Jim Crow laws

The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws in the United States enacted between 1876 and 1965, a period in American history known as the Jim Crow era. They mandated de jure racial segregation in all public facilities, with a supposedly "separate but equal" status for black Americans. They also imposed legal barriers on who private businesses were allowed to serve,Lawrence Otis Graham, Our Kind of People: Inside America's Black Upper Class. Harper Collins, 2009. p.335. prohibiting black-owned barber shops from serving white clients whether the whites wanted it or not,Separate is Not Equal: Brown v. Board of Education, Smithsonian and requiring apartment buildings to designate themselves black or white,Examples of Jim Crow laws, Ferris State University or prohibiting interracial athletic events even if entirely financed and organized by a private party.Charles Martin. Benching Jim Crow: The Rise and Fall of the Color Line in Southern College Sports, 1890-1980. University of Illinois Press, 2010. 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.Lowery, Malinda Maynor (2010). Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation. Univ of North Carolina Press. pp. 0–339. ISBN 9780807833681. Jim Crow laws were particularly popular in the South, where southern hospitality could only be enjoyed if one followed the "whites only" or "colored only" signs.
The Jim Crow era only began to end in 1954, when the US Supreme Court ruled that segregation in state-sponsored public schools was illegal in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. continued to rule against other instances of racial segregation. Meanwhile, the saw activists and black leaders lead a sustained nonviolent struggle against segregation through tactics like sit-ins, boycotts, and protests.Attacking Segregation Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia. The racist laws were finally overruled by the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Tragically, the legacy of racial segregation still haunts the United States. Uneven enforcement of civil rights measures and deep-seated cultural biases prevented full desegregation, leading to a situation where housing in the US is still about as segregated as it was before the Civil Rights Act,One cause of this phenomenon is white people actively leaving neighborhoods that black people decide to live in; see our article on white flight for more details. with black-majority areas almost universally being poorer than white areas.Segregation's Legacy. US News. Without desegregating neighborhoods and addressing long-standing economic inequality, black Americans are and will continue to be suffering under the remnants of Jim Crow.Modern Segregation. Economic Policy Institute. In other words, the long war drags on.
The system of race-based Jim Crow laws, as an extension of the post-Reconstruction Confederate States of America and as an implementation of a can be regarded as a form of fascism.Worshiping the Confederacy is about white supremacy — even the Nazis thought so: Confederate memory nurtured fascism. by Nina Silber (August 17, 2017 at 10:00 a.m. UTC) The Washington Post (archived from 12 Feb 2020 21:29:55 UTC).Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future by Jason Stanley (2024) One Signal Publishers / Atria. ISBN 9781668056912. Similarly, policies and rulings that function like Jim Crow, such as the Supreme Court's gutting of the Voting Rights Act, and superficially race-neutral but functionally racist voter disenfranchisement (such as Ron DeSantis's implementation felony re-enfranchisement in Florida) this also fascistic.
==Origin of the term==
The name Jim Crow is a blanket term which describes the myriad laws enacted in the United States in order to enforce racial segregation. Even before the laws began in full force, the term "Jim Crow" was generally used as an epithet against black people. The name comes from a song by Thomas Dartmouth Rice, who performed it in blackface and found enormous popularity across the US and even in London and Dublin.Who Was Jim Crow? Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia. The Jim Crow persona and song became so popular that it basically founded the genre of racist minstrel entertainment.
Jim Crow and other minstrel characters were intentionally portrayed as lazy and stupid for comedic effect, going a long way in perpetuating racial prejudice across the US. The minstrel shows popularized Jim Crow as a pop culture caricature recognized by much of America's white population. When white Americans referred to blacks as "Jim Crow", it was to reduce blacks to the same buffoonish caricature that Rice and other blackface performers showed on stage. 
The image became so ingrained in the national consciousness that it came to describe racist laws simply due to the fact that it was how most whites thought of black people. While Rice died in poverty and was soon forgotten, the name Jim Crow came to define an era of racist oppression.
==Enactment and solidification==
===White Democratic power===
After Reconstruction ended and President Rutherford B. Hayes withdrew federal troops from the South, white members of the Democratic PartyThis was before Richard Nixon enacted the Southern Strategy and the Democratic and Republican Parties swapped roles, meaning that the Democrats were the racist fuckwits and the Republicans were actually reasonable. were able to regain their stranglehold on power in the South. Paramilitaries like the White League used murderous violence to destroy local Republican Party organizing and suppress the black vote in order to ensure political victory for the Democrats.Michael Perman (2009). Pursuit of Unity: A Political History of the American South. Univ of North Carolina Press. pp. 138–. ISBN 978-0-8078-3324-7. In at least one case, there was an outright coup against an elected government when white supremacists employed a Gatling gun and other weapons to destroy the biracial government of Wilmington, North Carolina.
