Jim Crow laws

SIGNIFICANCE: Jim Crow laws established a system of White supremacy and discrimination in the United States that lasted from the end of Reconstruction until well into the 1960s. Although all Jim Crow laws are now off the books, their legacy has left African Americans politically and economically disadvantaged.

The term “Jim Crow” is thought to have originated in the song “Jump Jim Crow,” which a White minstrel performer in blackface made famous during the 1830s. His exaggerated mimicking of African American stereotypes may have caused the term to become associated with southern stereotypes of presumed Black inferiority. After the end of Reconstruction in the South in the late 1870s, southern states began passing legislation to take away the rights that formerly enslaved people had enjoyed after the Civil War. By the turn of the twentieth century, the term Jim Crow became synonymous with discrimination and particularly racial segregation.

Development of Segregation

The first segregation laws actually originated in the North before the Civil War. In some northern states, African Americans were segregated in railway cars, theaters, schools, prisons, and hospitals. They were also frequently barred from restaurants and hotels and were excluded from jury service. Some northern states had constitution provisions restricting the admission of African Americans to their states.

After the Civil War, the states of the defeated Confederacy adopted laws known as “Black codes” that restricted the rights of the newly freed enslaved people and created a system similar to slavery. However, Reconstruction soon brought in Union troops and forced the creation of new governments. African American men were given the same voting rights as White men, and many African Americans were elected to political office for the first time. This overturning of the southern order naturally angered many White southerners and engendered resentments that would later be expressed in vengeful legislation.

During the 1870s, the US Supreme Court began to issue rulings that limited federal protections of the civil rights guaranteed by the equal protection and privileges and immunities clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment , which had been ratified in 1868. These rulings had the effect of contributing to the later development of legally mandated racial segregation. In 1877, for example, the Court ruled in Hall v. de Cuir that states could not prohibit segregation on common carriers. In 1883, the Court declared unconstitutional the Civil Rights Act of 1875, and ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment gave Congress the power to restrain states but not individuals from racial discrimination and segregation. In 1890, in Louisville, New Orleans and Texas Railroad v. Mississippi , the Court ruled that states could constitutionally require segregation on carriers.

The Supreme Court’s landmark Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 established the principle of separate-but-equal in a ruling upholding a Louisiana law that required segregation on railroad cars. The separate-but-equal doctrine would serve as the constitutional underpinning of legal segregation until the mid-1950s. Finally, in 1898, the Court upheld the new Mississippi constitution that effectively disfranchised African Americans. The Court also ignored its separate-but-equal principle in public education when it ruled in 1899 in Cumming v. County Board of Education that statutes establishing separate schools for Whites were valid even if they provided no comparable schools for African Americans.

Jim Crow Laws

Jim Crow laws generally consisted of statutes that disfranchised and segregated African Americans. The most common disfranchising device was the use of literacy tests, which required prospective voters to read, write, and interpret passages from the US and state constitutions. In theory, the tests applied equally to all citizens, but in practice they were gimmicks designed to take away the vote from former slaves, few of whom had had opportunities to learn to read. At the same time, the states’ so-called grandfather clauses restored the vote to many illiterate White southerners by exempting from the literacy test requirement citizens whose grandfathers had been eligible to vote—a loophole of no benefit to former slaves. Some states also provided exemptions for illiterate citizens judged to be of “good moral character”—a subjective evaluation made by biased White registrars. Moreover, even if Black would-be voters could read, they still had to get past the registrars’ subjective evaluations of their interpretations of constitutional texts.

Another common disfranchising device was the use of poll taxes, which affected both poor Blacks and poor Whites. These taxes were generally payable six to eighteen months prior to elections. Would-be voters who failed to pay them by deadlines could not vote. Some states also required voters to pay the taxes not only for forthcoming elections but for all previous elections to retain their eligibility to vote.

