What was Jim Crow?

Jim Crow refers to the system of state and local laws and customs in the southern and some western states from roughly 1877 to 1965 that enforced racial segregation, disenfranchised Black voters, and maintained white supremacy through legal, economic, and extralegal means. The name came from a minstrel character popularized by white performer Thomas Dartmouth Rice in the 1830s, used to mock African Americans, and became a generic label for racial separation.

Jim Crow segregation took shape in the late nineteenth century after the formal end of Reconstruction in 1877. Southern Democrats, called Redeemers, regained control of state governments and rewrote constitutions to disenfranchise Black voters and segregate public life. Mississippi led the way with its 1890 constitution that introduced poll taxes, literacy tests, residency requirements, and other devices that excluded Black voters within technically race-neutral language. Other southern states followed: South Carolina in 1895, Louisiana in 1898 (where the term grandfather clause originated to exempt poor whites from literacy tests if their grandfathers had voted), North Carolina in 1900, Alabama and Virginia in 1901 to 1902, Texas in 1902, Georgia in 1908, and Oklahoma in 1910. Black voter registration in former Confederate states fell from majorities in some states during Reconstruction to nearly zero by 1910.

Segregation extended into nearly every aspect of public life. Schools, hospitals, parks, libraries, swimming pools, drinking fountains, restrooms, restaurants, theaters, and transportation were segregated by race. The Supreme Court endorsed the system in Plessy v. Ferguson on May 18, 1896 by upholding Louisiana's law requiring separate but equal railroad cars. Justice Henry Billings Brown's majority opinion claimed that separate facilities did not stamp Black Americans with a badge of inferiority, while Justice John Marshall Harlan's lone dissent declared that the Constitution is colorblind. Plessy stood for 58 years until Brown v. Board of Education on May 17, 1954 declared school segregation unconstitutional.

Jim Crow was enforced not only by law but by violence. Lynching reached its peak in the 1880s and 1890s, with the Tuskegee Institute documenting 4,743 lynchings from 1882 to 1968, mostly of Black men in southern states. The Ku Klux Klan, refounded in 1915, terrorized Black communities.

The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s slowly dismantled Jim Crow. Brown ended school segregation in principle. The Civil Rights Act of July 2, 1964 banned discrimination in public accommodations and employment. The Voting Rights Act of August 6, 1965 banned literacy tests and other voting barriers. Loving v. Virginia in 1967 struck down state laws against interracial marriage. Jim Crow as a formal legal system ended with these reforms, although its effects persist.