks across the South.
Extralegally, Jim Crow justice was rough. According to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), between 1889 and 1918 over 2,500 African Americans were lynched: captured and viciously murdered by mobs. Ostensibly, accusations of rape provided the reason for lynching, yet rarely were these cases validated. A form of social control and vengeance, lynching followed when a black person stepped out of line, did not demonstrate enough deference, acted out of antagonism, committed assault or manslaughter as self-defense, or spoke out of turn. Through the first half of the twentieth century, furthermore, riots flared as an expression of white antagonism, among them the Wilmington Riot of 1898, the Atlanta Riot of 1906, the East Saint Louis Riot of 1917, and the Tulsa Riot of 1921. In each of these and other conflagrations, whites expressed their racial rage by entering black neighborhoods to assault men, women, and children, and by burning down homes, schools, and churches. African American veterans in uniform also were targets of random attack, subject to vengeance for wearing a symbol of American citizenship.
AFRICAN AMERICANS AND JIM CROW
For these reasons, Jim Crow presented a formidable opponent—one that could divide its victims against themselves. Numerous leaders stepped forward to speak to the quandary of race relations. Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) advised black men to shift their focus from electoral politics to economics, to take up the trades, farming, and domestic and service work in order to build character and capital. While Washington supported industrial education, Du Bois recommended that the most talented of black folk be trained in the liberal arts so that they could emerge as leaders of the race. Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931), a fearless antilynching campaigner, took up the mantle of agitation, advising African Americans to protect themselves and to leave the South altogether.
The question of migration as a form of protest dominated black discourse and action after emancipation, and as the century turned, a trickle of black southerners, mostly women, began to leave the land for the cities of the South and the North. They laid the groundwork for what was later called the Great Migration, when millions of African Americans left the brutalities of the South for the possibilities of the North. Black migrations were fueled by several factors. African Americans hoped to escape the tyranny of the South, especially economic oppression. The importunate character of sharecropping pressed families to give up the land for the city. There, however, they found new sets of barriers to employment or improved living conditions. Nevertheless, as the war economies expanded and European immigration slowed, African Americans found employment in the industries and the trades. Black people also migrated to find personal freedom not available to them in the South. African American women, for example, migrated to escape the persistent danger of public sexual assault by white and private assault by black men. As migrants within the South, women also laid the foundations upon which black southern communities were built, and it is here that the war against Jim Crow took place.
In urban areas, African Americans upbuilt communities from small settlements of freedpeople into dynamic neighborhoods of homes, institutions, and organizations. Although segregated, schools instilled a sense of race pride and responsibility in children. Churches served multiple roles, as community, political, and recreational spaces. Teachers, professors, undertakers, doctors, lawyers, and nurses served to uplift the black community. Held in high esteem, they presented not only models to emulate, but also a daily reminder of black accomplishment despite Jim Crow. National organizations like the NAACP, the National Negro Business League (NNBL), and black fraternities and sororities all functioned to improve the quality of life for African Americans. Founding segregated YWCAs, YMCAs, Boy’s Clubs, Boy Scouts, and Girl Scouts, adult African Americans supervised the development of young people with an eye toward the demands of citizenship. Indeed, although historians have called the early years of Jim Crow "the Nadir," the lowest point in African American history, the period also was the zenith of the black press, black business, black church organizations, and the black women’s club movement as African Americans set about the work of race progress.
Still, the disadvantages of Jim Crow far outweighed the advantages, and beginning in the 1930s, African Americans took up a number of civil rights crusades. The NAACP, for example, began the battle against educational inequality, with the support of local branches. Local communities also engaged in "don’t-buy-where-you-can’t-work" campaigns, denying their dollars to businesses that did not employ black people. Veterans returned from a war against racism expecting to be accorded citizenship rights commensurate with their sacrifices. Turned back at the courthouses, they launched voting rights campaigns. By the 1940s, several events signaled that the demise of Jim Crow had begun. In Texas, the Supreme Court decision in Smith v. Allwright, Election Judge, et al. 312 U. S. 649 (1944) ended the all-white primary, opening the southern electoral process to black voters. In 1948 President Harry Truman (1913-2003) signed Executive Order 9981, desegregating the armed forces. Finally, the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education sounded the end of constitutionally sanctioned Jim Crow in public schools, making way for African Americans to demand the integration of all public facilities and accommodations.
Just as Jim Crow was not a strictly definable historical period, the struggle against it was protracted. Using forms of direct action, nonviolent protests, and demonstrations, civil rights activists of the 1950s and 1960s were determined to break the back of Jim Crow, and they were successful, at least as far as the legal arena was concerned. Inasmuch as Jim Crow was a milieu that permeated culture and ideology historically, the struggle against American apartheid continues.
