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A Brief History of Jim Crow

"I can ride in first-class cars on the railroads and in the streets," wrote journalist T. McCants Stewart. "I can stop in and drink a glass of soda and be more politely waited upon than in some parts of New England." Perhaps Stewart's comments don't seem newsworthy. Consider that he was reporting from South Carolina in 1885 and he was black.

A marker in New Orleans stands where Homer Plessy was arrested in 1892. His case ultimately reached the U.S. Supreme Court and resulted in an infamous decision creating the legal doctrine of "separate, but equal." (Wikimedia Commons)

Stewart had decided to tour the South because he feared for freedmen's liberties. In 1868, with Amendment XIV, the Constitution had finally given black men full citizenship and promised them equal protection under the law. Blacks voted, won elected office, and served on juries. However, 10 years later, federal troops withdrew from the South, returning it to local white rule. And now, the Republican Party, champion of Reconstruction and freedmen's rights, had fallen from national power. Would black people's rights survive?

After a few weeks on the road, Stewart decided they would. True, terrorism against blacks - lynching, rape, arson - ran unchecked. True, many rural blacks lived under a sharecropping system little better than slavery. But Stewart noted many signs of change. He saw a black policeman arrest a white criminal. He saw whites casually talk with black strangers. "The morning light is breaking," he told his readers.

Stewart was wrong. Over the next 20 years, blacks would lose almost all they had gained. Worse, denial of their rights and freedoms would be made legal by a series of racist statutes, the Jim Crow laws.

"Jim Crow" was a derisive slang term for a black man. It came to mean any state law passed in the South that established different rules for blacks and whites. Jim Crow laws were based on the theory of white supremacy and were a reaction to Reconstruction. In the depression-racked 1890s, racism appealed to whites who feared losing their jobs to blacks. Politicians abused blacks to win the votes of poor white "crackers." Newspapers fed the bias of white readers by playing up (sometimes even making up) black crimes.

In 1890, in spite of its 16 black members, the Louisiana General Assembly passed a law to prevent black and white people from riding together on railroads. Plessy v. Ferguson, a case challenging the law, reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896. Upholding the law, the court said that public facilities for blacks and whites could be "separate but equal." Soon, throughout the South, they had to be separate.

Two years later, the court seemed to seal the fate of black Americans when it upheld a Mississippi law designed to deny black men the vote. Given the green light, Southern states began to limit the voting right to those who owned property or could read well, to those whose grandfathers had been able to vote, to those with "good characters," to those who paid poll taxes. In 1896, Louisiana had 130,334 registered black voters. Eight years later, only 1,342, 1 percent, could pass the state's new rules.

Jim Crow laws touched every part of life. In South Carolina, black and white textile workers could not work in the same room, enter through the same door, or gaze out of the same window. Many industries wouldn't hire blacks: Many unions passed rules to exclude them.

In Richmond, one could not live on a street unless most of the residents were people one could marry. (One could not marry someone of a different race.) By 1914, Texas had six entire towns in which blacks could not live. Mobile passed a Jim Crow curfew: Blacks could not leave their homes after 10 p.m. Signs marked "Whites Only" or "Colored" hung over doors, ticket windows, and drinking fountains. Georgia had black and white parks. Oklahoma had black and white phone booths.

Prisons, hospitals, and orphanages were segregated as were schools and colleges. In North Carolina, black and white students had to use separate sets of textbooks. In Florida, the books couldn't even be stored together. Atlanta courts kept two Bibles: one for black witnesses and one for whites. Virginia told fraternal social groups that black and white members could not address each other as "Brother."

Though seemingly rigid and complete, Jim Crow laws did not account for all of the discrimination blacks suffered. Unwritten rules barred blacks from white jobs in New York and kept them out of white stores in Los Angeles. Humiliation was about the best treatment blacks who broke such rules could hope for. Groups like the Ku Klux Klan, which revived in 1915, used venom and violence to keep blacks "in their place."

More than 360,000 black men served in World War I. The country welcomed them home with 25 major race riots, the most serious in Chicago. White mobs lynched veterans in uniform. Black Americans fought back. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, founded in 1909, and the Urban League publicized abuses and worked for redress.

Protesters march against school segregation. (Wikimedia Commons)

Though they drew support from both races, these groups barely stemmed the tide. The 1920s and 30s produced new Jim Crow laws. By 1944, a Swede visiting the South pronounced segregation so complete that whites did not see blacks except when being served by them.

But World War II changed America, inside and out. The link between white supremacy and Hitler's "master race" could not be ignored. Jim Crow shocked United Nations delegates who reported home about the practice. "Racial discrimination furnishes grist for the Communist propaganda mills," said a government spokesman. "It raises doubt even among friendly nations as to the intensity of our devotion to the democratic faith."

In 1948, President Harry Truman took decisive action to promote racial equality. He urged Congress to abolish the poll tax, enforce fair voting and hiring practices, and end Jim Crow transportation between states. Four Southern states abandoned Truman's Democratic Party in protest. Then, as commander in chief, Truman ordered the complete integration of the armed forces. He did not wipe out racism, but, trained to obey commands, officers complied as best they could. In Korea, during the 1950s, integrated U.S. forces fought their first war.

Back at home, when the new Eisenhower administration downplayed civil rights, federal courts took the lead. In 1950, the NAACP decided to challenge the concept of "separate but equal." Fed up with poor, overcrowded schools, black parents in South Carolina and Virginia sued to get their children into white schools. Both times, federal courts upheld segregation. Both times, the parents appealed. Meanwhile, in a similar case, Delaware's Supreme Court ordered a district to admit black students to white schools until adequate classrooms could be provided for blacks. This time, the district appealed.