The Democratic politicians who came to power amid this wave of repression called themselves the " making clear their intention to "redeem" the South from its period of post-Civil War progress towards racial equality. They represented the interests of rich white agriculturalists, the same group of people who had led the disastrous uprising of the Confederate States.
===Disenfranchisement===
The Redeemer Democrats quickly set about ensuring their continued power by suppressing black and poor voters. Over about a decade after Reconstruction, black people lost their hard-won right to vote in the South through state governments subverting the US Constitution. White mobs used violence to intimidate black people out of voting, and state governments began to pass laws to impose further restrictions. First there was a literacy test, which most black people were unable to pass since it had been illegal to teach slaves to read.Voting Rights For Blacks And Poor Whites In The Jim Crow South. The literacy tests were always administered by white officials who would reject black would-be voters even if they clearly could demonstrate literacy. Grandfather clauses were used in certain places to make sure that the literacy tests didn't impact poor whites by allowing people to vote if their fathers or grandfathers had voted before 1867. Since that applied to almost no black people, it again excluded them from the political process.
With the Democratic stranglehold on politics in the South, anyone who won a Democratic primary would be fairly certain of winning office. With that in mind, the Democratic Party and state officials ensured that their primary elections would only be open to white voters. Additionally, officials would routinely purge voter rolls of black Americans and pass laws disenfranchising former prisoners (of whom many were blacks who had been convicted of trumped-up charges). All told, the Southern Democrats had a depressingly effective system in place to prevent black people from doing anything as simple as voting.
The effects of disenfranchisement made themselves clear in the number of registered voters. In 1896, for instance, Louisiana had 130,334 registered black voters.A Brief History of Jim Crow. Constitutional Rights Foundation. After the enactment of the state's new voter restrictions, only 1,342 black citizens were able to cast a vote. Similarly, in Virginia, there were over 100,000 registered black voters in 1867, almost half the state's eligible voting population. After 1902, when the state constitution implemented a poll tax and other barriers to voting, the number dropped to 21,000, just 4.7% of all registered voters.Virginia's Constitution. Howard, A. E. Dick. Virginia Museum of History & Culture, Virginia Historical Society. By 1940, across the South, a mere 3% of black citizens were registered to vote.Race and Voting in the Segregated South. Constitutional Rights Foundation. Without the right to vote, black people could not hold public office and had no say in how they were taxed or how their schools would be funded or how they would be treated by the police and the courts.
===Malign neglect===
With black people removed from political life, their general quality of living sharply declined thanks to the efforts of white governments. Black schools were neglected and underfunded, with the black students having no choice but to go to them thanks to segregation in education.Reese, W. (2010). History, Education, and the Schools. Springer. p. 145. ISBN 978-0230104822. Blacks could not visit white libraries, and they almost never got any libraries of their own. 
Public education became the African-American's first introduction in the reality of living at the bottom of a segregated society. Their schools taught them only the skills necessary for agricultural or domestic work, a form of neglect which had a cascading effect down the generations. Black teachers had much lower salaries and much less training than their white counterparts, to the point where a study in 1931 found that black teachers in Alabama performed worse on tests than ninth-grade or eighth-grade white students.
Also hindering the education of black Americans was the arduous burden of farm labor. After the end of slavery, white landowners maintained their economic status by finding a new way to force black people back into laboring for no compensation. This time, the system was called sharecropping, where blacks would be coerced by violence or economic necessity into signing abusive contracts that trapped them in cycles of debt and required them to live on the white landlord's property while paying exorbitant rents to do so.Racialized Poverty – The Legacy of Slavery. Equal Justice Initiative. White landlords had extensive control over the lives of their tenants and their tenants' families. Black children also usually had to work the fields in these living arrangements at expense to their education, and black children in the South attended school just 15 or 20 weeks each year as found by a study in the 1930s. 
Black children who graduated their miserable grade schools had few or no opportunities to attend high school. In 1932, only 14% of black children between 15 and 19 years old were enrolled in public high schools in the South. What high schools existed for them had few resources and rarely taught science or music or art.
