- Jim Crow Laws named for an ante-bellum mistral show character.
o Minstrel show one of first indigenous forms of American entertainment.
- Tradition began when there were individual performers who imitated Negro singing and dancing.
o One of most successful individual performs was Thomas Dartmouth “Daddy” Rice.
o In what he sang, there were the words “Jim Crow”.
- Jim Crow Laws however, were late 19th century statues passed by the legislatures of the Southern states that created a racial caste system in the American South.
- After Reconstruction years, blacks and whites often rode together in the same railway cars, ate in the same restaurants, etc.
o However, did not interact as equals
- Emergence of large black communities in urban areas and emergence of significant black labor force = new challenge to white southerners.
o Could not control these new communities in the same ways they had been able to control rural blacks who were more directly dependent on white landowners and merchants than their urban counterparts.
o In city, blacks and whites in more direct competition than in the countryside.
o Therefore the ity required more rigidly institutionalized systems of control.
- The laws were a response to a new reality that required white supremacy to have a rigid legal basis to retain control voer blacks.
- 1883 US Supreme Court declared Civil Rights of 1875 unconstitutional and ruled that the 14th Amendment prohibited state governments from discrimination against people because of race but did not restrict private organizations from doing so.
o Eventually, Court also validated state legislation that discriminated against blacks in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) establishing “separate but equal”.
§ Court held that these separate but equal did not deprive blacks of equal rights if accommodations were equal.
o 1899 Court went even further in Cumming v. County Board of Education.
§ Where laws establishing separate schools for whites were valid even if they provided no comparable schools for blacks.
- Due to the court rulings, by 1914 every Southern state passed laws that created two separate societies.
- Wouldn’t be until 1915 when Supreme Court began to attack Jim Crow Laws.
o In Guinn v. US (1915) the Supreme Court supported the position that Oklahoma law denying the right to vote (grandfather claus) was unconstutional.
o In Buchanan v. Worley (1917) the Court struck down law requiring residential segregation.
- Final most important blow against racial segregation was 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education where it declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional.
o This would begin the Civil Rights Movement and began the end of the Jim Crow Laws.
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