The Supreme Court agreed to consider these three cases in combination with one other. In Topeka, Kansas, where schools for blacks and whites were equally good, Oliver Brown wanted his 8-year-old daughter, Linda, to attend a school close to home. State law, however, prevented the white school from accepting Linda because she was black.

On May 17, 1954, at the stroke of noon, the nine Supreme Court Justices announced their unanimous decision in the four cases, now grouped as Brown v. Board of Education. They held that racial segregation of children in public schools, even in schools of equal quality, hurt minority children. "Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." The practice violated the Constitution's 14th amendment and must stop. To some, the judgment seemed the fruitful end of a long struggle. Actually, the struggle had just begun.
For Discussion and Writing

1. Imagine that you were born black in 1860 and lived until 1920. Would you have any faith in the U.S. legal system? In the "American way of life"? Why or why not?

2. How did Jim Crow laws affect the American image abroad? How did our foreign policy impact racial equality at home?

3. Most laws are meant to promote the general welfare or protect society from an evil. Did Jim Crow laws serve these purposes? If so, how? If not, what was their purpose?

4. Under Jim Crow, black facilities were often of far poorer quality than those reserved for whites. Separate rarely meant equal. If blacks and whites had received equal treatment, would Jim Crow laws have been fair?

5. "I don't believe you can change the hearts of men with laws or decisions," said one person who opposed court ordered desegregation. Do you agree with the statement? Is it a valid reason to continue segregation?

6. Read the 14th Amendment and explain how the Supreme Court used it to disallow segregation in the Brown decision. Why didn't the Court use it for the same purpose in Plessy v. Ferguson?

For Further Reading

Packard, Jerrald M. American Nightmare: The History of Jim Crow. New York: St. Martin's Press. 2002.

Chafe, William H. Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell about Life in the Segregated South. New York: The New Press. 2001.
Return to Black History Month Home Page

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passed a law to prevent black and white people from riding together on railroads

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"I can ride in first-class cars on the railroads and in the streets," wrote journalist T. McCants Stewart. "I can stop in and drink a glass of soda and be more politely waited upon than in some parts of New England."

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"All marriages between a white person and a negro, or between a white person and a person of negro descent to the fourth generation inclusive, are hereby forever prohibited,"--Florida.

"Separate free schools shall be established for the education of children of African descent; and it shall be unlawful for any colored child to attend any white school, or any white child to attend a colored school,"--Mississippi.

"Any person . . . who shall rent any part of any such building to a negro person or a negro family when such building is already in whole or in part in occupancy by a white person or white family shall be guilty of a misdemeanor,"--Louisiana.

As blacks emerged from slavery after the Civil War, Southern states adapted a new strategy to prevent them from improving their status or achieving equality. They passed laws on marriage, schools, housing, and conduct intended to keep the races apart. The laws and customs of segregation that followed the Civil War became known as Jim Crow, named after a minstrel character from the 1830s.

A new documentary tells what it was like to live during the Jim Crow era, which lasted from the 1880s through 1954, when the Supreme Court ordered the desegregation of public schools. The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow, a four-part series for PBS from Thirteen/ WNET New York, lets viewers learn about the era through the stories of its victims, perpetrators, and opponents.

The threat of physical pain, public humiliation, and death held Jim Crow laws firmly in place. Blacks and whites who tried to protest Jim Crow laws risked their lives. In 1919, ninety lynchings occurred in a single year--one every four days. Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative explains in the film: "You could not keep African Americans in this country in a subordinate status without the threat of violence." Historian Patricia Sullivan echoes Stevenson: "Relief from physical terrorism was critical to all of the other rights that people would strive for."

Yet people did fight against the system. Ned Cobb was a successful black sharecropper in Alabama who bought his own farm and formed a tenant farmers union. In the early twentieth century, a sharecropper's life was a cycle of misery. Because the banks based their loans on the value of the crops not the land, tenant farmers had to grow cash crops, like cotton instead of food for their families. Banks and merchants took their money straight from the sale of the cotton so that farmers had to go back and borrow more for food. Six thousand of Cobb's fellow sharecroppers joined him in forming the Alabama Sharecropper's Union. Cobb's descendants tell his story in the documentary, including one incident in the 1930s, when Cobb went to prevent his neighbor's land from being repossessed. During the confrontation, he exchanged gunshots with the sheriff and was sent to prison for thirteen years.

"The horrific you expect--the heroic you don't," says Richard Wormser, producer, writer, and director of the documentary. Wormser spent the last seven years collecting the stories. Wormser says he and Bill Jersey, co-writer, producer, and director, "decided to tell stories about the individuals struggling to subvert and overcome Jim Crow."

An important moment in the struggle against segregation took place in 1909 when the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was formed by W.E.B. DuBois, Ida Wells- Barnett, Henry Moscowitz, Mary White Ovington, Oswald Garrison Villiard, and William English Walling. The NAACP broke away from earlier black leaders such as Booker T. Washington, who believed in a gradual accumulation of equality through education and moral fortitude. The NAACP wanted more immediate action and fought for equality through the courts and political advocacy. It provided a forum for a growing black intellectual class in its magazine The Crisis, edited by DuBois. The NAACP made the fight against lynching a top priority.

