Everything about The Jim Crow Laws totally explained
The
Jim Crow laws, often referred to as a system or legal state as the
Jim Crow Era or merely
Jim Crow, were state and local laws enacted primarily but not exclusively in the
Southern and
border states of the
United States between 1876 and 1965. They mandated
de jure segregation in all public facilities, with a supposedly "
separate but equal" status for black Americans and members of other non-white racial groups. In reality, this led to treatment and accommodations that were usually inferior to those provided for
white Americans, systematizing a number of economic, educational and social disadvantages.
Some examples of Jim Crow laws are the segregation of public schools, public places and public transportation, and the segregation of restrooms and restaurants for whites and blacks. These Jim Crow Laws were separate from the 1800-66
Black Codes, which had also restricted the
civil rights and
civil liberties of African Americans. State-sponsored school
segregation was declared unconstitutional by the
Supreme Court of the United States in 1954 in
Brown v. Board of Education. Generally, the remaining Jim Crow laws were overruled by the
Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the
Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Etymology
The origin of the phrase "Jim Crow" has often been attributed to "
Jump Jim Crow", a song-and-dance
caricature of
African Americans, which first surfaced in 1832. Its origins may, however, precede this production. and was followed in each Southern state by white Democratic Party
Redeemer governments that passed Jim Crow laws to separate the African-American people from the general population.
While the separation of African Americans from the general population was becoming legalized and formalized in the
Progressive Era (1890s-1920s), it was also becoming customary. Even in cases in which Jim Crow laws didn't expressly forbid black people to participate in, for instance, sports or recreation or church services, the laws shaped a segregative culture.
The
presidential election of 1912 was, in the context of the Jim Crow Era, deeply slanted against African American interests. While
poll taxes and literacy requirements banned many Americans from voting, much of the time these requirements had loopholes that permitted White Americans exemptions from these requirements. In
Oklahoma, for instance, anyone qualified to vote prior to 1866, or related to someone qualified to vote prior to 1866, was exempted from the literacy requirement; the only Americans who could vote prior to that year were of course White Americans, such that all White Americans were effectively excluded from the literacy testing, whereas all Black Americans were effectively singled out by the law.
The presidency of
Woodrow Wilson, a Southern Democrat, furthered the segregation of Washington, amidst much protest. Wilson appointed many Southern politicians who were supportive of segregation, and the president was apparently sincere in his belief that segregation was in the best interest of Black Americans and White Americans alike.
A
Washington Bee editorial wondered if the "reunion" of 1913 was a reunion of those who fought for "the extinction of slavery", or a reunion of those who fought to "perpetuate slavery and who are now employing every artifice and argument known to deceit" to present emancipation as a failed venture. This perspective takes anti-Black sentiment for granted, because bigotry was widespread in the South, where Black Americans seemed to embody and continually reaffirm the
Confederacy's
Civil War defeat: "With
white supremacy challenged throughout the South, many whites sought to protect their former status by threatening African Americans who exercised their new rights."
World War II era
After World War II, public attitudes turned against segregation. The
Civil Rights movement was energized by a number of flashpoints in this period, including the brutalization of WWII veteran
Isaac Woodard while he was still in uniform. As the Civil Rights movement gained momentum and used federal courts to attack Jim Crow, the white governments of many of the states of the Southeast countered with more numerous and strict segregation laws on the local level until the start of the 1960s.
The
NAACP Legal Defense Committee (a group independent of the NAACP)—and its lawyer
Thurgood Marshall—brought the landmark case
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, before the Supreme Court. In the landmark 1954 decision, which had far-reaching social ramifications, the court unanimously overturned the 1896 Plessy decision. The Supreme Court found that legally mandated (
de jure) public school segregation was unconstitutional. The practice wasn't brought to a final end until the 1970s.
The court ruling didn't stop
de facto, or residentially-based, school segregation, which continues today in many regions.
Associate Justice Frank Murphy introduced the word "racism" into the lexicon of
U.S. Supreme Court opinions in
Korematsu v. United States,
323 U.S. 214 (
1944), in which he charged that by upholding the forced relocation of
Japanese-Americans during
World War II the Court was sinking into "the ugly
abyss of racism." This was the first time that the word "racism" found its way into the lexicon of words used in Supreme Court opinion (he used it twice in a concurring opinion in
Steele v. Louisville & Nashville R. Co. 323|192 (
1944) issued that same day). He would use that word in five separate opinions, although the word "racism" disappeared with Murphy and from the court for almost two decades, not reappearing until the landmark decision of
Loving v. Virginia, .
Indeed, the question of the alleged "color-blindness" of the constitution has become increasingly a source of controversy on the Supreme Court. Some observers believed the Court is moving from trying to prevent oppression of minorities, to protecting the status quo.
