What Were Jim Crow Laws?

The term 'Jim Crow laws' refers to laws enacted after the U.S. Civil War to prevent emancipated slaves and other people of color from accessing their full rights as citizens. Learn the history of the term and how these laws affected society in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey
brain Stuff. Lauren Vogelbaum here. Today's episode speaks frankly but
non graphically about racial violence. For the better part of
a century, American people of color lived under the burden
of what are now known as Jim Crow Laws. This
racist system of segregation, mainly of black people from white people,

(00:25):
affected virtually every sector of American life and reached far
beyond the South, where it was best known and most
harshly practiced. Jim Crow Laws and the deep wounds that
they inflicted on American society are not relegated to the
past tense. Their legacy is still felt in many ways today.
We spoke with Stephen Barry, a professor of American culture

(00:46):
at the University of Michigan and the author of the
Jim Crow Routine, Everyday Performances of Race, civil Rights, and
Segregation in Mississippi. He said Jim Crow was about so
much more than laws. It really was an all encompass
system that involved political practices, economic practices, social practices, cultural practices.

(01:06):
Some of that was about legal things, but some of
it wasn't. One of the challenges why Jim Crow often
seems like it's in the past. People tend to think that, oh,
it was a few laws, and we got rid of
segregation laws and we got the Voting Rights Act, so
that must have taken care of it. It didn't. These
laws weren't named after a real life person. Jim Crow

(01:27):
was a fictional character in a minstrel show representation of
a black man and exaggerated, stereotyped and racist representation, played
by a white man on stage in black face in
the early eighteen hundreds. This character was a hit with
many audiences, and by ninety eight the term Jim Crow
had become a racial epithet. Estates began passing laws to

(01:49):
restrict the rights of slaves freed at the end of
the Civil War. The laws came to be known as
Jim Crow laws. The Emancipation Proclamation of eighteen sixty three
freed all slaves from states that had ceded from the Union,
and in the following years three amendments to the U.
S Constitution gave former slaves rights. Thirteenth in eighteen sixty

(02:10):
five abolished slavery, the fourteenth in eighteen sixty eight guaranteed
equal protection to all citizens, and the fifteenth in eighteen
seventy guaranteed the right to vote regardless of race, color,
or previous condition of servitude. The South, coping with its
loss in the Civil War and what it felt was
punishment meeted out by the U S government, responded by

(02:30):
enacting a series of laws over several years to severely
restrict the rights that had been granted to black people.
These laws were said to be enacted for many reasons,
but the simplest explanation is this they aimed to maintain
white people's claim to first class status in American society
and to keep black people a second class citizens. Here

(02:51):
are a few early examples of these laws. In eighteen
sixty six, the Tennessee legislature passed a bill requiring separate
schools for black and white people. Between eighteen sixty six
and nineteen fifty five, Tennessee passed twenty Jim Crow laws,
including ones that outlawed misagenation and required segregation in public accommodations.

(03:12):
In eighteen seventy seven, the new constitution of the State
of Georgia included requirements the primary schools be segregated, and
it established a separate university for black people. It also
instituted a poll tax, which disproportionately affected poor black people,
effectively stripping them of the right to vote. Laws like
these kept black people from voting and thereby from having

(03:34):
a say in governance. It barred them from holding public office,
thus slanting the justice system against them. It restricted them socially,
requiring Black people to use different phone booths, drinking fountains, restrooms,
and so on. It's stymied them economically, and in all
prohibited them from gaining equal footing with white citizens by themselves.

(03:54):
The Jim Crow laws were devastating, but as Barry points out,
the legal aspect of Jim Crow was only part of
the problem. Black people were also subjected to widespread violence
and murder, implicitly condoned by much of white society and
rarely prosecuted, that continued well into the twentieth century. The
Ku Klux Klan, originally a club for Confederate veterans, was

(04:16):
born in the aftermath of the Civil War and has
terrorized black people for decades. In the Equal Justice Initiative
released a report called Lynching in America, confronting the legacy
of racial terror. It documented in the period between eighteen
seventy seven and nineteen fifty, almost four thousand lynchings. From

(04:37):
that report quote racial terror. Lynching was a tool used
to enforce Jim Crow laws and racial segregation, a tactic
for maintaining racial control by victimizing the entire African American community,
not merely punishment of an alleged perpetrator for a crime.
Barry explained that the fears, frustrations, and injustices created by

