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Jim Crow Laws

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Jim Crow laws were state and local laws enacted in the Southern and border states of the United States and in force between 1876 and 1964 that required racial segregation, especially of African-Americans, in all public facilities. "Jim Crow period" or the "Jim Crow era" refers to the time during which this practice occurred. The most important laws required that public schools be segregated by race, and that most public places (including trains and buses) have separate facilities for whites and blacks. School segregation was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education. All the other Jim Crow laws were repealed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

During the Reconstruction period 1865-1876, federal law provided civil rights protection in the South for Freedmen--the African-Americans who had formerly been slaves. Reconstruction ended at different dates (the latest 1877), and was followed in each Southern state by Redeemer governments that passed the Jim Crow laws to separate the races. In the Progressive Era the restrictions were formalized, and segregation was extended to the federal government by President Woodrow Wilson in 1913.

After 1945, the Civil Rights movement gained momentum and used federal courts to attack Jim Crow. The Supreme Court declared de jure public school segregation unconstitutional in 1954. Legal school segregation was known as de jure segregation; it ended in practice in the 1970s. The Court ruling did not stop de facto or informal school segregation, which continues in large cities. President Lyndon B. Johnson, building a coalition of northern Democrats and Republicans, pushed Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which immediately outlawed all Jim Crow laws. Restaurants, hotels and theatres (with rare exceptions), immediately dropped racial segregation.

Contents

Origins of the Jim Crow laws

The conclusion of the American Civil War in 1865 led to Reconstruction which took place in several very different stages. In the first stage of Presidential Reconstruction, all-white Southern legislatures, overwhelmingly dominated by ex-Confederates, abolished laws regarding slavery but passed the black codes, which gave new rights to the Freedmen but fewer than whites possessed. The North reacted against those codes and the Radical Republicans passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 which gave freedmen legal rights (but not the right to vote). The country by 1870 passed the 14th, and 15th Amendments to the United States Constitution, guaranteeing civil rights and the right to vote. The southern states came under Republican control--a party comprising the Freedmen, white Southerners ("Scalawags") and migrants from the North (''Carpetbaggers"). The Ku Klux Klan and related groups reacted violently, but they were suppressed by President Ulysses S. Grant using the federal courts. By 1877 the conservatives and Democrats, forming a Redeemer coalition, ousted all the Republican governments. From 1877 down to the 1970s the Democrats controlled every state nearly all the time.

After 1877, the Redeemers reversed many of the civil rights gains that black Americans had made during Reconstruction, passing laws that mandated discrimination by both local governments and by private citizens. Since "Jim Crow law" is a blanket term for any of this type of legislation, the exact date of inception for the laws varies by state. The most important laws came in the 1890s and the adoption of legislation segregating railroad cars in New Orleans as the first genuine Jim Crow law. By 1915, every Southern state had effectively destroyed the gains in civil rights and liberties that blacks had enjoyed due to the Reconstructionist efforts.

Between 1890 and 1910, many state governments prevented most blacks from voting by various techniques, such as poll taxes and literacy tests. (These could be waived for whites due to grandfather clauses.) It is estimated that of 181,000 African-American males of voting age in Alabama in 1900, only 3,000 were registered to vote.

The discriminatory Jim Crow laws were enacted to support racial segregation. They required black and white people to use separate water fountains, public schools, public bath houses, restaurants, public libraries, buses and rail cars.

Examples of Jim Crow laws in various states

The following examples of segregation (Jim Crow laws) are excerpts from examples of Jim Crow laws shown on a (U.S.) National Park Service web site. [link]

Note that the examples here include anti-miscegenation laws; though sometimes counted among the "Jim Crow laws" of the South, those laws had also existed outside the South for many years. Anti-miscegenation laws were not repealed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but were declared unconstitutional in the 1967 Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia.

An African American drinks out of a segregated water cooler designated for "colored" patrons in 1939 at a streetcar terminal in Oklahoma City.
Enlarge
An African American drinks out of a segregated water cooler designated for "colored" patrons in 1939 at a streetcar terminal in Oklahoma City.

ALABAMA

FLORIDA GEORGIA LOUISIANA MISSISSIPPI NORTH CAROLINA VIRGINIA WYOMING More examples of state-ordered discrimination against African-American people appear here [link].

Examples of laws requiring discrimination against black people in the following states Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, & Kentucky are here: [link] Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, New Mexico, and North Carolina are here: [link] Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, and Wyoming are here: [link]

Further discussion of state laws requiring segregation of the races is here [link] and here [link].

