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JIM CROW LAWS

JIM CROW LAWS, which regulated social, economic, and political relationships between whites and African Americans, were passed principally to subordinate blacks as a group to whites and to enforce rules favored by dominant whites on nonconformists of both races. The name "Jim Crow" came from a character in an early nineteenth-century minstrel show song.

Beginning with a ban on interracial marriages in Maryland in 1664, the laws spread north as well as south, but they were neither uniform nor invariably enforced. The campaign against them, initiated in the 1840s by both black and white Massachusetts antislavery activists, reached a symbolic end in the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court case, Loving v. Virginia, that finally ruled anti-intermarriage laws unconstitutional.

The most widespread laws mandated racial segregation in schools and public places such as railroads, restaurants, and streetcars. Since segregation laws often replaced customary or legal exclusion of African Americans from any services at all, they were initially, in a sense, progressive reforms. They tended to be adopted earliest and were more strictly enforced in cities where diverse crowds intermingled, than in the countryside where other means of racial subordination were readily available.

During Reconstruction in the 1860s and 1870s, seven southern states passed laws requiring equal access to places open to the public; Louisiana and South Carolina, as well as seven northern states, promised integrated schools. After a long struggle over whether to include a school integration provision, Congress in 1875 passed the Civil Rights Act, which prohibited racial discrimination in public accommodations. But in 1883, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in The Civil Rights Cases that Congress had no power under the Fourteenth Amendment to regulate an individual's discriminatory behavior.

While virtually all northern states that had not already banned Jim Crow practices rushed to enact state versions of the invalidated national Civil Rights Act, most southern states during the 1880s and 1890s passed laws requiring segregation. The Supreme Court held up the southern laws in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), accepting assurances that separate accommodations would be equal. Freed of legal restraints, some southern cities and states went on to prescribe separate drinking fountains, restrooms, entrances to public buildings, and even Bibles for use in court. More significantly, they disfranchised the vast majority of African Americans through literacy and property tests and discrimination against blacks who could pass such tests.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) led the long effort to overturn Jim Crow through lawsuits such as those that led to Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), as well as by lobbying for new state and federal laws. Beginning in the 1890s and greatly intensifying in the 1950s, African Americans boycotted segregated transit, held sit-ins at segregated restaurants, picketed discriminatory businesses, registered black voters, and braved frequent violence in an ultimately successful effort to force Americans to abolish the most blatant legal inequities. The 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and a host of state and federal court decisions institutionalized the crusaders' victories. The demise of explicitly discriminatory laws, however, was only one giant step on the unfinished journey toward racial equality.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kousser, J. Morgan. Dead End: The Development of Nineteenth-Century Litigation on Racial Discrimination in Schools. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985.

Rabinowitz, Howard N. Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865–1890. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. 3rd rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.

J. Morgan Kousser

See also Black Codes; Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka; Civil Rights Movement; Literacy Test; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Poll Tax; Segregation.