Behold the image of Thomas Rice, an American actor who rose to fame in the early 1800s due to his derogatory character known as Jim Crow. All throughout the country, Rice performed the famous song “Jump Jim Crow,” a song which was created by enslaved Black people and turned into a song that mocked and degraded those of African descent (Pilgrim 2000). As the Father of American minstrelsy, Rice is charged with popularizing the stereotypes and myths about Black people being lazy, idiotic, and uncivilized. However, today the term “Jim Crow” is infamously known as the set of laws established after the Reconstruction era that legalized segregation and legitimized the secondary citizen status of African Americans.
It was the 1896 Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson that legalized “separate but equal” public spaces (ACRU 5). From then on, “separate but equal” established the American social order, especially of that in the American South. State governments began mandating how the races were to interact, legalized disenfranchisement based on race, and actively encouraged violence against African Americans who attempted to change the status quo. Parks, public schools, libraries, theaters, prisons, neighborhoods and more were all segregated based on race. Black people were also expected to behave and speak in an appropriate manner when in the presence of whites. Jim Crow social etiquette included Black men having no physical contact with white women whatsoever, Blacks always addressing whites in a respectful manner, Black couples never showing affection in the presence of whites, etc. (ACRU 10-11).
Nursing: “No person or corporation shall require any White female nurse to nurse in wards or rooms in hospitals, either public or private, in which negro men are placed.” (Alabama law)
Teaching: “Any instructor who shall teach in any school, college or institution where members of the white and colored races are received and enrolled as pupils for instruction shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and upon conviction thereof, shall be fined...” (Oklahoma law)
Beer and Wine Sales: “All persons licensed to conduct the business of selling beer or wine...shall serve either white people exclusively or colored people exclusively and shall not sell to two races within the same room at any time.” (Georgia law)
Most notable about the Jim Crow era, was voter denial. States created a variety of ways in which to encourage voter disenfranchisement of African Americans, such as grandfather clauses, literacy tests, and poll taxes. Literacy tests were nonsensical in that even the most brilliant person would find it difficult to successfully pass one. As many African Americans of the time were poor, they could not afford to pay poll taxes which would be between “$25 to $50 dollars in today’s money” (ACRU 8 2014). Grandfather clauses prevented African Americans from voting by exempting those whose grandfather did not own land before a certain year, often during the Slavery era.
Sample of a literacy test
African Americans resisted and rebelled against Jim Crow and of course were met with violence, often turned deadly. The primary method of physical violence used by white supremacists was lynching. Lynchings were public executions done by mobs of angry whites against Blacks to intimidate and invoke fear in Black communities (ACRU 15). Often lynching victims were voters, were accused of raping white women, or just so happened to be in the wrong place at the right time. Victims were often burned alive, castrated, or raped before the final act of being hung from trees.
Majority of those whose family members were lynched found no justice. The government, both state and federal, allowed the lynchings to take place without intervening. Activists such as Ida B Wells dedicated their careers to campaigning for anti-lynching and recorded numerous incidents of public lynchings by white supremacists. With the Civil Rights Movement, Jim Crow laws were overturned and declared unconstitutional. Public lynchings were no longer allowed but the stain of white supremacy continued on to present day United States.
For more information:
Ida B. Wells, “Lynch Law in America”
The Civil Rights Act of 1964
Civil Rights and the 1950s: Crash Course US History #39
Blackface! Minstrel Shows
Ida B. Wells and Anti-Lynching Activism
The American Civil Rights Union. “The Truth About Jim Crow.”
Blackface performers are, “...the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow citizens.” - Frederick Douglass
