11.1: Jim Crow - Readings and Media

The selected readings, images, and videos of this module will inform students about the Jim Crow era.

Readings and Media

Jim Crow

Definition: Discriminatory laws designed to disfranchise and segregate African Americans in the South

Significance: Jim Crow laws established a system of white supremacy and discrimination in the United States that lasted from the end of Reconstruction until well into the 1960s. Although virtually all Jim Crow laws are now off the books, their legacy has left African Americans politically and economically disadvantaged.

The term “Jim Crow” is thought to have originated in the song “Jump Jim Crow,” which a white minstrel performer in blackface made famous during the 1830s. His exaggerated mimicking of African American stereotypes may have caused the term to become associated with southern stereotypes of presumed black inferiority. After the end of Reconstruction in the South in the late 1870s, southern states began passing legislation to take away the rights that former slaves had enjoyed after the Civil War. By the turn of the twentieth century, the term Jim Crow became synonymous with discrimination and particularly racial segregation.

Development of Segregation

The first segregation laws actually originated in the North before the Civil War. In some northern states, African Americans were segregated in railway cars, theaters, schools, prisons, and hospitals. They were also frequently barred from restaurants and hotels and were excluded from jury service. Some northern states had constitution provisions restricting the admission of African Americans to their states.

After the Civil War, the states of the defeated Confederacy adopted laws known as “black codes” that restricted the rights of new freed slaves and created a system similar to slavery. However, Reconstruction soon brought in Union troops and forced the creation of new governments. African American men were given the same voting rights as white men, and many African Americans were elected to political office for the first time. This overturning of the southern order naturally angered many white southerners and engendered resentments that would later be expressed in vengeful legislation.

During the 1870s, the US Supreme Court began to issue rulings that limited federal protections of the civil rights guaranteed by the equal protection and privileges and immunities clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment, which had been ratified in 1868. These rulings had the effect of contributing to the later development of legally mandated racial segregation. In 1877, for example, the Court ruled in Hall v. de Cuir that states could not prohibit segregation on common carriers. In 1883, the Court declared unconstitutional the Civil Rights Act of 1875, and ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment gave Congress the power to restrain states but not individuals from racial discrimination and segregation. In 1890, in Louisville, New Orleans and Texas Railroad v. Mississippi, the Court ruled that states could constitutionally require segregation on carriers.

The Supreme Court’s landmark Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 established the principle of separate-but-equal in a ruling upholding a Louisiana law that required segregation on railroad cars. The separate-but-equal doctrine would serve as the constitutional underpinning of legal segregation until the mid-1950s. Finally, in 1898, the Court upheld the new Mississippi constitution that effectively disfranchised African Americans. The Court also ignored its separate-but-equal principle in public education when it ruled in 1899 in Cumming v. County Board of Education that statutes establishing separate schools for whites were valid even if they provided no comparable schools for African Americans.

Jim Crow Laws

Jim Crow laws generally consisted of statutes that disfranchised and segregated African Americans. The most common disfranchising device was the use of literacy tests, which required prospective voters to read, write, and interpret passages from the US and state constitutions. In theory, the tests applied equally to all citizens, but in practice they were gimmicks designed to take away the vote from former slaves, few of whom had had opportunities to learn to read. At the same time, the states’ so-called grandfather clauses restored the vote to many illiterate white southerners by exempting from the literacy test requirement citizens whose grandfathers had been eligible to vote—a loophole of no benefit to former slaves. Some states also provided exemptions for illiterate citizens judged to be of “good moral character”—a subjective evaluation made by biased white registrars. Moreover, even if black would-be voters could read, they still had to get past the registrars’ subjective evaluations of their interpretations of constitutional texts.

Another common disfranchising device was the use of poll taxes, which affected both poor blacks and poor whites. These taxes were generally payable six to eighteen months prior to elections. Would-be voters who failed to pay them by deadlines could not vote. Some states also required voters to pay the taxes not only for forthcoming elections but for all previous elections to retain their eligibility to vote.

A final disfranchising technique was the so-called white primary, which thirteen southern states used to prevent African Americans from having meaningful voices in the electoral process. Because most white southerners were Democrats during the Jim Crow era, Democratic Party primaries were the most important elections. Candidates who won the Democratic primaries were virtually assured of victory in the general elections, which Republican Party candidates occasionally did not even bother to contest. Since political parties were regarded as private clubs, they remained exempt from government antidiscrimination laws until well into the twentieth century, allowing local Democratic Party branches legally to exclude African Americans from voting in party primaries—which were the only elections that mattered.

