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The Jim Crow laws (named after "Jump Jim Crow", a song-and-dance caricature of African Americans) were state and local laws enacted in the Southern and border states of the United States and enforced between 1876 and 1965. They mandated "separate but equal" status for black Americans. In reality, this led to treatment and accommodations that were almost always inferior to those provided for white Americans. The 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, public places and public transportation have separate buildings, toilets, and restaurants for whites and blacks. (These Jim Crow Laws were separate from the 1800-66 Black Codes, which had 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 Voting Rights Act. During the Reconstruction period of 1865-76, 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 legally-mandated, or de jure, public school segregation unconstitutional in 1954, and it ended in practice in the 1970s. The court ruling did not stop de facto, or residentially-based, school segregation, which continues today in many 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 annulled Jim Crow laws that segregated restaurants, hotels and theaters; these facilities (with rare exceptions) immediately dropped racial segregation. The Voting Rights Act ended discrimination in voting for all federal, state and local elections.
Examples
The following examples of segregation are excerpts from examples of Jim Crow laws shown on the National Park Service website. The examples 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.
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 shall not 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 shall 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 or 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 shall be unlawful for any colored child to attend any white school, or any white child to attend a colored school."
New Mexico
- "Separate rooms be provided for the teaching of pupils of African descent, and 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 shall not 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 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 is 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 shall not 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."
Attempts at dismantling the laws
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" (inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement).
In 1883, the Supreme Court restricted the Civil Rights Act of 1875 to actions by state and local government. It ruled Congress could not control private persons or corporations. After Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875, it did not pass another civil rights law until 1957.
In 1890, Louisiana passed a law requiring separate accommodations for colored and white passengers on railroads. Louisiana law distinguished between "white," "black" and "colored" (that is, people of mixed white and black ancestry). The law already had provided that blacks could not ride with white people, but colored people could ride with whites prior to 1890. A group of concerned black, colored and white citizens in New Orleans formed an association dedicated to the repeal of the law. They persuaded Homer Plessy, who was only one-eighth "Negro" and of fair complexion, 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 car. He was directed to leave that car and sit instead in the "coloreds only" car. Plessy refused and was immediately arrested. The Citizens Committee of New Orleans fought the case all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States. They lost in 1896, and Plessy v. Ferguson resulted in 58 more years of legal discrimination against black and colored 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. 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, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) before the Supreme Court. In 1954, the court unanimously overturned the 1896 Plessy decision in its ruling; Thurgood Marshall later became the first black Supreme Court Justice.
Legacy
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.
Jim Crow laws were a product of the solidly Democratic South. Conservative Southern Democrats, exploiting racial fear and attacking the corruption (real or perceived) of Reconstuction Republican governments, took over state governments in the South in the 1870s and dominated them for nearly 100 years. 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 congressmen and senators, all of them but two Democrats.
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 could not be denied, and the barriers to African-American participation in all the major sports began to crumble in the 1950s and 1960s.
Twentieth century
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 could not require residential segregation. The Supreme Court 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 was not 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 did not violate the Equal Protection clause of the Constitution when they discriminated, because they were not "state actors" covered by that clause.
After World War II, as attitudes in the Federal courts turned against segregation, 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 after being ordered to do so by the bus driver. 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, was not an isolated case. 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 he 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 (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).
In 1971, the Supreme Court, in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, upheld desegregation busing of students to achieve integration.
End of de jure segregation
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 traveling to Mississippi to aid in the registration of African-American voters as part of the Mississippi Summer Project. The Federal Bureau of Investigation recovered their bodies, which had been buried in an earthen dam, 44 days later. 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."
See also
References
- The History of Jim Crow—Inside the South
- http://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/dixonclan/bio.html
- LBJ for Kids CIVIL RIGHTS DURING THE JOHNSON ADMINISTRATION
- United States Department of Justice Introduction To Federal Voting Rights Laws
Further reading
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External links
- Racial Etiquette: The Racial Customs and Rules of Racial Behavior in Jim Crow America - A detailed article outlining the basics of Jim Crow etiquette.
- Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia
- An article on "New Racist Forms: Jim Crow in the 21st Century"
- "You Don't Have to Ride Jim Crow!" PBS documentary on first Freedom Ride, in 1947
- The History of Jim Crow
- A 1923 article in the SF Chronicle lauding California's Jim Crow handgun law, which is still in force today
- List of laws enacted in various states
- Video: The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow
- Video: The Strange Demise of Jim Crow
- Ferris University page about Jim Crow
- PBS page about a relevant program
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