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The so-called Jim Crow laws were a set of state and local laws that in the United States maintained racial segregation since the late 19th century. After slavery was abolished, many whites feared for the freedom blacks had. They hated the idea that black citizens could achieve the same social status as whites if they were allowed equal access to employment, health care, housing, and education. It was then that the states began to pass laws that placed a series of restrictions on blacks. Taken together, these laws limited the advancement of black people and ultimately gave them de facto status.of second class citizens. The Civil Rights Act passed in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act enacted in 1965 as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s social reform program marked a turning point in the long struggle for civil rights in the United States, social situation whose effects are still felt today.
Jim Crow laws
In 1887, the state of Florida issued a series of regulations enforcing racial segregation in public transportation, as well as in other public facilities. And by 1990 all the southern states of the United States had implemented similar laws. These laws determined that blacks had to drink from different water sources than whites, use different toilets than whites, and sit apart from them in movie theaters, restaurants, and buses. They also had to attend separate schools and live in different neighborhoods.
Jim Crow’s nickname for racial apartheid in the United States comes from a popular 19th-century song called Jump Jim Crow (“Jump, Jim Crow”) performed by a singer named Thomas Daddy Rice, who performed in blackface.
The antecedent to Jim Crow laws is found in the so-called Black Codes. The norms that included racial discrimination continued in force even after the thirteenth amendment formally abolished slavery in the United States in 1865, adapting to the new reality. This is the case of the Black Codes , the Black Codes. It was a set of rules issued by state governments, locally valid, which limited the rights of blacks. They began to be implemented in the 1830s and were in force in many cases until well into the 20th century, when the civil rights movement managed to have them abolished.
During the so-called Reconstruction Period that followed the civil war, the Black Codes were in practice a way of legalizing racial discrimination and enforcing racial segregation, despite the thirteenth amendment having been enacted. The first state to adopt these standards was Texas in 1866, followed by other states in the southern United States. The Black Codes limited the political incidence of the black population, controlled their work and activities, limited the movements of those who had been slaves, and even established the servitude generated by debts. Control of the work of former slaves was established through fines and corporal punishment, mainly to ensure cheap labor for whites. Then,
The Black Codes imposed curfews on blacks, required unemployed blacks to be jailed, and mandated that they get white patrons to live in the city, or passes from their employers if they worked in agriculture. The Black Codes even made it difficult for African Americans to hold gatherings of any kind, including religious services. Black people who violated these laws could be fined, imprisoned, if unable to pay the fines they could be required to do forced labor, just as they had done while enslaved. Essentially, the codes recreated conditions similar to slavery.
Legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments sought to grant more freedoms to African Americans. However, these laws focused on citizen rights and suffrage and did not prevent the later enactment of Jim Crow laws. Segregation not only sought to keep society racially stratified, but also promoted homegrown terrorism against blacks. African Americans who did not obey Jim Crow laws could be beaten, imprisoned, maimed, or lynched. Racial terrorism had its maximum expression in public lynchings. The Equal Justice Initiative(Equal Justice Initiative) of Alabama has documented 4,048 cases of lynchings in twelve southern states of the United States between 1877 and 1950. Lynchings were violent public acts, featuring the torture of black citizens that traumatized African-American society through throughout the country, with the tolerance of state and national officials.
But a black person did not need to disobey Jim Crow laws to become a target of violent racism. Black people who behaved with dignity, prospered financially, got an education, dared to vote, or refused sexual advances from white people could also be targeted for racist acts. In fact, a black person need not do anything at all to be a victim of violent acts of racism. If a white person simply didn’t like the look of a black person, she could lose everything, including her life.
The legal battle against Jim Crow laws
The 1896 United States Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson was the first major legal challenge against Jim Crow laws. The plaintiff in the case, Homer Plessy, a Louisiana native, was a shoemaker and activist who was sitting in a whites-only train car, for which he was arrested, just as he and his fellow activists planned. The High Court ultimately decided that accommodations that followed the “separate but equal” precept for whites and blacks were not discriminatory.
Homer Plessy died in 1925 and would not live to see that ruling overturned in the landmark Brown v. Topeka Board of Education case that was ruled by the United States Supreme Court in 1954. While this ruling focused on segregation in schools led to the repeal of laws mandating segregation in city parks, public beaches, public housing, interstate and intrastate travel, and elsewhere.
On December 1, 1955 Rosa Parks, a seamstress and secretary of the local NAACP ( National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) chapter, refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white man. Rosa Parks was arrested for violating a Montgomery city law in Alabama, United States. The imprisonment of Rosa Parks was the trigger for a historic and crucial action in the fight for black civil rights in the United States, led by Martin Luther King: the boycott of transportation in Montgomery. Another form of anti-discrimination was the actions of the Freedom Riders , the freedom riders, who challenged discrimination on interstate public transportation.
The current impact of Jim Crow laws
Although racial segregation is illegal today, the United States remains a racially stratified society. Black children are much more likely to attend school with other black children than with white children. In fact, there is more segregation in schools today than in 1970.
Segregation is also maintained in many neighborhoods in the United States. The fact that the number of blacks in prison is proportionally much higher is a sociological sign of the disenfranchisement of the African-American population. Michelle Alexander coined the term “New Jim Crow” to describe these phenomena.
In the form of an analogy, the laws that persecute undocumented immigrants have been characterized by the name “John” Crow. Anti-immigrant bills passed in states like California, Arizona and Alabama in recent decades have led to so-called illegal immigrants living in the shadows, subjected to poor working conditions, predatory employers, lack of medical care, sexual assaults , domestic violence and other types of aggression due to their discrimination. Although some of these laws have been largely repealed or neutralized, their passage in several states has created a hostile climate that makes undocumented immigrants feel dehumanized.
Thus, it could be said that Jim Crow is a ghost that lives in the racial divisions that continue to characterize American life.
Sources
C. Vann Woodward. The Strange Career of Jim Crow . A commemorative edition. Oxford University Press, 2001.
Civil Rights Act of 1964 – CRA – Title VII – Equal Employment Opportunities – 42 US Code Chapter 21 Accessed December 2021.
Equal Justice Initiative. Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror . Consulted in December 2021.
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Rosa Parks . Accessed November 2021.
Rosa Parks, tired of giving up . Accessed November 2021.
Michelle Alexander. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness . New York, 2012.