The disfranchisement of African Americans gave white southerners total control over political processes and allowed them to enact discriminatory laws. As the US Supreme Court diluted the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment and federal civil rights laws, southern states moved quickly to segregate African Americans. Mandatory segregation on public transportation was followed by segregated waiting rooms and ticket windows. Local ordinances segregated almost everything that might mix members of different racial groups, from theaters, swimming pools, and restaurants to parks, phone booths, elevators, and even public benches and water fountains. At the state level, schools, mental institutions, homes for the aged, and prisons were segregated. Florida even required that school textbooks used by black and white students be stored separately when classes were not in session. Eventually, the Jim Crow system governed nearly every aspect of daily life, and white supremacy was the norm in the South.

Challenges to Segregation

As early as 1915, the Supreme Court began overturning Jim Crow laws. During that year, the Court declared grandfather clauses unconstitutional in Guinn v. United States. Many other antidiscriminatory decisions followed, such as the Court’s 1944 banning of white primaries in Smith v. Allwright. The Court’s most important ruling, however, came in 1954, when its justices unanimously declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education. That landmark decision was the beginning of the end of the separate-but-equal doctrine. In his opinion on the Brown ruling, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote that in the matter of education, “separate” could never be “equal.”

The 1950s also brought the Civil Rights movement and a new anti-Jim Crow attitude in federal government. In 1964, the US Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, a far-reaching law that ended segregation in many public accommodations, outlawed employment discrimination, and anticipated further major civil rights legislation. The following year, Congress passed the first Voting Rights Act. It eliminated literacy tests as a voting requirement. During that same year, the Supreme Court declared poll taxes unconstitutional in Harper v. Virginia. These developments did not end all Jim Crow laws immediately, but they set the United States on a course that would, in fact, lead to the abolition of legally mandated segregation and discrimination. The changes wrought by the end of Jim Crow meant that African Americans could, for the first time, become full participants in the American political process.

Jim Crow in the Twenty-First Century

Despite the progressive measures of the late twentieth century, there are some who believe that a racial caste system is alive and well in the United States of the twenty-first century. Issues cited as evidence include racial profiling, instances of police brutality against African Americans and other minorities of color, and the seemingly mass incarceration of African Americans in the country's prisons. In 2010, former litigator Michelle Alexander published a book titled The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness focusing specifically on the idea that the criminal justice system targets African Americans, offering statistics that convey the reality of the number of African Americans criminalized and kept behind bars. In general, she claims that African Americans remain in a subordinate state, albeit one slightly different from that of their ancestors. Alexander emphasizes that there are actually a greater number of African Americans in prisons or on probation and parole than were enslaved in 1850. Such arguments have sparked several debates, especially following Barack Obama's election as president in 2008.

Moore, William V. "Jim Crow Laws." Salem Press Encyclopedia. 2022.

Jim Crow & Segregation

In the late nineteenth century, the implementation of Jim Crow—or racial segregation—laws institutionalized white supremacy and Black inferiority throughout the South.

Courtesy of the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University.

A black and white reproduction of a photograph of a New Orleans CORE protest at Woolworths and McCrory's on Canal Street, April 1961.

In the late nineteenth century, many white Louisianans attempted to reverse the gains African Americans had made during Reconstruction. The implementation of Jim Crow—or racial segregation laws—institutionalized white supremacy and Black inferiority throughout the South. The term Jim Crow originated in minstrel shows, the popular vaudeville-type traveling stage plays that circulated the South in the mid-nineteenth century. Jim Crow was a stock character, a stereotypically lazy and shiftless Black buffoon, designed to elicit laughs with his avoidance of work and dancing ability. By 1880, however, “Jim Crow” came to signify a model of race relations in which African Americans and white Americans operated in separate social planes. Almost one hundred years would pass before civil rights workers were able to reverse these laws.

The Origins of Jim Crow, 1865 to 1890

In the five years after the Civil War, the Republican-controlled Louisiana Congress enacted powerful civil rights legislation aimed at securing African Americans their political rights. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, respectively, abolished slavery, recognized African Americans as citizens, and guaranteed African American men the right to vote. The Fourteenth Amendment was particularly significant because it guaranteed African Americans the same rights of citizenship that white Americans had, including equal protection under the law. By 1875 African Americans across the South, supported by the federal government, had established nearly four thousand schools for Black students. In addition, more than fifteen hundred had run for office as state and national representatives.

