Research Paper

The History of Jim Crow is a wonderful Web site that provides a wealth of historical and pedagogical materials on the segregation and the disfranchisement of African Americans from Reconstruction through the modern civil rights movement. The site was produced in conjunction with the PBS documentary The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow and is divided into five sections. One provides teachers guides to the four-part television series, while another includes brief overview essays on the origins, transformation, and end of Jim Crow. Three of the overviews are accompanied by in-depth essays that include hyperlinks to esoteric terms and concepts and to biographies of key figures and summaries of events. The geography section is particularly well designed. The content is organized in a series of interactive maps showing, among other things, Jim Crow laws in and outside of the South, patterns of lynchings, the locations of formative Supreme Court decisions on civil rights, and African American pioneers in the sporting world.

Jim Crow was the name of the racial caste system which operated primarily, but not exclusively in southern and border states, between 1877 and the mid-1960s. Jim Crow was more than a series of rigid anti-Black laws. It was a way of life. Under Jim Crow, African Americans were relegated to the status of second class citizens. Jim Crow represented the legitimization of anti-Black racism. Many Christian ministers and theologians taught that Whites were the Chosen people, Blacks were cursed to be servants, and God supported racial segregation. Craniologists, eugenicists, phrenologists, and Social Darwinists, at every educational level, buttressed the belief that Blacks were innately intellectually and culturally inferior to Whites. Pro-segregation politicians gave eloquent speeches on the great danger of integration: the mongrelization of the White race. Newspaper and magazine writers routinely referred to Blacks as niggers, coons, and darkies; and worse, their articles reinforced anti-Black stereotypes. Even children's games portrayed Blacks as inferior beings (see "From Hostility to Reverence: 100 Years of African-American Imagery in Games"). All major societal institutions reflected and supported the oppression of Blacks.

The Jim Crow system was undergirded by the following beliefs or rationalizations: Whites were superior to Blacks in all important ways, including but not limited to intelligence, morality, and civilized behavior; sexual relations between Blacks and Whites would produce a mongrel race which would destroy America; treating Blacks as equals would encourage interracial sexual unions; any activity which suggested social equality encouraged interracial sexual relations; if necessary, violence must be used to keep Blacks at the bottom of the racial hierarchy. The following Jim Crow etiquette norms show how inclusive and pervasive these norms were:

A Black male could not offer his hand (to shake hands) with a White male because it implied being socially equal. Obviously, a Black male could not offer his hand or any other part of his body to a White woman, because he risked being accused of rape.

Blacks and Whites were not supposed to eat together. If they did eat together, Whites were to be served ...