A final disfranchising technique was the so-called White primary, which thirteen southern states used to prevent African Americans from having meaningful voices in the electoral process. Because most White southerners were Democrats during the Jim Crow era, Democratic Party primaries were the most important elections. Candidates who won the Democratic primaries were virtually assured of victory in the general elections, which Republican Party candidates occasionally did not even bother to contest. Since political parties were regarded as private clubs, they remained exempt from government antidiscrimination laws until well into the twentieth century, allowing local Democratic Party branches legally to exclude African Americans from voting in party primaries—which were the only elections that mattered.

The disfranchisement of African Americans gave White southerners total control over political processes and allowed them to enact discriminatory laws. As the US Supreme Court diluted the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment and federal civil rights laws, southern states moved quickly to segregate African Americans. Mandatory segregation on public transportation was followed by segregated waiting rooms and ticket windows. Local ordinances segregated almost everything that might mix members of different racial groups, from theaters, swimming pools, and restaurants to parks, phone booths, elevators, and even public benches and water fountains. At the state level, schools, mental institutions, homes for the aged, and prisons were segregated. Florida even required that school textbooks used by Black and White students be stored separately when classes were not in session. Eventually, the Jim Crow system governed nearly every aspect of daily life, and White supremacy was the norm in the South.

Challenges to Segregation

As early as 1915, the Supreme Court began overturning Jim Crow laws. During that year, the Court declared grandfather clauses unconstitutional in Guinn v. United States . Many other antidiscriminatory decisions followed, such as the Court’s 1944 banning of White primaries in Smith v. Allwright . The Court’s most important ruling, however, came in 1954, when its justices unanimously declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education. That landmark decision was the beginning of the end of the separate-but-equal doctrine. In his opinion on the Brown ruling, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote that in the matter of education, “separate” could never be “equal.”

The 1950s also brought the Civil Rights movement and a new anti-Jim Crow attitude in federal government. In 1964, the US Congress passed the Civil Rights Act , a far-reaching law that ended segregation in many public accommodations, outlawed employment discrimination, and anticipated further major civil rights legislation. The following year, Congress passed the first Voting Rights Act . It eliminated literacy tests as a voting requirement. During that same year, the Supreme Court declared poll taxes unconstitutional in Harper v. Virginia. These developments did not end all Jim Crow laws immediately, but they set the United States on a course that would, in fact, lead to the abolition of legally mandated segregation and discrimination. The changes wrought by the end of Jim Crow meant that African Americans could, for the first time, become full participants in the American political process.

Jim Crow in the Twenty-First Century

Despite the progressive measures of the late twentieth century, there are some who believe that a racial caste system is alive and well in the United States of the twenty-first century. Issues cited as evidence include racial profiling, instances of police brutality against African Americans and other minorities of color, and the seemingly mass incarceration of African Americans in the country's prisons. In 2010, former litigator Michelle Alexander published a book titled The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, focusing specifically on the idea that the criminal justice system targeted African Americans, offering statistics that conveyed the reality of the number of African Americans kept behind bars. In general, she claimed that African Americans remained in a subordinate state, albeit one slightly different from that of their ancestors. Alexander emphasized that there were actually a greater number of African Americans in prisons or on probation and parole than were enslaved in 1850.

Bibliography

Higginbotham, F. Michael. Ghosts of Jim Crow: Ending Racism in Post-Racial America. New York: New York UP, 2013. Print.

Litwack, Leon. Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow. New York: Knopf, 1998. Print.

Rasmussen, R. Kent. Farewell to Jim Crow: The Rise and Fall of Segregation in America. New York: Facts on File, 1997. Print.

Schuessler, Jennifer. "Drug Policy as Race Policy: Best Seller Galvanizes the Debate." The New York Times, 6 Mar. 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/03/07/books/michelle-alexanders-new-jim-crow-raises-drug-law-debates.html. Accessed 5 July 2024.

Rasmussen, R. Kent. Farewell to Jim Crow: The Rise and Fall of Segregation in America. New York: Facts on File, 1997. Print.

Smith, Elliott. Jim Crow: Segregation and the Legacy of Slavery. Lerner, 2022.

Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow, commemorative edition. New York: Oxford UP, 2001. Print.