Instituting Jim Crow was a gradual process before 1880, especially during Reconstruction, when it appeared that African Americans enjoyed some protection from the federal government. But in 1865, the Louisiana legislature began implementing “black codes,” laws that formed the basis for racial segregation. Originating in the eighteenth century, black codes regulated and restricted the movement of enslaved people. More generally, they reinstated the antebellum southern social order, in which white people occupied a higher social rung than Black people. Throughout the 1860s and 1870s, black codes limited Black life in numerous ways. They determined the types of businesses African Americans could own and the time of day they could visit downtown. The codes stipulated that no more than three African Americans could ever assemble in one place, and gave white people legal authority over Black people when no police officer was present. Though black codes were found in every parish, they were most vigorously enforced in the northern and eastern parishes of Louisiana.

In southern Louisiana, African Americans were allowed much more freedom, largely owing to the racial demographics of southern Louisiana in general and New Orleans in particular. By 1860, New Orleans could be divided into three discernable racial groups: whites, free people of color, and enslaved people of African descent. In New Orleans, free people of color, who often had a mixed racial heritage, traditionally enjoyed a measure of freedom in their businesses and social interactions not found in other parts of the state.

By 1877, deepening distrust between white people and African Americans led to the lowest point in race relations in American history. At the beginning of Reconstruction, Louisiana sent several Black politicians to the US House of Representatives, and one African American, P. B. S. Pinchback, served as governor from late 1872 to January 1873. By the time federal troops were officially removed from Louisiana in 1877, however, all of these politicians had been defeated; all hopes for improved racial relations, or federal intervention on behalf of Black Louisianans, seemed to have evaporated.

As Reconstruction ended, most African Americans in Louisiana rented small plots of land, hoping to become self-sufficient farmers. Formerly enslaved people tended to stay geographically close to their former owners, usually living no more than fifty miles away. In place of slavery, white Louisianans developed an agricultural system called sharecropping. White property owners gave African American farmers access to land with the understanding that these farmers would give the landowner part of the crop as “rent.” Sharecropping quickly evolved into an exploitative relationship between farmers and landlords. Often illiterate and uneducated, sharecroppers rarely understood the written contracts they were compelled to sign. Further, landlords set the price of the crop, often ignoring its market value, while Black farmers with left without recourse. Sharecropping undergirded Black poverty in Louisiana—profits were scarce, weather and climate were often uncooperative, and corruption was rampant. While there were attempts to unify white and Black farmers in the immediate postbellum period, sharecropping allowed class and racial distinctions to persist.

Institutionalizing Jim Crow

By 1890, the Democratic Party hatched a scheme to completely remove the Republican Party from the South by disfranchising southern Black men, the most ardent supporters of the Republican Party. White Louisianans implemented poll taxes, literacy tests, residency requirements, and “understanding” clauses to prevent Black people from registering to vote. Despite the rights guaranteed them by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, African Americans were systematically excluded from the political process. Social segregation soon followed.

In 1891, the Louisiana legislature had officially segregated the railroads within the state. In 1892, Homer Plessy, an active member of a New Orleans civil rights organization, the Comité de Citoyens, bought a first-class ticket on a train and attempted to sit among whites. After he was arrested for breaking the law, Plessy sued the railroad company, his lawyers arguing that segregation denied him equal protection under the law as guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. In 1896, however, the US Supreme Court upheld Louisiana law in its decision on Plessy vs. Ferguson. Speaking for the majority, Justice Henry Brown stated that segregation did not deprive Plessy of his rights, nor did it make him an inferior person. The justices argued that states could establish “separate but equal” facilities; if Black and white people were treated equally, segregation would be allowed to stand. Yet, in almost all public facilities—schools, hospitals, trains, restaurants, hotels, parks, cemeteries, the armed forces, and jury duty—white people received priority over African Americans. Following the decision, some institutions excluded African Americans altogether.

Two years after the Plessy decision, Louisiana passed one of the first laws officially stripping Black men of the right to register to vote. In essence, everything that could be segregated in Louisiana was. Public facilities for adults, including restaurants, hotels, night clubs, and cemeteries, were strictly segregated, as were public facilities for children such as amusement parks, playgrounds, and schools. By 1900, the line separating white and Black people had become deeply entrenched in Louisiana’s culture. After 1902, New Orleans streetcars were segregated. A 1908 state law prohibited cohabitation (in marriage or domestic situations) between white and Black men and women. Racial segregation in jails was required in 1920. Even in New Orleans, tolerant (if not friendly) interactions between white and African American residents all but disappeared. The Catholic Church established a segregated parish in downtown New Orleans, the Congregation of Corpus Christi.

Not coincidentally, lynchings increased dramatically after 1900, primarily in the northern parishes of Caddo, Ouachita, and Morehouse. Between 1900 and 1931, more than half the lynchings in the state occurred north of Alexandria. The numbers of African Americans lynched are in the thousands, though detailed statistics are skewed because police officers in the northern parishes rarely considered lynchings as homicides. Still, lynchings and the threat of lynching contributed to the maintenance of Jim Crow.