==Separate but "equal"==
===Plessy v. Ferguson===
Jim Crow came to rest upon the doctrine/justification of "separate but equal", which became the founding myth of the entire American system of segregation. The legal argument asserted that racial segregation did not necessarily violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution because the segregated facilities would be kept to an equal standard. As seen above, this was complete bullshit, and it was to be tested before the United States Supreme Court in 1890.
In 1890, Louisiana passed a law mandating that railroads provide "equal but separate accommodations for the white, and colored, races."Plessy v. Ferguson. Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Black Americans in the city of New Orleans were outraged, and a mixed-race man named Homer Plessy promptly got himself arrested for refusing to comply when ordered to move to the colored cabin of a passenger train. Plessy pleaded "not guilty" during legal proceedings on the basis that the law was unconstitutional, and the issue made its way to the Supreme Court in 1896 (law is slow). Cue one of the darkest moments in American history.
Plessy's attorneys argued that the segregation law violated the Fourteenth Amendment's provision guaranteeing equal protection under the law. Unfortunately, a majority of the Supreme Court decided that segregation did not violate the Equal Protection Law because it theoretically provided for equal services for both races despite them being separate.Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). PBS. Associate Justice John Marshall Harlan was the lone dissent, making the obvious argument that segregation was a fundamental violation of civil rights and thus inherently violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Despite Harlan's powerful and correct dissent, the Court's decision provided constitutional cover for segregation from the very top of the American judicial system.
==It gets worse==
===The Great Migration, or how Jim Crow went North===
By the early 1900s, the South had become unlivable to millions of its black citizens. Sharecropping, economic inequality, and ongoing racist oppression forced black Americans out of the South, while reports of abundant industrial job openings in the North created the promise of a better future.Great Migration. Britannica. This began a massive wave of internal migration among African-Americans who hoped to live in at least a slightly less shitty part of the country. Cities like Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and New York City absorbed millions of black migrants, permanently shifting their demographics. Do you see where this story is going yet?
Black Americans moving to the northern US were instantly met with a wave of racist backlash that had previously been hidden by the fact that there just weren't that many black people up there. Tensions rapidly escalated between white industrial workers and the black people who were hired alongside them, exploding in 1917 in the horrifying East St. Louis riots that left 6,000 black people homeless and around 250 black people murdered. Race riots swept further across northern cities, and black activists responded by protesting amid worsening conditions.Arnesen, Eric. (2003). Black protest and the great migration : a brief history with documents. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's. pp. 12–15, 29–35. ISBN 0-312-39129-3. OCLC 51099552. They also faced serious employment discrimination, but this luckily didn't prevent a major drop in black poverty as a result of the move.Thernstrom, Stephan (1973). The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880–1970. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. p. 201. ISBN 978-0674433946.
In the Midwest and Western states, whites responded by declaring "sundown towns", a colloquial name for groups of all-white communities which used threats and signage to keep blacks from settling there.Sundown Towns. Black Past. Monuments to the Confederacy were erected across the nation, even in strongly pro-Union states, as a thinly-veiled threat to black migrants.Loewen, James W. (1999). Lies Across America. New York, NY: Touchstone. ISBN 0-684-87067-3. pp. 102–103; 182–183 Racist violence became just as common as it had been in the South, perhaps even worse. Thus, while black Americans had moved north, Jim Crow moved with them. 
===Then came Woodrow Wilson===
In 1912, things got even worse for black Americans when Woodrow Wilson was elected president. The first southern president since the Civil War, Woodrow Wilson quickly turned the federal government into a weapon against black Americans, a massive betrayal since black people had always expected the feds to be on their side thanks to the powerful example of Abraham Lincoln.The Racist Legacy of Woodrow Wilson. The Atlantic. One of Wilson's first major domestic policies was segregating the federal government and sweeping many racist neo-Confederates into top offices.In Their Own Words: The long-forgotten racial attitudes & policies of Woodrow Wilson Keylor, William. Boston University. Wilson purged black officeholders who had been appointed by his Republican predecessors,Segregation in the US Government (1913) PBS. and subjected those who remained to indignities like being made to work hidden behind screensThe History and Experience of African Americans in America’s Postal Service National Postal Museum. or in literal cages.Another Open Letter to Woodrow Wilson W.E.B. DuBois. September 1913 Wilson had destroyed the last active legacy of the anti-racist Republicans of old and completed the entry of Jim Crow into every public American space.
