3.5 Disenfranchisement and Jim Crow Laws

'Jim Crow' started in the 1830s as an insult. A white performer, Thomas D. Rice, wore blackface makeup and performed a song-and-dance act called 'Jump, Jim Crow' that mocked Black people. The name became a slur, and later a label for segregation laws.

Jim Crow laws were local and state laws, passed mostly but not only in the South, under the protection of Plessy v. Ferguson (3.4). They limited Black men's voting and required separate hospitals, transportation, schools, parks and even cemeteries. The required photographs of segregated water fountains and restrooms show how segregation reached into everyday life. These laws stood until the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

Scholars call the years from the end of Reconstruction to about the start of the Second World War the nadir, meaning the lowest point, of American race relations. The historian Rayford W. Logan gave it that name. The period saw some of the most open public acts of racism in US history, including thousands of lynchings, often carried out before crowds, and mob attacks on Black communities.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett was born into slavery in Mississippi and became a teacher, journalist, civil rights leader and feminist. In 1892 three of her friends, Black grocery store owners in Memphis, were lynched after their store competed with a white-owned one. Wells began investigating lynching. When she wrote that lynching had nothing to do with protecting white women, a mob destroyed her newspaper's office, and she had to leave Memphis.

In A Red Record (1895), a required source, she collected lynching statistics, often from white newspapers, so readers couldn't dismiss her numbers. She showed that most victims had not even been accused of rape, the excuse lynch mobs often gave, and that lynching was really a way to terrorize African Americans and stop them from getting ahead. In earlier writing, Southern Horrors (1892), she argued that Black families had the right to defend themselves and should keep a rifle at home.

African Americans resisted Jim Crow from the start. Around 1900 to 1906, Black residents of more than two dozen Southern cities boycotted newly segregated streetcars, sometimes for months. Activists relied on Black newspapers and sympathetic writers to publicize mistreatment and murder. Others organized, sued, and moved away. These efforts laid the groundwork for later movements (3.9, 4.4).