The Civil Rights Movement Builds

As the century turned, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) became increasingly active in Louisiana. Between 1909 and 1930, the NAACP was a decentralized organization that focused on ending lynchings. In the 1930s, however, the organization retooled itself for the purpose of challenging the doctrine of “separate but equal” that formed the base of the Jim Crow laws.

In 1930s Louisiana, the NAACP counted New Orleans attorney A. P. Tureaud as one of its most important assets. Tureaud, a Howard University Law School graduate and colleague of Thurgood Marshall, sought to dismantle segregation in Louisiana’s public schools. Tureaud believed that segregated education, and the meager resources allotted for African American children, perpetuated poverty and inequality across generations. With the assistance of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Tureaud sued the state of Louisiana for paying African American teachers lower salaries than their white counterparts. Tureaud’s 1940 victory in Joseph P. McKelpin v. Orleans Parish School Board led to pay equity among all public schools.

World War II ushered in a number of legal and social changes that further weakened the structure of segregation. Nearly one million Black men and women served in the armed forces, and about five hundred thousand served in Europe and Asia. African Americans understandably believed that their willingness to die for their country abroad proved their worthiness for expanded political rights at home. Faced with an emergent civil rights movement, President Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9981 in 1948, fully desegregating the armed forces.

In Louisiana, the fight for desegregation took place in another social arena: public accommodations. Long before Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama, African Americans in Baton Rouge initiated a bus boycott of their own in 1953. Baton Rouge segregated the buses so that the first ten rows were reserved for white passengers, though African Americans accounted for 80 percent of the riders. A leading minister in the city, T. J. Jemison, spoke before the Baton Rouge City Council, testifying that it was unfair to force African American riders to stand in the back of the bus while the seats in the front remained empty. In June, African Americans in Baton Rouge formed the United Defense League (UDL) and organized a bus boycott. After one week, the city council and the UDL reached a compromise. The first two rows on the buses were reserved for white passengers but, after that, African Americans could sit where they wanted. Though segregation was still in effect, the Baton Rouge Bus Boycott provided a model for other cities to follow.

Memorable and vital successes over racial segregation continued in Louisiana and the rest of the South throughout the 1950s and 1960s. In response to a pending lawsuit, segregation was abolished at Louisiana State University; the first African American undergraduate enrolled in 1953. The Plessy decision was finally overturned the next year, when the US Supreme Court ruled on Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. The court found legal segregation unconstitutional in all public accommodations, especially public schools. Though met with massive resistance, the decision transformed the southern way of life. The “whites only” screens on New Orleans’s streetcars were officially removed in 1958. In 1960, the New Orleans School Crisis erupted over the desegregation of public schools. But in 1961, desegregation continued peacefully.

Jim Crow’s Demise

In 1964, the Civil Rights Act outlawed racial discrimination and segregation in schools, restaurants, hotels, and universities. Signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, the Civil Rights Act also prohibited unequal application of voting requirements, ended discrimination in interstate commerce, barred discrimination by state and city governments, and outlawed discrimination in private companies that take federal dollars. The 1965 Voting Rights Act went a step further and outlawed numerous tactics used to disenfranchise African Americans and other groups. Officially, the era of Jim Crow had ended. After nearly one hundred years of economic, political, and social demoralization, African Americans occupied the same levels of citizenship as white people, at least in the eyes of the law.

For Louisiana, desegregation in public schools would come slowly. In 1965, only five Louisiana parishes submitted plans for integration. By 1967, thirty parishes still had made no arrangements to desegregate. In 1970, forty-five parishes were ordered to come up with a legitimate plan or risk the loss of federal funding; full integration of Louisiana’s public schools did not come until the mid-1970s. Similarly, Louisiana was ordered—on at least ten occasions between 1965 and 1998—to integrate segregated universities and professional schools or compensate the state’s historically Black colleges and universities for generations of neglect.

The impact of segregation on Louisiana’s culture and history continues to linger. One lasting consequence of Jim Crow is the persistence of extreme poverty among African Americans, particularly in the northern parishes bordering the Mississippi River. The decline of cotton and sugar production, the source of Louisiana’s wealth prior to the Civil War, has left behind impoverished communities unable to find suitable alternatives. In twenty-first century, “stealth racism,” or subtle long-term racism, remains in Louisiana, particularly as racial attitudes harden in the midst of economic instability.

Brown, Nikki. "Jim Crow and Segregation." 64 Parishes. January 21, 2015. https://64parishes.org/entry/jim-cro...kaAvfuEALw_wcB.