The end of Jim Crow
In the courts
In the 20th century, the Supreme Court began to overturn Jim Crow laws on constitutional grounds. In
Buchanan v. Warley 245 US 60 (1917), the court held that a
Kentucky law couldn't require residential segregation. The Supreme Court in 1946, in
Irene Morgan v. Virginia ruled segregation in interstate transportation to be unconstitutional, in an application of the
commerce clause of the Constitution. 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. Elliott); Virginia (
Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County); and
Washington, D.C. (
Spottswode 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 didn't violate the
Equal Protection clause of the Constitution when they discriminated, because they were not "state actors" covered by that clause.
In 1971, the Supreme Court, in
Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, upheld
desegregation busing of students to achieve integration.
In the public arena
Rosa Parks' 1955 act of
civil disobedience, in which she refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man, was a central event of the
Civil Rights movement. Her action, and the demonstrations that it spawned, led to a series of legislative and court decisions that contributed to undermining the Jim Crow system.
The
Montgomery Bus Boycott led by Reverend
Martin Luther King, Jr., which followed Rosa Parks' action, was, however, not the first of its kind. Numerous boycotts and demonstrations against segregation had occurred throughout the 1930s and 1940s. These early demonstrations achieved positive results and helped spark political activism.
K. Leroy Irvis of
Pittsburgh's Urban League, for instance, led a demonstration against employment discrimination by Pittsburgh's department stores in 1947, launching his own influential political career.
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 (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
Building a coalition of northern Democrats and Republicans, President
Lyndon B. Johnson pushed
Congress to pass the
Civil Rights Act of 1964, which immediately annulled Jim Crow laws that segregated restaurants, hotels and theaters. These facilities (with rare exceptions) immediately dropped racial segregation. The
Voting Rights Act of 1965 ended legally sanctioned barriers to voting for all federal, state and local elections. It also provided for Federal oversight and monitoring of counties with historically low voter turnout, a sign of discriminatory barriers.
In January, 1964, President
Lyndon 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 aiding in the registration of African-American voters as part of the Mississippi Summer Project. Forty-four days later, the
Federal Bureau of Investigation recovered their bodies, which had been buried in an earthen dam. The Neshoba County deputy sheriff,
Cecil Price 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.
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."
Legacy
Legal
The Supreme Court of the United States held in the
Civil Rights Cases 109 US 3 (1883) that the Fourteenth Amendment didn't 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 upholding discriminatory laws in the face of evidence of profound inequalities in practice.
Political
Jim Crow laws were a product of the
solidly Democratic South. Conservative white Southern Democrats, exploiting racial fear and attacking the corruption (real or perceived) of Reconstruction
Republican governments, took over state governments in the South in the 1870s and dominated them for nearly 100 years, chiefly as a result of disfranchisement of most blacks through statute and constitutions. In 1956, southern resistance to the Supreme Court's ruling in
Brown v. Board of Education resulted in a resolution called the
Southern Manifesto. It was read into the Congressional Record and supported by 96 southern congressmen and senators, all but two of them southern Democrats.
African-American life
The Jim Crow laws were a major factor in
the Great Migration during the early part of the 20th century, because opportunities were so limited in the South that African Americans moved in great numbers to northern cities to seek a better life.
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 couldn't be denied. Changing social attitudes and leadership by pioneers such as
Jackie Robinson, who entered formerly all-white professional baseball in 1947, aided in lowering the barriers. African-American participation in all the major sports began to increase rapidly in the 1950s and 1960s.
Remembrance
Ferris State University in
Big Rapids, Michigan houses the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, an extensive collection of everyday items that promoted racial segregation or presented racial stereotypes of
African Americans, for the purpose of academic research and education about their cultural influence.
State-by-state examples of Jim Crow laws
The following examples of segregation are excerpts from examples of Jim Crow laws shown at the
National Park Service website
.
The examples include
anti-miscegenation laws. Although sometimes counted among the "Jim Crow laws" of the South, those laws also were passed by other states 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.
Alabama
- "All passenger stations in this state operated by any motor transportation company shall have separate waiting rooms or space and separate ticket windows for the white and colored races."
Arizona
"The marriage of a person of Caucasian blood with a Negro, Mongolian, Malay, or Hindu shall be null and void."
Arkansas
Various laws from 1884 to 1947 prohibited marriage or relations between whites and blacks or mulattoes, providing for specific fines and imprisonment of up to three years.
Various laws from 1891 to 1959 segregated rail travel, streetcars, buses, all public carriers, race tracks, gaming establishments, polling places, washrooms in mines, tuberculosis hospitals, public schools and teachers' colleges.
A poll tax was first imposed in the 1890s.
Florida
"All marriages between a white person and a Negro, or between a white person and a person of Negro descent to the fourth generation inclusive, are hereby forever prohibited."