One hero of the struggle was DuBois's colleague, Walter White, a leader of the NAACP who went south to investigate a rash of lynchings and barely escaped with his own life. White, whose fair complexion and blue eyes belied his African American heritage, was able to move freely through white circles to gather evidence to incriminate those committing violence against blacks. In the time he was there, White investigated forty-one lynchings, eight race riots, and numerous cross-burnings.

When White caught wind that his identity was no longer a secret, he boarded the first train north. The train conductor told him that he was "leaving just before the fun was about to start. . . . There's a damn yellow nigger down here passing for white, and the boys are going to get him. And when they get through with him, he won't pass for white no more." White said later, "No matter what the distance, I shall never take a train ride as long as that one." Although there was never a federal antilynching law passed, work by the NAACP did change public opinion and when White died in 1955 there were only three lynchings that year.

The series also presents the perspective of the enforcers of segregation, the Ku Klux Klan. A long-time Klan member named Gordon Parks recounts attending his first lynching when he was just nine years old. As he tells it, a black man had raped a seventeen-yea-old daughter of a family in the neighborhood. "When her parents come home, she told them, and they called my grandpa. He was the Wizard and my daddy was the Grand Dragon, and they got about a hundred people and we went and got him, and grandpa said I could go with them. . . . We took him down to this thick, old oak tree, and there was about two hundred down there. And they took him and set him down and had his hands tied behind him. And Grandpa asked me--told my daddy to ask me--to ask anybody if they had anything to say before we'd put him up in the tree to hang him. And I asked anybody if they had anything to say and one man said, 'Yeah, I have something to say. . .' and he cut him from ear to ear, and then they put the rope around his neck and pulled him up in the tree. We stayed there about a hour ... to make sure he died before they left."

The Klan inspired fear on both sides of the color line. Another eyewitness to a Klan execution describes how as a young white child in the south following World War II, he hid in the grass and saw the killing of his black neighborhood friend--just returned from the war--his friend's brother and both of their pregnant wives. Later when the sheriff came to his house and asked if anyone knew anything about it, he piped up and said "I know who done it." The sheriff pulled him aside and told him: "I can put some of these people in jail but I can't put all of them in. If they found out you know what you know, it would come back on you, your mama, your sister and your brother. The best thing you could ever do is not to mention this again." He kept the secret for decades, and no one was ever charged with the murders.

Wormser describes the documentary as a story with four, distinct chapters. "Promises Betrayed," part one of the series, covers the period from 1865 to 1896, a time that began with the promise of great freedom yet ended in diminished hope. By the time President Hayes withdrew federal troops from the South in 1877--the official end of Reconstruction--Southern states had already begun to pass laws that segregated and disenfranchised African Americans.

The black middle class emerges as a political and economic force in episode two, "Fighting Back," a look at the period from 1896 to 1917. Episode three, "Don't Shout Too Soon," deals with the violent time between World Wars I and II, from 1918 to 1940. "Terror and Triumph" is the title of the last episode that covers the years from 1940 through 1954, including World War II, which acted as a catalyst for change at home. In World War II, more than two hundred thousand black Americans served their country in the military. And yet, black veterans returning home south of the Mason-Dixon line were spat upon and continually designated to subordinate citizenship. The soldiers returned home ready to demand equal treatment. One of them was Hosea Williams, who became chief lieutenant in Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In the film, Williams describes what many of the soldiers thought: "If we've got to fight and die for America, why should we be treated like slaves?"

Williams, platoon sergeant of the Third Army, shares the violent homecoming he encountered in Thomasville, Georgia, when he asked a woman behind a snack bar at a bus station for a drink of water. She wouldn't give him one, so "I tried to lean inside and get me a cup of water," Williams explains, "and those white people beat me 'till I was unconscious. I was in the army uniform and had all these medals . . . and they beat me until they thought I was dead." Someone called a black undertaker who realized Williams was still alive. The undertaker rushed him to a hospital. "And I laid there crying for eight weeks," Williams continues, "wishing that Adolph Hitler had won the war."

President Harry S. Truman was instrumental in the dismantling of Jim Crow that followed the war. He signed a presidential order to desegregate the military, although he knew there would be a political cost to him in the 1948 election. Despite this handicap, he triumphed over breakaway Dixiecrats in four Southern states to win. He was the first president ever to address the NAACP. But it would be in the courts that the battle over segregation would be decided.

Charles Hamilton Huston, vice dean of Howard Law School, had a plan. He believed that training black lawyers and sending them south to work was the first step in abolishing segregation. "Experience has proved that the average white lawyer, especially in the South, cannot be relied upon to wage an uncompromising fight for equal rights for negroes," Huston declared.

As special counsel to NAACP in 1935, Huston began a legal campaign to end segregation in public schools. His strategy included documenting the inequity between educational opportunities for blacks and whites and reinforcing the expensive price tag associated with separate and equal schools. He believed a broken "separate but equal" policy would eventually eliminate discrimination.

The strategy, of course, relied on individuals who had the conviction to stay the course. One of those individuals was high school student Barbara Johns of Farmville, Virginia. Johns organized a student strike against Moton High School in this quiet, Virginia town that prided itself on the cordiality of its race relations, while still adhering to the Jim Crow era's segregated schools policy. She was outraged that more than 450 black students were crammed into a small, overflowing eight-room schoolhouse made from tar paper covered buildings, while their white counterparts enjoyed a modern facility with room to spare.