Attempts at dismantling Jim Crow

Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875, legislation introduced by Charles Sumner and Benjamin F. Butler in 1870, and passed March 1, 1875. It guaranteed that everyone, regardless of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, was entitled to the same treatment in "public accommodations" (i.e. inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement).

The Supreme Court of the United States invalidated most of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 in 1883. The nation's highest court held that Congress had no power under the U.S. Constitution to regulate the conduct of individuals (see Civil Rights Cases). After Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875, it did not pass another civil rights law until 1957.

In 1890, the State of Louisiana passed a law requiring separate accommodations for black and white passengers on railroads. A group of concerned black and white citizens in New Orleans formed an association dedicated to the repeal of that law. They persuaded Homer Plessy, who was light-skinned and one-eighth African, to test it. In 1892, Plessy purchased a first-class ticket from New Orleans on the East Louisiana Railway. Once he had boarded the train, he informed the train conductor of his racial lineage, and took a seat in the whites-only section. He was asked to leave the railway car designated for white passengers, and ordered to sit instead in the "blacks only" car. Plessy refused and was immediately arrested. The Citizens Committee of New Orleans appealed the case to the Supreme Court of the United States and lost. The loss of the case, Plessy v. Ferguson, resulted in 58 more years of hardship and legal discrimination against black people in the United States.

When black soldiers returning from World War II refused to put up with the second class citizenship of segregation, the movement for Civil Rights was renewed. Post-World War II efforts to end discrimination resulted in the NAACP Legal Defense Committee--and its lawyer Thurgood Marshall-- bringing the landmark case that came to be known as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, [347 U.S. 483] (1954) before the Supreme Court. In 1954, the Court effectively overturned the 1896 Plessy decision in its ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Thurgood Marshall would later become a U.S. Supreme Court Justice.

The legacy of Jim Crow

The Supreme Court of the United States held in the Civil Rights Cases 109 US 3 (1883) that the Fourteenth Amendment did not give the federal government the power to outlaw private discrimination, and then held in Plessy v. Ferguson 163 US 537 (1896) that Jim Crow laws were constitutional as long as they allowed for "separate but equal" facilities. In the years that followed, the Court made this "separate but equal" requirement a hollow phrase, by approving discrimination even in the face of evidence of profound inequalities in practice.

In 1902, Reverend Thomas Dixon, a white, Southern anti-Reconstructionist, published the novel The Leopard's Spots, which intentionally fanned racial animosity.[link]

Jim Crow laws were a product of the solidly Democratic South. As the party which supported the Confederacy, the Democrats quickly dominated all aspects of local, state, and federal political life in the post-Civil War South, right up through the 1970s. Even as late as 1956, a resolution called Southern Manifesto, condemning the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, was read into the Congressional Record, and supported by 96 southern congressman and senators, each one a Democrat.

While African-American entertainers, musicians, and literary figures had broken into the white world of American art and culture after 1890, African-American athletes found obstacles confronting them at every turn. By 1900, white opposition to African-American boxers, baseball players, track athletes, and basketball players kept them segregated and limited in what they could do. But their prowess and abilities in all-African-American teams and sporting events could not be denied, and one by one the barriers to African-American participation in all the major sports began to crumble in the 1950s and 1960s.

Twentieth century

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In the 20th century, the Supreme Court began to overturn Jim Crow laws on constitutional grounds. The Court held in Guinn v. United States 238 US 347 (1915) that an Oklahoma law that denied the right to vote to some citizens was unconstitutional. (Nonetheless, the majority of African-Americans were unable to vote in most states in the Deep South of the US until the 1950s or 1960s.) In Buchanan v. Warley 245 US 60 (1917), the Court held that a Kentucky law could not require residential segregation. The Supreme Court outlawed the white primary election in Smith v. Allwright 321 US 649 (1944), and, in 1946, in Irene Morgan v. Virginia ruled segregation in interstate transportation to be unconstitutional, though its reasoning stemmed from the commerce clause of the Constitution rather than any moral objection to the practice. It wasn't until 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka 347 US 483 that the Court held that separate facilities were inherently unequal in the area of public schools, effectively overturning Plessy v. Ferguson, and outlawing Jim Crow in other areas of society as well. This landmark case consisted of complaints filed in the states of Delaware-Gebhart v. Belton; South Carolina-Briggs v. Elliot; Virginia – Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County; and Washington, DC – Bolling v. C. Melvin Sharpe.These decisions, along with other cases such as McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Board of Regents 339 US 637 (1950), NAACP v. Alabama 357 US 449 (1958), and Boynton v. Virginia 364 US 454 (1960), slowly dismantled the state-sponsored segregation imposed by Jim Crow laws.

