Jim Crow Laws and American

jim crow LAWS and AMERICAN SOCIETY

According to Jennifer Blue, the term Jim Crow, the name of an early Negro minstrel song, "refers to the official discrimination against or segregation of African-Americans" following the end of the Civil War in 1865 and commencing from the beginning of the Reconstruction Era in 1866 and up to the mid-1920's. These "Jim Crow" laws were "officially instituted by the southern states when racial attitudes hardened in the 1890's" some thirty years after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation which abolished slavery in America. During these years, Jim Crow laws "mandated racial separation in schools, parks, playgrounds, restaurants, hotels, public transportation... restrooms" and other public facilities and stood as symbols of "supposed black inferiority" ("An Analysis of Jim Crow Laws," Internet).

During the Reconstruction Era, the U.S. Congress and the Supreme Court refused to enact laws that would protect African-Americans in the Deep South, due in part to viewing the "Negro problem" as indigenous to southern states which by the 1880's had institutionalized segregation to such an extent that African-Americans were left out of all political and economic arenas related to employment, housing and voting. By 1881, many southern states had passed new legislation which required separate accommodations for blacks in theaters, parks and public conveyances like taxis, buses and trains. These and other facilities became "Jim Crow" bathrooms, phone booths and even courtroom Bibles and signs were prominently displayed as either "Colored" or "White," indicating separate facilities for blacks and whites (Rabinowitz, 140).

In addition, these Jim Crow laws "played a major role in the creation of new systems of race relations that emerged in the Deep South to replace slavery." The commitment to white supremacy had always been a constant among southern whites since the earliest days of the Colonial Period and up the Revolutionary War, "but its expression varied according to changing national and regional circumstances" and viewpoints regarding African-Americans and their proper place in American society (Rabinowitz, 167).

One of the major components of these Jim Crow laws was disenfranchisement which was "largely the work of rural and urban white elites who sought to reassure" whites in the south that white supremacy was the law of the land. As a result, lynching and other forms of violence against blacks were endorsed, encouraged and rationalized in the minds of most southern whites (Rabinowitz, 168). A prominent spokesman against African-American rights and equality was Benjamin Tillman, governor of South Carolina from 1890 to 1894. Tillman greatly aided in the disenfranchisement of blacks in the south by requiring Jim Crow laws and in 1990, he proudly announced "We have done out best to prevent blacks from voting and how we could eliminate every one of them... We stuffed ballot boxes and shot them. We are not ashamed of it" (Rabinowitz, 172).