"We have a right to have a school as good as the white kids' school," Johns affirmed to fellow Moton High classmates. "We have to make a change, and I mean right now!" And so began a yearlong strike that would help change the nation.

Johns's stance was not without consequences. The parents of many of the students lost their jobs with county departments, and many of the area's teachers were out of work because of a lack of students. Some parents sent their children away to relatives because they worried for their safety.

Johns's suit, eventually bundled with four similar cases from elsewhere in the country, became part of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education. In that case, the Court held that racially segregated public schools are inherently unequal and, therefore, unconstitutional. Chief Justice Earl Warren and a unanimous Supreme Court finally declared, "In the field of public education, the doctrine of separate but equal has no place." Armed with this ammunition from the national courts, the Civil Rights movement would fight discrimination across all aspects of society for the next several decades.

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"All marriages between a white person and a negro, or between a white person and a person of negro descent to the fourth generation inclusive, are hereby forever prohibited,"--Florida. "Separate free schools shall be established for the education of children of African descent; and it shall be unlawful for any colored child to attend any white school, or any white child to attend a colored school,"--Mississippi.

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Jim Crow Laws and the Jim Crow Era was one of the worst events in American History. So many African Americans and other ethnic groups were horribly mistreated and robbed of quality of life. This is important to remember so history doesn't repeat itself and so that we do not treat people the same way today. For soe reason, people back then hated those who weren't like them and people of today need to know to never act the same way ever again.

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Jim Crow was a fictional character portraying a black slave that was not all very smart or wise. He was used in racist comedies during the Civil War. This name was then used for racist laws and agreements later as well as what we know of as the Jim Crow Era.

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The main philosophy of the Jim Crow Era however not exactly true as many blacks did not get the same rights as whites.

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Jim crow laws emerged in the southern states after the civil war, first enacted by law makers. As the country was still recovering from the civil war, and the southern states furthered restrictions on black rights after they go against 2 US supreme court decisions. Each southern state continued to get Jim crow laws, and by the start of World war 1, every southern state had Jim crow laws. Jim crow laws kept growing and eventually started being dismantled around 1940's

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Jim Crow Laws

Imagine that you are a teenager, and you're ready to go to high school. You really want to go to high school and maybe even college because you enjoy learning and want to get a good job in the future.

But there's a problem. You live on a farm in the middle of nowhere, and the only school in the area won't allow you to attend because of the color of your skin.

There are dozens of scenarios I could ask you to imagine about what it was like to be black in the Jim Crow South. I could ask you to think about going to a movie with friends, only to be shut out because the only theater in town is whites-only. I could ask you to imagine traveling to a new town, only to discover that none of the hotels or motels would allow you to check in. What if you were on the road and starving but couldn't eat at any restaurants?

For the first century after the American Civil War, Jim Crow laws, or segregation laws, sprang up in the South. These laws kept power in the hands of whites, while keeping black Americans from being able to get the same benefits of society as their neighbors.

Of all the places that the Jim Crow laws hurt African Americans, perhaps the most poignant was in the education system, where millions of children were shut out of a good education because of the color of their skin. Let's look closer at how the Jim Crow laws impacted American education.

Separate & Unequal

Even when the Jim Crow laws were being enacted, many people (including white people) felt that they were not fair. They believed that blacks and whites should have equal access to opportunity.

So how did the Jim Crow laws manage to be passed if many people believed that everyone should be equal? The phrase 'separate but equal' was a common refrain in the Jim Crow South. Proponents of the laws said that they provided equal opportunities for everyone, though in separate quarters.

Of course, that was not true at all. In education, for example, black schools received on average far less money than white schools. Because of that, school conditions were vastly different. White school buildings were maintained far better than black school buildings, and white classrooms were less crowded. White schools could afford to pay for the best educators.

Some black schools even had inequality of materials. In some places, black schools were not allowed to use textbooks with the Constitution or Declaration of Independence in them, because the white school boards feared that would lead to black students wanting equality and freedom.

And that was just the inequalities between the students who had access to school at all. Remember when I asked you to imagine that you wanted to go to school but couldn't because the only school in your area was all-white? Sadly, this was true for many people.

After the Civil War, most African Americans in the South lived in rural areas. Those small towns and farming communities could often only afford to support one school, and so the only school offered was whites-only. For many blacks, that meant that the only black school available to them was too far away for them to attend.

Rosenwald Schools

Amongst all the depressing news about education in the Jim Crow South, there is one bright spot. It started in 1912, with a collaboration between millionaire Julius Rosenwald, who was the head of Sears Roebuck & Company, and Booker T. Washington, a famous black educator.

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the impact of jim crow laws on education - video & lesson transcript | study.com

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The Impact of Jim Crow Laws on Education - Video & Lesson Transcript | Study.com

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Imagine that you are a teenager, and you're ready to go to high school. You really want to go to high school and maybe even college because you enjoy learning and want to get a good job in the future. But there's a problem.

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Back to White Only

Jim Crow Laws

"Marriages are void when one party is a white person and the other is possessed of one-eighth or more negro, Japanese, or Chinese blood."
-Nebraska, 1911

"Separate free schools shall be established for the education of children of African descent; and it shall be unlawful for any colored child to attend any white school, or any white child to attend a colored school."
-Missouri, 1929

"All railroads carrying passengers in the state (other than street railroads) shall provide equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races, by providing two or more passenger cars for each passenger train, or by dividing the cars by a partition, so as to secure separate accommodations."
-Tennessee, 1891

See more Jim Crow laws

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Back to White Only "Marriages are void when one party is a white person and the other is possessed of one-eighth or more negro, Japanese, or Chinese blood." -Nebraska, 1911 "Separate free schools shall be established for the education of children of African descent; and it shall be unlawful for any colored child to attend any white school, or any white child to attend a colored school."