In addition to Jim Crow laws, in which the state compelled segregation of the races, businesses, political parties, unions and other private parties created their own Jim Crow arrangements, barring blacks from buying homes in certain neighborhoods, from shopping or working in certain stores, from working at certain trades, etc. The Supreme Court outlawed some forms of private discrimination in Shelley v. Kraemer 334 US 1 (1948), in which it held that "restrictive covenants" that barred sale of homes to blacks or Jews or Asians were unconstitutional, on the grounds that they represented state-sponsored discrimination, in that they were only effective if the courts enforced them.

The Supreme Court was unwilling, however, to attack other forms of private discrimination; it reasoned that private parties did not violate the Equal Protection clause of the Constitution when they discriminated, because they were not "state actors" covered by that clause.

As attitudes turned against segregation in the Federal courts after World War II, the segregationist white governments of many of the states of the Southeast countered with even more numerous and strict segregation laws on the local level until the start of the 1960s. The modern Civil Rights movement is often considered to have been sparked by an act of civil disobedience against Jim Crow laws when Rosa Parks, an African-American woman, refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man. Her action, and the demonstrations that it spawned, led to a series of legislation and court decisions in which Jim Crow laws were repealed or annulled.

However, the Montgomery Bus Boycott led by Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. which followed Rosa Parks' action, did not come in a vacuum. Numerous boycotts and demonstrations against segregation had occurred throughout the 1930s and 1940s. These early demonstrations achieved positive results and helped spark political activism. For instance, K. Leroy Irvis of Pittsburgh's Urban League led a demonstration against employment discrimination by Pittsburgh's department stores in 1947, and later became the first 20th Century African-American to serve as a state Speaker of the House.

In 1964, the U.S. Congress attacked the parallel system of private Jim Crow practices. It invoked the commerce clause to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination in public accommodations, i.e., privately owned restaurants, hotels, and stores, and in private schools and workplaces. This use of the commerce clause was upheld in Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States 379 US 241 (1964).

End of de jure segregation

In January, 1964, President Johnson met with civil rights leaders. On January 8, during his first State of the Union address, Johnson asked Congress to "let this session of Congress be known as the session which did more for civil rights than the last hundred sessions combined." On June 21, civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney, disappeared in Neshoba County, Mississippi. The three were volunteers traveling to Mississippi to aid in the registration of African-American voters as part of the Mississippi Summer Project. The FBI recovered their bodies, which had been buried in an earthen dam, 44 days later. The Neshoba County deputy sheriff and 16 others, all Ku Klux Klan members, were indicted for the crimes; seven were convicted. On July 2, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 [link]

According to the United States Department of Justice, "By 1965 concerted efforts to break the grip of state disfranchisement had been under way for some time, but had achieved only modest success overall and in some areas had proved almost entirely ineffectual. The murder of voting-rights activists in Philadelphia, Mississippi, gained national attention, along with numerous other acts of violence and terrorism. Finally, the unprovoked attack on March 7, 1965, by state troopers on peaceful marchers crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, en route to the state capitol in Montgomery, persuaded the President and Congress to overcome Southern legislators' resistance to effective voting rights legislation. President Johnson issued a call for a strong voting rights law and hearings began soon thereafter on the bill that would become the Voting Rights Act." [link]

The name

A depiction of Thomas D. Rice's "Jim Crow"
A depiction of Thomas D. Rice's "Jim Crow"

The term Jim Crow comes from the minstrel show song "Jump Jim Crow" written in 1828 and performed by Thomas Dartmouth "Daddy" Rice, a white English migrant to the U.S. and the first popularizer of blackface performance. The song and blackface itself were an immediate hit. A caricature of a shabbily dressed rural black, "Jim Crow" became a standard character in minstrel shows. He was often paired with "Zip Coon," a flamboyantly dressed urban black who associated more with white culture. By 1837, Jim Crow was being used to refer to racial segregation.

Pop culture implications

In an episode of the Cartoon Network cartoon The Boondocks, during a flashback to a protest speech being given by Martin Luther King, Jr., the self-hating African-American character Uncle Ruckus is depicted yelling at Dr. King while holding a sign that says "I Love Jim Crow".

Another more popular example comes from "Bamboozled" directed by Spike Lee. The movie centers around an Ivy League writer who is tired of pitching "Cosby Show"-esque takes on the black family and devises a plan to revive minstrel shows. Instead of white actors in black face, it features black actors in even blacker face. The show is a success, but along with the success comes repercussions. It takes a real look at the image problems African-Americans deal with in terms of post Jim Crow race relations.

Further reading

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