Jim Crow laws were state and local laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States. All were enacted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by white Democratic-dominated state legislatures after the Reconstruction period. The laws were enforced until 1965. In practice, Jim Crow laws mandated racial segregation in all public facilities in the states of the former Confederate States of America and other states, starting in the 1870s and 1880s. Jim Crow laws were upheld in 1896 in the case of Plessy vs. Ferguson, in which the U.S. Supreme Court laid out its "separate but equal" legal doctrine for facilities for African Americans. Moreover, public education had essentially been segregated since its establishment in most of the South after the Civil War (1861–65).
The legal principle of "separate but equal" racial segregation was extended to public facilities and transportation, including the coaches of interstate trains and buses. Facilities for African Americans and Native Americans were consistently inferior and underfunded compared to the facilities for white Americans; sometimes, there were no facilities for people of color. As a body of law, Jim Crow institutionalized economic, educational, and social disadvantages for African Americans and other people of color living in the South.
Jim Crow laws and Jim Crow state constitutional provisions mandated the segregation of public schools, public places, and public transportation, and the segregation of restrooms, restaurants, and drinking fountains for whites and blacks. The U.S. military was already segregated. President Woodrow Wilson, a Southern Democrat, initiated the segregation of federal workplaces in 1913.
In 1954, segregation of public schools (state-sponsored) was declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren in landmark case Brown v. Board of Education. In some states, it took many years to implement this decision, while the Warren Court continued to rule against the Jim Crow laws in other cases such as Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States (1964). Generally, the remaining Jim Crow laws were overruled by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Etymology
The phrase "Jim Crow Law" can be found as early as 1892 in the title of a New York Times article about Louisiana requiring segregated railroad cars. The origin of the phrase "Jim Crow" has often been attributed to "Jump Jim Crow", a song-and-dance caricature of blacks performed by white actor Thomas D. Rice in blackface, which first surfaced in 1828 and was used to satirize Andrew Jackson's populist policies. As a result of Rice's fame, "Jim Crow" by 1838 had become a pejorative expression meaning "Negro". When southern legislatures passed laws of racial segregation directed against blacks at the end of the 19th century, these statutes became known as Jim Crow laws.Origins of Jim Crow laws
In January 1865 an amendment to the Constitution to abolish slavery in the United States was proposed by Congress, and on December 18, 1865, it was ratified as the Thirteenth Amendment formally abolishing slavery.
Cover of an early edition of "Jump Jim Crow" sheet music (circa 1832)
Freedmen voting in New Orleans, 1867
During the Reconstruction period of 1865–1877, federal laws provided civil rights protections in the U.S. South for freedmen,
the African Americans who had formerly been slaves, and the minority of
blacks who had been free before the war. In the 1870s, Democrats gradually regained power in the Southern legislatures, having used insurgent paramilitary groups, such as the White League and the Red Shirts, to disrupt Republican organizing, run Republican officeholders out of town, and intimidate blacks to suppress their voting. Extensive voter fraud was also used. Gubernatorial elections were close and had been disputed in Louisiana for years, with increasing violence against blacks during campaigns from 1868 onward.
In 1877, a national Democratic Party compromise to gain Southern support in the presidential election (a corrupt bargain)
resulted in the government's withdrawing the last of the federal troops
from the South. White Democrats had regained political power in every
Southern state. These Southern, white, Democratic Redeemer governments legislated Jim Crow laws, officially segregating black people from the white population.
Blacks were still elected to local offices throughout the 1880s,
but their voting was suppressed for state and national elections.
Democrats passed laws to make voter registration and electoral rules
more restrictive, with the result that political participation by most
blacks and many poor whites began to decrease. Between 1890 and 1910, ten of the eleven former Confederate states, starting with Mississippi, passed new constitutions or amendments that effectively disenfranchised most blacks and tens of thousands of poor whites through a combination of poll taxes, literacy and comprehension tests, and residency and record-keeping requirements. Grandfather clauses temporarily permitted some illiterate whites to vote but gave no relief to most blacks.
Voter turnout dropped drastically through the South as a result
of such measures. In Louisiana, by 1900, black voters were reduced to
5,320 on the rolls, although they comprised the majority of the state's
population. By 1910, only 730 blacks were registered, less than 0.5% of
eligible black men. "In 27 of the state's 60 parishes, not a single
black voter was registered any longer; in 9 more parishes, only one
black voter was." The cumulative effect in North Carolina
meant that black voters were completely eliminated from voter rolls
during the period from 1896–1904. The growth of their thriving middle
class was slowed. In North Carolina and other Southern states, blacks
suffered from being made invisible in the political system: "[W]ithin a
decade of disfranchisement, the white supremacy campaign had erased the image of the black middle class from the minds of white North Carolinians." In Alabama
tens of thousands of poor whites were also disenfranchised, although
initially legislators had promised them they would not be affected
adversely by the new restrictions.
Those who could not vote were not eligible to serve on juries and
could not run for local offices. They effectively disappeared from
political life, as they could not influence the state legislatures, and
their interests were overlooked. While public schools had been
established by Reconstruction legislatures for the first time in most
Southern states, those for black children were consistently underfunded
compared to schools for white children, even when considered within the
strained finances of the postwar South where the decreasing price of
cotton kept the agricultural economy at a low.