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What was Jim Crow - Jim Crow Museum - Ferris State University

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In 1890, Louisiana passed the "Separate Car Law," which purported to aid passenger comfort by creating "equal but separate" cars for blacks and whites. This was a ruse. No public accommodations, including railway travel, provided blacks with equal facilities.

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Jim Crow law, in U.S. history, any of the laws that enforced racial segregation in the South between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the beginning of the civil rights movement in the 1950s. Jim Crow was the name of a minstrel routine (actually Jump Jim Crow) performed beginning in 1828 by its author, Thomas Dartmouth ("Daddy") Rice, and by many imitators, including actor Joseph Jefferson. The term came to be a derogatory epithet for African Americans and a designation for their segregated life.

From the late 1870s, Southern state legislatures, no longer controlled by so-called carpetbaggers and freedmen, passed laws requiring the separation of whites from "persons of colour" in public transportation and schools. Generally, anyone of ascertainable or strongly suspected Black ancestry in any degree was for that purpose a "person of colour"; the pre- Civil War distinction favouring those whose ancestry was known to be mixed-particularly the half-French "free persons of colour" in Louisiana-was abandoned. The segregation principle was extended to parks, cemeteries, theatres, and restaurants in an effort to prevent any contact between Blacks and whites as equals. It was codified on local and state levels and most famously with the " separate but equal" decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).

In 1954 the Supreme Court reversed Plessy in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. It declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional, and, by extension, that ruling was applied to other public facilities. In the years following, subsequent decisions struck down similar kinds of Jim Crow legislation. See also Black code; racial segregation.

Origins

Prior to the Civil War the inferior status of slaves had made it unnecessary to pass laws segregating them from white people. Both races could work side by side so long as the slave recognized his subordinate place. In the cities, where most free African Americans lived, rudimentary forms of segregation existed prior to 1860, but no uniform pattern emerged. In the North free Blacks also laboured under harsh restrictions and often found an even more-rigid segregation than in the South.

One might have expected the Southern states to have created a segregation system immediately after the war, but that did not happen. In some states the legislatures imposed rigid separation, but only in certain areas; Texas, for example, required that every train have one car in which all people of colour had to sit. The South had had no real system of public education prior to the Civil War, and as the postwar Reconstruction governments created public schools, those were as often as not segregated by race. Nonetheless, New Orleans had fully integrated schools until 1877, and in North Carolina former slaves routinely sat on juries alongside whites.

In 1877 the Supreme Court ruled in Hall v. DeCuir that states could not prohibit segregation on common carriers such as railroads, streetcars, or riverboats. In the Civil Rights Cases of 1883, the court overturned key elements of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, thereby sanctioning the notion of " separate but equal" facilities and transportation for the races (though it did not use the term separate but equal). Seven years later the court approved a Mississippi statute requiring segregation on intrastate carriers in Louisville, New Orleans & Texas Railway v. Mississippi (1890). As those cases demonstrated, the court essentially acquiesced in the South's "solution" to the problems of race relations.

From 1887 to 1892 nine states, including Louisiana, passed laws requiring separation on public conveyances, such as streetcars and railroads. Though they differed in detail, most of those statutes required equal accommodations for Black passengers and imposed fines and even jail terms on railroad employees who did not enforce them. Five of the states also provided criminal fines or imprisonment for passengers who tried to sit in cars from which their race excluded them. The Louisiana Separate Car Act passed in July 1890. In order to "promote the comfort of passengers," railroads had to provide "equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races" on lines running in the state.

Challenging the Separate Car Act

The Louisiana Separate Car Act marked a dramatic and humiliating reversal of fortune for the Black and mixed-race citizens of Louisiana. Although a slave state, Louisiana in general and New Orleans in particular had always had, because of their French origins, a more-tolerant attitude toward people of colour than did other Deep South states. In addition to the usual demarcation between Black and white, since the 1700s New Orleans had acknowledged a third class, free people of colour (in French, gens de couleur libres), sometimes called Creoles, the freed descendants of European fathers and African mothers who had enjoyed a great deal of autonomy. Although Louisiana, like most Southern states, had laws against marriage between slaves, it did allow free people of colour, whites, and the gens de couleur to marry, testify in court against whites, and in some cases inherit property from their fathers. Some became slaveowners themselves, and apparently many of them accumulated significant property. Their social standing, especially in New Orleans, had insulated them from some of the white reaction following the war. But when whites regained power after the end of Reconstruction, they saw only two races, and the privileged position of the gens de couleur evaporated; from then on they were Black as far as the law was concerned.

Gens de couleur helped form the American Citizens Equal Rights Association when the Separate Car bill was introduced, and they pledged to fight it. Among the members of the committee was Louis A. Martinet, a Creole attorney and doctor who had also founded the Daily Crusader, and he and his newspaper became the leading opponents of the law. After its passage his paper called for both a legal challenge and a boycott of those railroads that had segregated cars. Martinet received the help of Albion W. Tourgée, a white lawyer, who had fought for the North, and served as a lawyer and judge in North Carolina.

