Segregation (or Jim Crow, so named after a racially stereotyped minstrel show character) existed prior to the Civil War, but it was not systematic. Many hotels excluded blacks, and most churches had balconies or separate pews for African Americans. With the emancipation of slaves following the Civil War, the custom of segregation continued as communities formed dual school systems to maintain the status quo. The Civil Rights Act of (1875) did not try to integrate schools, but it did call for the integration of public facilities. The voiding of that desegregation law by the U. S. Supreme Court in the 1883 Civil Rights Cases in effect encouraged discrimination. Nevertheless, Jim Crow—segregation—laws were rare in the South before the 1890s and became prevalent at the turn of the century. Indeed, Virginia did not separate the races on the state’s railroads prior to 1900. Nor were the state’s streetcars segregated by race, and despite discrimination, blacks generally were not barred from or segregated in bars, waiting rooms, theaters, or other public venues. Excepting churches, schools, and railroad cars, most areas in the South did not practice either de facto or de jure segregation prior to 1897.
The Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court case in 1896 set into motion the concept of legally separating the races in public arenas. The Court upheld the 1890 Louisiana Jim Crow law requiring that railroads provide “equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races.” Not all southern whites demanded Jim Crow laws: South Carolina resisted establishing Jim Crow cars before 1898, and the conservative editor of the Charleston News and Courier considered such a law absurd. He noted sarcastically that a Jim Crow car would logically call for Jim Crow railroads, passenger boats, waiting rooms, eating halls, jury boxes, as well as a Jim Crow Bible for court procedures and even two or
Three Jim Crow counties for blacks. But in time his sarcastic absurdities became realities as nearly all his examples were adopted by southern legislatures. In 1898 South Carolina enacted a Jim Crow car for first-class coaches and two years later amended the law to include second-class coaches. Jim Crow streetcars were established by North Carolina and Virginia (1901); Louisiana (1902); Arkansas, South Carolina, and Tennessee (1903); Mississippi and Maryland (1904); Florida (1905); and Oklahoma (1907). Other Jim Crow statutes separated whites and other races in public facilities such as libraries, concert halls, parks, and railroad and bus terminals. Eventually, Jim Crow was applied to churches, housing, employment, sport teams, hospitals, orphanages, cemeteries, funeral homes, morgues, and places of entertainment, and throughout the South, “white only” or “colored only” signs were strictly enforced.
These signs were particularly humiliating to African Americans and liberals. Beginning in the 1950s, civil rights activists protested against Jim Crow laws by sitting in at lunch counters, wading in at swimming pools, and supporting economic boycotts of businesses that supported Jim Crow enforcement. These odious laws remained in effect until the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibited discrimination in all public facilities.
Further reading: C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 3d rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974).
—William Seraile
World History
