JIM CROW

Reconstruction and the Age of Jim Crow

Reconstruction and the Age of Jim Crow

Introduction

Jim Crow is the name associated with a system of white supremacy that required racial subordination and exploitation. Essentially, Jim Crow laws divested blacks of their citizenship rights. After the demise of Reconstruction in 1876 and passage of a new state constitution in 1890, Mississippi became the first post-Civil War state to deny blacks the right to vote, the most basic of citizenship rights. That constitution set in motion the restoration of the white supremacist planter class rule and the economic, political, and social exclusion of blacks throughout the South. Once slavery ended after the Civil War, Jim Crow's purpose was to maintain or perpetuate a racialized labor force through debt peonage and the threat of violence in the agricultural economy. Maintaining this system reinforced the social construction of black inferiority, which then served as the basis for reality (Litwack, 1998).

Thesis Statement

Jim Crow laws divested blacks of their citizenship rights.

Discussion and Analysis

The term Jim Crow originated in a minstrel show song, “Jump Jim Crow,” of 1828, performed by Thomas “Daddy” Rice, a “blackface” entertainer, whose caricature spawned imitators in minstrel shows everywhere. A white supremacist South embraced this ridicule and degradation. Jim Crow became more than performance art, as a rigid system of social exclusion and segregation became the centerpiece of the Jim Crow pattern of race relations in the South.

Segregation, or Jim Crow, became the system of exclusion that relegated blacks to a then-permanent subordination within a system institutionalized as legal doctrine. What began as an isolated case of per-mitting racially segregated schools in Boston in 1824 became a law of the land in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson. In that Supreme Court ruling, the Court ruled that the “equal protection” clause of the 14th Amendment was satisfied by the doctrine of “separate but equal.” Buttressed by this ruling, other Southern states followed Mississippi's lead in instituting Jim Crow laws.

African Americans were denied the right to vote by the grandfather clause (laws that restricted the right to vote to people whose ancestors had voted before the Civil War), poll taxes (fee charges to poor African Americans), white primaries (only Democrats could vote and only whites could be Democrats), and literacy tests (name all the vice presidents and Supreme Court Justices throughout American history). The Supreme Court helped undermine the constitutional protections of African Americans with the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson case in 1896, which legitimized Jim Crow.

The Plessy v. Ferguson decision ruled that separate facilities for whites and African Americans were constitutionally legal, and encouraged the passage of other discriminatory laws, which wiped out the gains made by African Americans during Reconstruction. Railways, streetcars, public waiting rooms, restaurants, boardinghouses, theaters, and public parks were separated. There were separate schools, hospitals, and other institutions, generally of inferior quality, that were designated for blacks.

Conclusion

At the base of the Jim Crow system was an agricultural economy. Though slavery formally ended with the Civil War, agricultural demand for ...