A citizens' committee (the Citizens' Committee to Test the Constitutionality of the Separate Car Law), drawn primarily from the Creole community, raised $3,000 to fund a lawsuit, and Tourgée agreed to be lead counsel in the case. But they also needed a local lawyer, since the challenge to the law would have to go through state courts before it could be appealed to the federal system. A white lawyer, James Walker, finally agreed to take the case in December 1891. Martinet did not consider any of the Black lawyers in New Orleans competent to raise a constitutional question, since, as he explained, they practiced almost entirely in the police courts.

Tourgée and Martinet considered several possibilities. They could have a Black passenger buy a ticket outside Louisiana and then travel into the state, thus raising a challenge to the law under the commerce clause. They might have a fair-skinned person of mixed race attempt to enter the ladies' car, but there they ran into the problem, as Martinet noted, that she might not be refused admission. In New Orleans, he wrote to Tourgée, "people of tolerably fair complexion, even if unmistakably colored, enjoy here a large degree of immunity from the accursed prejudice."

But Tourgée wanted someone who was an octoroon, a person who was "of not more than one eighth colored blood," because he believed the winning strategy would be to expose the ambiguities in the definition of race. How did the law, or a train conductor, determine the race of a passenger? "It is a question," Tourgée told his colleague, that the Supreme Court "may as well take up, if for nothing else, to let the court sharpen its wits on." Martinet agreed, and in New Orleans he began talking to sympathetic railroad officials who wanted the law overturned for their own financial reasons. It would not do if their test passenger was merely excluded from boarding or even thrown off the train; he would have to be arrested so that a real case existed and he could claim injury in federal court. One railway informed him that it did not enforce the law, while another said that though it opposed the statute as too costly, it did not want to go against it publicly. Then the Louisville & Nashville line agreed to a test case. As it happened, for reasons neither Martinet nor Tourgée expected, their test case fizzled.

On February 24, 1892, 21-year-old Daniel Desdunes purchased a first-class ticket on the Louisville & Nashville from New Orleans to Mobile, Alabama, and took a seat in the whites-only car. He was arrested according to the plan and charged with a criminal violation of the Separate Car Act. Tourgée, Martinet, and the local attorney, James Walker, filed a "plea of jurisdiction," arguing that since Desdunes was a passenger in interstate commerce, he had the right and privilege to travel free from any governmental regulation save that of the Congress. Tourgée also introduced his claim that the determination of race was a complex question of both science and law and so could not be delegated to a train official. The lawyers assumed that their plea would be denied, Desdunes would be convicted, and then they would appeal. Then, on April 19, 1892, the presiding judge, Robert Marr, suddenly disappeared, and no one knew what had happened to him.

While Desdunes's attorney tried to figure out what to do next, on May 25 the Louisiana Supreme Court handed down its decision in Louisiana ex rel. Abbott v. Hicks. A train conductor on the Texas and Pacific Railway had been prosecuted for seating a Black passenger in a white car, and the railway argued that since the passenger was traveling between two states, either the Louisiana law did not apply to interstate travel or, if it did, then it was unconstitutional under the commerce clause. Much to everyone's surprise, the Louisiana high court agreed that regulations of the Separate Car Act could not apply to interstate passengers. Given that development, the new judge in Desdunes's case, John Ferguson, dismissed the case.

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Jim Crow law | History, Facts, & Examples

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Jim Crow law, any of the laws that enforced racial segregation in the U.S. South from the end of Reconstruction to the mid-20th century. The segregation principle was codified on local and state levels and most famously with the Supreme Court's 'separate but equal' decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).

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From the 1880s into the 1960s, a majority of American states enforced segregation through "Jim Crow" laws (so called after a black character in minstrel shows). From Delaware to California, and from North Dakota to Texas, many states (and cities, too) could impose legal punishments on people for consorting with members of another race. The most common types of laws forbade intermarriage and ordered business owners and public institutions to keep their black and white clientele separated. Here is a sampling of laws from various states.

Amateur Baseball

Georgia - It shall be unlawful for any amateur white baseball team to play baseball on any vacant lot or baseball diamond within two blocks of a playground devoted to the Negro race, and it shall be unlawful for any amateur colored baseball team to play baseball in any vacant lot or baseball diamond within two blocks of any playground devoted to the white race.

Barbers

Georgia - No colored barber shall serve as a barber [to] white women or girls.

Bathroom Facilities, Male

Alabama - Every employer of white or negro males shall provide for such white or negro males reasonably accessible and separate toilet facilities.

The Blind

Louisiana - The board of trustees shall...maintain a separate building...on separate ground for the admission, care, instruction, and support of all blind persons of the colored or black race.

Burial

Georgia - The officer in charge shall not bury, or allow to be buried, any colored persons upon ground set apart or used for the burial of white persons.

Buses

Alabama - All passenger stations in this state operated by any motor transportation company shall have separate waiting rooms or space and separate ticket windows for the white and colored races.

Child Custody

South Carolina - It shall be unlawful for any parent, relative, or other white person in this State, having the control or custody of any white child, by right of guardianship, natural or acquired, or otherwise, to dispose of, give or surrender such white child permanently into the custody, control, maintenance, or support, of a negro.

Circus Tickets

Louisiana - All circuses, shows, and tent exhibitions, to which the attendance of...more than one race is invited or expected to attend shall provide for the convenience of its patrons not less than two ticket offices with individual ticket sellers, and not less than two entrances to the said performance, with individual ticket takers and receivers, and in the case of outside or tent performances, the said ticket offices shall not be less than twenty-five (25) feet apart.