As if to rub it in, Woodrow Wilson had the incredibly racist and pseudohistorical film The Birth of a Nation shown in the White House. The film had used a quote taken directly from Woodrow Wilson that exalted and whitewashed (sorry about the pun) the original Ku Klux Klan. Having the film participated in by and shown to the US president brought it to national attention, greatly furthering its message of the Lost Cause of the South and the importance for a new age of white supremacy.
===1919, the year of hate===
Towards the end of Wilson's exceptionally racist presidency, the US was paralyzed by nearly a year of destructive race riots and white supremacist terrorist acts across more than three dozen cities. This is called the Red Summer, although the violence lasted far longer than a single season. 
World War I had intensified the Great Migration due to the demand for industrial jobs, and black Americans returning home from service overseas expected to be treated with the respect they deserved after honorably serving their country.Red Summer: The Race Riots of 1919. National World War One Museum and Memorial. Instead, their white countrymen met them with fear and revulsion, demanding that black people quietly return to being oppressed. 
White citizens, usually normal civilians unaffiliated with terrorist groups or the KKK, formed mobs across the country in an attempt to force black people back into their perceived rightful place. Racial violence began in the spring but started to dramatically intensify in late July after rumors of a black man being arrested for rape in Washington DC led to the US national capital being overtaken by four days of murderous terror from white mobs, killing between 15 and 40 people. 
By far the biggest race riot blew up in Chicago in early August after black teenagers were beaten with rocks and then drowned for the offense of getting too close to a whites-only beach. Violent rioting across Chicago's South and West sides and into the downtown lasted days; official casualty counts listed 38 deaths.
===Redlining and housing policy===
While segregation definitely existed in the northern and midwestern states beforehand, it got a whole lot worse after the wave of black migration made more whites think segregation necessary. Black migration northwards continued into the 1930s.How 13 migrations of African-Americans changed the nation. USA Today. State governments passed segregation laws in these regions, and the federal government used construction projects initiated by President Franklin Roosevelt to create segregated neighborhoods by bulldozing integrated ones.The Jim Crow North. The New York Times Upfront.
The Federal Housing Administration, which was established in 1934, refused to insure mortgages in and near African-American neighborhoods and simultaneously sponsored builders who were mass-producing entire subdivisions for white-only communities.A 'Forgotten History' Of How The U.S. Government Segregated America. NPR. This policy was known as "redlining" because the federal government literally created racial maps of American cities to highlight African-American areas as too risky to invest in. As a result of that, black areas became more and more run down, increasingly avoided by white citizens.
==Attempts to stall its destruction==
Since the Southern Strategy and the Reagan era, desegregation of public schools, lead regulations, health insurance equity, and poverty relief have slowed down and can be tied to the stagnation of black wages today.What If Black America Were a Country?, The Atlantic The Affordable Care Act is attempting to address at least one of these concerns.Charts: The economic gap between blacks and whites hasn’t budged for 50 years, The Washington Post
==Libertarian views==
While libertarians, almost inherently, are opposed to government discrimination, such as Jim Crow laws,Context Matters: A Better Libertarian Approach to Antidiscrimination Law by David E. Bernstein (June 16, 2010) Cato Unbound. their views on the remedy of the Civil Rights Act are mixed. Title II of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibited discrimination in public accommodations. Some — but not all — libertarians are opposed to the idea that a privately-owned business can be told by the government that they must serve everyone; according to these libertarians, this is in opposition to the idea of freedom of association for individuals (or corporations — same thing to them apparently).Libertarianism and the Right to Discriminate by Robert A. Levy (March/April 2016) Cato Policy Report. Rand Paul has questioned Title II,Rand Paul's rewriting of his own remarks on the Civil Rights Act by Glenn Kessler (April 11, 2013) The Washington Post.
Peter Thiel has expressed opposition to both women's suffrage (the Nineteenth Amendment in the US) and "welfare beneficiaries"The Education of a Libertarian by Peter Thiel (April 13, 2009) Cato Unbound. (reasonably interpreted to mean minorities).11 questions to see if libertarians are hypocrites: Eleven questions that expose their contradictions and faulty logic by R.J. Eskow (Sep 12, 2013 12:19 PM EDT) Salon.
==See also==
*Tulsa Race Massacre
*Black brute
*One-drop rule
*Separate but equal
*Apartheid
==References==
==Notes==
Category:Discrimination
Category:Fascism
Category:Racism
Category:United States law
Category:United States history
Category:White supremacy