Origin: 1829
A hopeful sign of racial progress in present-day America is that we no longer know the origin of Jim Crow. Unfortunately, however, the term deserves a place in this chronology because for more than a century Jim Crow guided white Americans' thinking about race.
He began, so the story goes, in 1828, in Louisville, Kentucky, where a young actor and musician, Thomas D. "Daddy" Rice, introduced on stage a character he called Jim Crow. As we look back from what we hope is a more enlightened time, it is repugnant to see the caricature of the black man presented by Jim Crow, and it is even more embarrassing that by 1829 audiences were so delighted with a white man who blackened his face with burnt cork, outlined his lips in white, and then sang and danced like a happy fool that Rice's "Jim Crow" became the most popular song in the country:
Legend has it that Rice imitated the singing and the shuffling dance of a crippled slave tending horses near the theater in Louisville. Whatever the origin, his act was a forerunner of the hugely popular minstrel shows.
But his caricature of African Americans as ignorant, laughable folk also prepared the way for Jim Crow segregation laws. From the end of the nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth, Jim Crow laws in the South and Jim Crow customs throughout the country separated blacks from whites and kept blacks from voting and from holding positions of responsibility.
During World War II, a sixteen-year-old African-American girl won an essay contest in Columbus, Ohio, on "What to Do with Adolf Hitler" with her proposal that he be put in a black skin and required to spend the rest of his life living in the United States of America. If there is hope for better race relations in our country today, it is at least in part because Jim Crow, like Adolf Hitler, is finally dead.