"Any Negro man and white woman, or any white man and Negro woman, who are not married to each other, who shall habitually live in and occupy in the nighttime the same room shall each be punished by imprisonment not exceeding twelve (12) months, or by fine not exceeding five hundred ($500.00) dollars."
"The schools for white children and the schools for Negro children shall be conducted separately."
Georgia
"All persons licensed to conduct a restaurant, shall serve either white people exclusively or colored people exclusively and shan't sell to the two races within the same room or serve the two races anywhere under the same license."
"It shall be unlawful for any amateur white baseball team to play baseball on any vacant lot or baseball diamond within two blocks of a playground devoted to the Negro race, and it'll be unlawful for any amateur colored baseball team to play baseball in any vacant lot or baseball diamond within two blocks of any playground devoted to the white race."
Kentucky
"The children of white and colored races committed to the houses of reform shall be kept entirely separate from each other."
Louisiana
"Any person who shall rent any part of any such building to a Negro person or a Negro family when such building is already in whole or in part in occupancy by a white person or white family, or vice versa when the building is in occupancy by a Negro person or Negro family, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and on conviction thereof shall be punished by a fine of not less than twenty-five ($25.00) nor more than one hundred ($100.00) dollars or be imprisoned not less than 10, or more than 60 days, or both such fine and imprisonment in the discretion of the court."
Maryland
"All railroad companies and corporations, and all persons running or operating cars or coaches by steam on any railroad line or track in the State of Maryland, for the transportation of passengers, are hereby required to provide separate cars or coaches for the travel and transportation of the white and colored passengers."
Mississippi
"Any person...who shall be guilty of printing, publishing or circulating printed, typewritten or written matter urging or presenting for public acceptance or general information, arguments or suggestions in favor of social equality or of intermarriage between whites and Negroes, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and subject to fine not exceeding five hundred (500.00) dollars or imprisonment not exceeding six (6) months or both."
Missouri
"Separate free schools shall be established for the education of children of African descent; and it'll be unlawful for any colored child to attend any white school, or any white child to attend a colored school."
New Mexico
"Separate rooms [shall] be provided for the teaching of pupils of African descent, and [when] said rooms are so provided, such pupils may not be admitted to the school rooms occupied and used by pupils of Caucasian or other descent."
North Carolina
"Books shan't be interchangeable between the white and colored schools, but shall continue to be used by the race first using them. "
"The state librarian is directed to fit up and maintain a separate place for the use of the colored people who may come to the library for the purpose of reading books or periodicals."
Oklahoma
"The [Conservation] Commission shall have the right to make segregation of the white and colored races as to the exercise of rights of fishing, boating and bathing."
"The baths and lockers for the negroes shall be separate from the white race, but may be in the same building."
"The Corporation Commission is hereby vested with power and authority to require telephone companies... to maintain separate booths for white and colored patrons when there's a demand for such separate booths. That the Corporation Commission shall determine the necessity for said separate booths only upon complaint of the people in the town and vicinity to be served after due hearing as now provided by law in other complaints filed with the Corporation Commission."
South Carolina
"No persons, firms, or corporations, who or which furnish meals to passengers at station restaurants or station eating houses, in times limited by common carriers of said passengers, shall furnish said meals to white and colored passengers in the same room, or at the same table, or at the same counter."
"It shall be unlawful for any parent, relative, or other white person in this State, having the control or custody of any white child, by right of guardianship, natural or acquired, or otherwise, to dispose of, give or surrender such white child permanently into the custody, control, maintenance, or support, of a negro."
Texas
Twenty-seven Jim Crow laws were passed in the Lone Star state from 1866 to 1958. Some examples include:
1950: Separate facilities required for white and black citizens in state parks
1953: Public carriers to be segregated
1958: No child compelled to attend schools that are racially mixed. No desegregation unless approved by election. Governor may close schools where troops used on federal authority.
Virginia
"Every person... operating... any public hall, theater, opera house, motion picture show or any place of public entertainment or public assemblage which is attended by both white and colored persons, shall separate the white race and the colored race and shall set apart and designate... certain seats therein to be occupied by white persons and a portion thereof, or certain seats therein, to be occupied by colored persons."
"The conductors or managers on all such railroads shall have power, and are hereby required, to assign to each white or colored passenger his or her respective car, coach or compartment. If the passenger fails to disclose his race, the conductor and managers, acting in good faith, shall be the sole judges of his race."
West Virginia
"White and colored persons shan't be taught in the same school."
This point-blank requirement for segregated schools was proclaimed in West Virginia's State Constitution as Article XII Section 8. In a remarkable show of the persistence of segregationist attitudes extending to the highest levels of state government, numerous attempts to remove this article from the constitution were defeated in the state legislature until it was finally repealed on Nov 8, 1994.
Wyoming
"All marriages of white persons with Negroes, Mulattos, Mongolians, or Malaya hereafter contracted in the State of Wyoming are and shall be illegal and void."Further Information
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