(04:58):
these laws and this violence seeped into everyday life. He said,
there's this tendency to think of both Jim Crow specifically
and racism more broadly as being this overt form that
looks like the KKK, that looks like a cross burning,
that looks like dramatic acts of violence. Sometimes it is that,
but often it's much more subtle. It's in the air

(05:19):
that we breathe and the water that we drink. Up
until eight Jim Crow laws were limited to state and
local regulations, but in a landmark case that year, the U. S.
Supreme Court codified the laws nationally. In Plus e versus Ferguson,
the court upheld the Louisiana Separate Car Act. Of this act,

(05:39):
also known as the Louisiana Railways Accommodation Act required railways
to quote provide equal but separate accommodations for white people
and people of color. Unsuccessful challenges to this law brought
it to the Supreme Court in Plessy versus Ferguson, and
in their decision, the Court held up the constitutionality of
states segregation laws, which opened the door for even more

(06:01):
restrictive Jim Crow laws in the coming years across the country.
These included one that passed in Arkansas in three stating
that it was unlawful for white prisoners to be handcuffed
or chained to black prisoners, and one from nineteen eleven
in Nebraska which stated that marriages would be void if
one person was white and one was one eighth or

(06:21):
more black, Japanese or Chinese, and one from nineteen twenty
six in Atlanta that stated the black barbers couldn't serve
white women or girls. In Californian ninety four, the state's
constitution was amended to strip voting rights from anyone quote
who shall not be able to read the Constitution in
the English language and write his name. Remember that under

(06:43):
these laws, even basic schooling wasn't necessarily available to people
of color and On top of all of this violence
and lynchings, continued pockets of resistance to Jim Crow formed
from time to time, Barry says, especially after Black soldiers
returned home from World War One and World War Two
and pressed for equal treatment, but the system of oppression

(07:05):
remained strong. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, a white
mob and Blakely Georgia lynched William Little in nineteen nineteen
for refusing to take off his uniform after returning home
from World War One. Barry said African Americans always challenged
the system. They always pushed back. Sometimes it came just
in terms of teaching your children how you survive this system.

(07:27):
Not only we want you to know these rules so
that you're safe, but we also want you to know
that you're just pretending. The poet Lawrence Dunbar referred to
this as we wear the mask. The idea was, you're
wearing this mask and pretending to go through the rules,
but you're learning that that's not who you really are,
that you're not really inferior, even though you're following those
rules that are meant to tell you that. Three years

(07:50):
after the end of World War Two, on July, President
Harry s. Truman desegregated the military, which was perhaps one
of the first real steps towards the downfall of Jim
Crow Laws. It wasn't until nineteen fifty four Supreme Court
decision in Brown versus the Board of Education, though, which
ruled that separating school children on the basis of race
was unconstitutional, thus overturning the idea of separate but equal

(08:14):
expressed in the Plessy decision about sixty years earlier. The
Jim Crow Laws were dealt a fatal blow. Barry explained,
World War Two was a huge turning point. People are
always pushing back and fighting. There's this constant struggle, but
it became more visible then, and you do get this
mobilization in the mid nineteen fifties. The struggle to free

(08:34):
black Americans from Jim Crow had more setbacks to come.
The Cold War was a hard time for anyone to
question American values for fear of being branded a communist.
But the turbulent nineteen sixties, with the full throated protests
of the Freedom Rides of nineteen sixty one and the
passage of the Civil Rights Act in nineteen sixty eight,
helped solidify the idea that Jim Crow laws were a
thing of the past, and that segregation had no place

(08:57):
in American society of the Gerald M. Packard in American Nightmare,
The History of Jim Crow wrote that quote Jim Crow
was a disease that once permeated every fissure and fold
of American society. Yet in the past few years voter
suppression measures have been introduced by the hundreds. Black people

(09:17):
in America today are incarcerated at a rate of more
than five times that of white people, and as of
investigative journalism by The Guardian found the black citizens and
black men ages fifteen to thirty four years in particular,
are disproportionately the victims of deadly forced by police officers.
Young black men made up just two percent of the

(09:38):
population but accounted for fifteen percent of deaths perpetrated by
the police. And we're nine times more likely to die
in police instance than any other demographic. Jim Crow Laws
may be dead, Jim Crow, though, is not. Today's episode
was written by John Donovan and produced by Tyler Klang.

(10:00):
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