Cohabitation

Florida - Any negro man and white woman, or any white man and negro woman, who are not married to each other, who shall habitually live in and occupy in the nighttime the same room shall each be punished by imprisonment not exceeding twelve (12) months, or by fine not exceeding five hundred ($500.00) dollars.

Education

Florida - The schools for white children and the schools for negro children shall be conducted separately.

Mississippi - Separate schools shall be maintained for the children of the white and colored races.

Missouri - Separate free schools shall be established for the education of children of African descent; and it shall be unlawful for any colored child to attend any white school, or any white child to attend a colored school.

New Mexico - Separate rooms [shall] be provided for the teaching of pupils of African descent, and [when] said rooms are so provided, such pupils may not be admitted to the school rooms occupied and used by pupils of Caucasian or other descent.

Texas - [The County Board of Education] shall provide schools of two kinds; those for white children and those for colored children.

Fishing, Boating, and Bathing

Oklahoma - The [Conservation] Commission shall have the right to make segregation of the white and colored races as to the exercise of rights of fishing, boating and bathing.

Hospital Entrances

Mississippi - There shall be maintained by the governing authorities of every hospital maintained by the state for treatment of white and colored patients separate entrances for white and colored patients and visitors, and such entrances shall be used by the race only for which they are prepared.

Housing

Louisiana - Any person...who shall rent any part of any such building to a negro person or a negro family when such building is already in whole or in part in occupancy by a white person or white family, or vice versa when the building is in occupancy by a negro person or negro family, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and on conviction thereof shall be punished by a fine of not less than twenty-five ($25.00) nor more than one hundred ($100.00) dollars or be imprisoned not less than 10, or more than 60 days, or both such fine and imprisonment in the discretion of the court.

Intermarriage

Arizona - The marriage of a person of Caucasian blood with a Negro, Mongolian, Malay, or Hindu shall be null and void.

Florida - All marriages between a white person and a negro, or between a white person and a person of negro descent to the fourth generation inclusive, are hereby forever prohibited.

Georgia - It shall be unlawful for a white person to marry anyone except a white person. Any marriage in violation of this section shall be void.

Maryland - All marriages between a white person and a negro, or between a white person and a person of negro descent, to the third generation, inclusive, or between a white person and a member of the Malay race; or between the negro a nd a member of the Malay race; or between a person of Negro descent, to the third generation, inclusive, and a member of the Malay race, are forever prohibited, and shall be void.

Mississippi - The marriage of a white person with a negro or mulatto or person who shall have one-eighth or more of negro blood, shall be unlawful and void.

Missouri - All marriages between...white persons and negroes or white persons and Mongolians...are prohibited and declared absolutely void...No person having one-eighth part or more of negro blood shall be permitted to marry any white person, nor shall any white person be permitted to marry any negro or person having one-eighth part or more of negro blood.

Wyoming - All marriages of white persons with Negroes, Mulattos, Mongolians, or Malaya hereafter contracted in the State of Wyoming are and shall be illegal and void.

Juvenile Delinquents

Florida - There shall be separate buildings, not nearer than one fourth mile to each other, one for white boys and one for negro boys. White boys and negro boys shall not, in any manner, be associated together or worked together.

Libraries

North Carolina - The state librarian is directed to fit up and maintain a separate place for the use of the colored people who may come to the library for the purpose of reading books or periodicals.

Texas - Any white person of such county may use the county free library under the rules and regulations prescribed by the commissioners court and may be entitled to all the privileges thereof. Said court shall make proper provision for the negroes of said county to be served through a separate branch or branches of the county free library, which shall be administered by [a] custodian of the negro race under the supervision of the county librarian.

Lunch Counters

South Carolina - No persons, firms, or corporations, who or which furnish meals to passengers at station restaurants or station eating houses, in times limited by common carriers of said passengers, shall furnish said meals to white and colored passengers in the same room, or at the same table, or at the same counter.

Mental Hospitals

Georgia - The Board of Control shall see that proper and distinct apartments are arranged for said patients, so that in no case shall Negroes and white persons be together.

Militia

North Carolina - The white and colored militia shall be separately enrolled, and shall never be compelled to serve in the same organization.No organization of colored troops shall be permitted where white troops are available, and while white permitted to be organized, colored troops shall be under the command of white officers.

Mining

Oklahoma - The baths and lockers for the negroes shall be separate from the white race, but may be in the same building.

Nurses

Alabama - No person or corporation shall require any white female nurse to nurse in wards or rooms in hospitals, either public or private, in which negro men are placed.

Parks

Georgia - It shall be unlawful for colored people to frequent any park owned or maintained by the city for the benefit, use and enjoyment of white persons...and unlawful for any white person to frequent any park owned or maintained by the city for the use and benefit of colored persons.

Pool and Billiard Rooms

Alabama - It shall be unlawful for a negro and white person to play together or in company with each other at any game of pool or billiards.

Prisons

Mississippi - The warden shall see that the white convicts shall have separate apartments for both eating and sleeping from the negro convicts.

Promotion of Equality

Mississippi - Any person...who shall be guilty of printing, publishing or circulating printed, typewritten or written matter urging or presenting for public acceptance or general information, arguments or suggestions in favor of social equality or of intermarriage between whites and negroes, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and subject to fine or not exceeding five hundred (500.00) dollars or imprisonment not exceeding six (6) months or both.

