Jim Crow laws

Laws or practices designed to separate whites and blacks in public and private facilities. Used in Southern states of the United States to preserve segregated schools, transport facilities, and housing, until the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ was declared unconstitutional in 1954.

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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.

The Jim Crow Laws emerged in southern states after the Civil War. First enacted in the 1880s by lawmakers bitter about their loss to the North and the end of slavery, the statutes separated the races in all walks of life. The resulting legislative barrier to equal rights created a racial caste system that favored whites and repressed blacks, an institutionalized form of inequality that grew in subsequent decades with help from the U.S. Supreme Court. Although the laws came under attack over the next half century, real progress against them did not begin until the Court began dismantling segregation in the 1950s. The remnants of the Jim Crow system were finally abolished in the 1960s through the efforts of the civil rights movement.

The origins of Jim Crow lie in the battered South of the midnineteenth century. The Civil War had ended, but its antagonisms had not; the war of values and political identity continued. Many whites refused to welcome blacks into civic life, believing them inferior and resenting northern demands in the era of Reconstruction, especially the requirement that southern states ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, which would abolish slavery. Southern states initially resisted by passing so-called Black Codes, which prohibited former slaves from carrying firearms or joining militias. More hostility followed when Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1875 (18 Stat. 335), which guaranteed blacks access to public facilities. As the federal government pressed the South to enfranchise blacks, a backlash developed in the form of state regulations that separated whites from blacks in public facilities. The laws were named for a minstrel show character, Jim Crow.

In the late nineteenth century, southern states took comfort from two U.S. Supreme Court decisions. First, in 1883, the Court struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875 as unconstitutional, in the so-called Civil Rights cases, 109 U.S. 3, 3 S. Ct. 18, 27 L. Ed. 835. It ruled that Congress had exceeded its powers under the Reconstruction amendments. This decision encouraged southern states to extend Jim Crow restrictions, as in an 1890 Louisiana statute requiring white and "colored" persons to be furnished "separate but equal" accommodations on railway passenger cars. In fact, that law came under attack in the Court's next significant decision, the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537, 16 S. Ct. 1138, 41 L. Ed. 256. In Plessy, the Court upheld the Louisiana law, ruling that establishing separate-but-equal public accommodations and facilities was a reasonable exercise of the police power of a state to promote the public good. Plessy kept the principle of separate but equal alive for the next sixty years.

By the start of World War I, every southern state had passed Jim Crow laws. Becoming entrenched over the next few decades, the laws permeated nearly every part of public life, including railroads, hotels, hospitals, restaurants, neighborhoods, and even cemeteries. Whites had their facilities; blacks had theirs. The white facilities were better built and equipped. In particular, white schools were almost uniformly better in every respect, from buildings to educational materials. States saw to it that their black citizens were essentially powerless to overturn these laws, using poll taxes and literacy tests to deny them the right to vote. Jim Crow even extended to the federal government: early in the twentieth century, discriminatory policies were rife throughout federal departments, and not until the Korean War (1950-53) did the armed forces stop segregating black and white units.

Opposition to the policy of Jim Crow came chiefly from African Americans. Early leadership was provided by the Afro-American National League in the 1890s and, after the turn of the century, the influential author and activist W. E. B. Du Bois. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), established in 1909, became the most powerful force for the repeal of Jim Crow laws during the next half century. The NAACP fought numerous battles in two important arenas: the court of public opinion and the courts of law.

At first, legal progress came slowly. In a series of decisions in the 1940s, the U.S. Supreme Court began dismantling individual Jim Crow laws and practices. The Court ruled that political parties could not exclude voters from primary elections on the basis of race (Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649, 64 S. Ct. 757, 88 L. Ed. 987 [1944]). It ruled that black passengers on interstate buses need not follow the segregation laws of the states through which those buses passed (Morgan v. Virginia, 328 U.S. 373, 66 S. Ct. 1050, 90 L. Ed. 1317 [1946]). It also held that the judiciary could no longer enforce private agreements — called restrictive covenants — that excluded ownership or occupancy of property based on race (Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1, 68 S. Ct. 836, 92 L. Ed. 1161 [1948]).

By 1950, legal changes were coming in leaps. The Court decided in favor of black student Heman Marion Sweatt concerning his appeal for entrance to the University of Texas Law School. In Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U.S. 629, 70 S. Ct. 848, 94 L. Ed. 1114 (1950), the Court ruled that the educational opportunities offered to white and black law students by the state of Texas were not substantially equal, and that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment required that Sweatt be admitted to classes with white students at the University of Texas law school. Four years later came the Court's most significant decision affecting Jim Crow: Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483, 74 S. Ct. 686, 98 L. Ed. 873 (1954). Overturning the precedent that had existed since Plessy in 1896, the Court in Brown decreed unconstitutional the policy of separate-but-equal educational facilities for blacks and whites.

Brown marked a turning point in the battle against the institution of segregation that Jim Crow laws had created. It was not the death knell, however. Much remained to be done not only to topple legal restrictions but to remove the barriers of prejudice and violence that stood in the way of full integration. The final blows were administered by the civil rights movement, whose boycotts, sit-ins, and lawsuits continued over the next two decades. By the mid-1960s, the last vestiges of legal segregation were ended by a series of federal laws including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (42 U.S.C.A. § 2000a et seq.), the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (42 U.S.C.A. § 1971 et seq.), and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 (42 U.S.C.A. § 3601 et seq.).

See: Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas; Civil Rights; Civil Rights Cases; Equal Protection; Ku Klux Klan; Ku Klux Klan Act; Plessy v. Ferguson; School Desegregation.