Railroads

Alabama - The conductor of each passenger train is authorized and required to assign each passenger to the car or the division of the car, when it is divided by a partition, designated for the race to which such passenger belongs.

Maryland - All railroad companies and corporations, and all persons running or operating cars or coaches by steam on any railroad line or track in the State of Maryland, for the transportation of passengers, are hereby required to provide separate cars or coaches for the travel and transportation of the white and colored passengers.

Virginia - The conductors or managers on all such railroads shall have power, and are hereby required, to assign to each white or colored passenger his or her respective car, coach or compartment. If the passenger fails to disclose his race, the conductor and managers, acting in good faith, shall be the sole judges of his race.

Reform Schools

Kentucky - The children of white and colored races committed to the houses of reform shall be kept entirely separate from each other.

Restaurants

Alabama - It shall be unlawful to conduct a restaurant or other place for the serving of food in the city, at which white and colored people are served in the same room, unless such white and colored persons are effectually separated by a solid partition extending from the floor upward to a distance of seven feet or higher, and unless a separate entrance from the street is provided for each compartment.

Georgia - All persons licensed to conduct a restaurant, shall serve either white people exclusively or colored people exclusively and shall not sell to the two races within the same room or serve the two races anywhere under the same license.

Teaching

Oklahoma - Any instructor who shall teach in any school, college or institution where members of the white and colored race are received and enrolled as pupils for instruction shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and upon conviction thereof, shall be fined in any sum not less than ten dollars ($10.00) nor more than fifty dollars ($50.00) for each offense.

Telephone Booths

Oklahoma - The Corporation Commission is hereby vested with power and authority to require telephone companies...to maintain separate booths for white and colored patrons when there is a demand for such separate booths. That the Corporation Commission shall determine the necessity for said separate booths only upon complaint of the people in the town and vicinity to be served after due hearing as now provided by law in other complaints filed with the Corporation Commission.

Textbooks

North Carolina - Books shall not be interchangeable between the white and colored schools, but shall continue to be used by the race first using them.

Theaters

Virginia - Every person...operating...any public hall, theatre, opera house, motion picture show or any place of public entertainment or public assemblage which is attended by both white and colored persons, shall separate the white race and the colored race and shall set apart and designate...certain seats therein to be occupied by white persons and a portion thereof , or certain seats therein, to be occupied by colored persons.

Transportation

North Carolina - The...Utilities Commission...is empowered and directed to require the establishment of separate waiting rooms at all stations for the white and colored races.

Wine and Beer

Georgia - All persons licensed to conduct the business of selling beer or wine...shall serve either white people exclusively or colored people exclusively and shall not sell to the two races within the same room at any time.

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Jim Crow Laws - Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park (U.S. National Park Service)

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From the 1880s into the 1960s, a majority of American states enforced segregation through "Jim Crow" laws (so called after a black character in minstrel shows). From Delaware to California, and from North Dakota to Texas, many states (and cities, too) could impose legal punishments on people for consorting with members of another race.

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Freedom Riders | Article

The segregation and disenfranchisement laws known as "Jim Crow" represented a formal, codified system of racial apartheid that dominated the American South for three quarters of a century beginning in the 1890s. The laws affected almost every aspect of daily life, mandating segregation of schools, parks, libraries, drinking fountains, restrooms, buses, trains, and restaurants. "Whites Only" and "Colored" signs were constant reminders of the enforced racial order.

Signs such as "Colored Waiting Room" constantly reminded travelers of the enforced racial order. Credit: Library of Congress

In legal theory, blacks received "separate but equal" treatment under the law - in actuality, public facilities for blacks were nearly always inferior to those for whites, when they existed at all. In addition, blacks were systematically denied the right to vote in most of the rural South through the selective application of literacy tests and other racially motivated criteria.

Sign at a Greyhound Bus Station in Rome, GA. Credit: Library of Congress

The Jim Crow system was upheld by local government officials and reinforced by acts of terror perpetrated by Vigilantes. In 1896, the Supreme Court established the doctrine of separate but equal in Plessy v. Ferguson, after a black man in New Orleans attempted to sit in a whites-only railway car.

In 1908, journalist Ray Stannard Baker observed that "no other point of race contact is so much and so bitterly discussed among Negroes as the Jim Crow car." As bus travel became widespread in the South over the first half of the 20th century, it followed the same pattern.

"Travel in the segregated South for black people was humiliating," recalled Diane Nash in her interview for Freedom Riders. "The very fact that there were separate facilities was to say to black people and white people that blacks were so subhuman and so inferior that we could not even use the public facilities that white people used."

Transit was a core component of segregation in the South, as the 1947 Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) pamphlet and Bayard Rustin song, "You Don't Have to Ride Jim Crow" attests. Keeping whites and blacks from sitting together on a bus, train, or trolley car might seem insignificant, but it was one more link in a system of segregation that had to be defended at all times - lest it collapse. Thus transit was a logical point of attack for the foes of segregation, in the courtroom and on the buses themselves.

It would take several decades of legal action and months of nonviolent direct action before these efforts achieved their intended result.

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Jim Crow Laws | American Experience | PBS

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Freedom Riders | Article The segregation and disenfranchisement laws known as "Jim Crow" represented a formal, codified system of racial apartheid that dominated the American South for three quarters of a century beginning in the 1890s. The laws affected almost every aspect of daily life, mandating segregation of schools, parks, libraries, drinking fountains, restrooms, buses, trains, and restaurants.