Like schools, public libraries for blacks and Native Americans
were underfunded, if they existed at all, and they were often stocked
with secondhand books and other resources. These facilities were not introduced for African Americans in the South until the first decade of the 20th century. Throughout the Jim Crow era, libraries were only available sporadically. Prior to the 20th century, most libraries established for African Americans were school-library combinations.
Many public libraries for both European-American and African-American
patrons in this period were founded as the result of middle-class
activism aided by matching grants from the Carnegie Foundation.
In some cases, progressive measures intended to reduce election fraud, such as the Eight Box Law in South Carolina, acted against black and white voters who were illiterate, as they could not follow the directions. While the separation of African Americans from the white general population was becoming legalized and formalized during the Progressive Era
(1890s–1920s), it was also becoming customary. For instance, even in
cases in which Jim Crow laws did not expressly forbid black people to
participate in sports or recreation, a segregated culture had become
common.
In the Jim Crow context, the presidential election of 1912 was steeply slanted against the interests of black Americans. Most blacks still lived in the South, where they had been effectively disfranchised, so they could not vote at all. While poll taxes
and literacy requirements banned many poor or illiterate Americans from
voting, these stipulations frequently had loopholes that exempted
European Americans from meeting the requirements. In Oklahoma, for instance, anyone qualified to vote before 1866, or related to someone qualified to vote before 1866 (a kind of "grandfather clause"), was exempted from the literacy requirement;
but the only persons who had the franchise before that year were white,
or European-American males. European Americans were effectively
exempted from the literacy testing, whereas black Americans were
effectively singled out by the law.
Woodrow Wilson
was a Democrat elected from New Jersey, but he was born and raised in
the South, and was the first Southern-born president of the post-Civil War period. He appointed Southerners to his Cabinet.
Some quickly began to press for segregated workplaces, although the
city of Washington, D.C., and federal offices had been integrated since
after the Civil War. In 1913, for instance, Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo –
an appointee of the President – was heard to express his opinion of
black and white women working together in one government office: "I feel
sure that this must go against the grain of the white women. Is there
any reason why the white women should not have only white women working
across from them on the machines?"
The Wilson administration introduced segregation in federal
offices, despite much protest from African-American leaders and white
progressive groups in the north and midwest.
He appointed segregationist Southern politicians because of his own
firm belief that racial segregation was in the best interest of black
and European Americans alike. At Gettysburg on July 4, 1913, the semi-centennial of Abraham Lincoln's declaration that "all men are created equal", Wilson addressed the crowd:
How complete the union has become and how dear to all of us, how unquestioned, how benign and majestic, as state after state has been added to this, our great family of free men!
In sharp contrast to Wilson, a Washington Bee
editorial wondered if the "reunion" of 1913 was a reunion of those who
fought for "the extinction of slavery" or a reunion of those who fought
to "perpetuate slavery and who are now employing every artifice and
argument known to deceit" to present emancipation as a failed venture. Historian David W. Blight notes that the "Peace Jubilee" at which Wilson presided at Gettysburg in 1913 "was a Jim Crow reunion, and white supremacy might be said to have been the silent, invisible master of ceremonies."
In Texas,
several towns adopted residential segregation laws between 1910 and the
1920s. Legal strictures called for segregated water fountains and
restrooms. Jim Crow laws were a product of what had become the solidly Democratic South due to disfranchisement of blacks.
Native Americans, like African Americans, were also affected by
the Jim Crow laws, especially after they were made citizens through the Indian Citizenship Act
of 1924. Native American identity was especially targeted by a system
that only wanted to recognize white or colored, and the government began
to question the legitimacy of some tribes because they had intermarried
with African Americans. The Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) employed anthropometrists
to determine the blood quantum of Native Americans in the South, and
declared that the only individuals who could claim Native American
identity were those determined to be half- or full-blooded Native
Americans, making individuals even more vulnerable to Jim Crow laws. Native Americans who were part white or light-complexioned would often pass as white to avoid the persecution of the Jim Crow laws, while family members with reddish-brown skin could not.
Native Americans in the South were especially affected through their
education, as schools in the native communities, like black schools,
were poorly funded; some Native American children attended "colored"
schools.
Immediate citizenship didn't change the views that White Americans had
about Native Americans, and voter suppression was a tactic that was used
against Native Americans in the South.
States used five basic arguments in justifying the denial of voting
rights to Native Americans: (1) failure to sever tribal ties makes
Native Americans ineligible; (2) "Native Americans not taxed"; (3)
Native Americans that are under guardianship; (4) reservation Indians
are not residents; and (5) tribal sovereignty precludes participation in
state and local governments.
Jim Crow laws were carried over into the West; some states did not
allow Native Americans to vote, or made it difficult for them to reach
the ballot boxes.
A disproportionate lack of access to voter registration was often made
with Native Americans having to travel excessive miles from a
reservation.
Historical development
Early attempts to break Jim Crow
Sign for the "colored" waiting room at a bus station in Durham, North Carolina, May 1940
The Civil Rights Act of 1875, introduced by Charles Sumner and Benjamin F. Butler,
stipulated a guarantee that everyone, regardless of race, color, or
previous condition of servitude, was entitled to the same treatment in
public accommodations, such as inns, public transportation, theaters,
and other places of recreation. This Act had little effect.
An 1883 Supreme Court decision ruled that the act was unconstitutional
in some respects, saying Congress was not afforded control over private
persons or corporations. With white southern Democrats forming a solid
voting bloc in Congress, due to having outsize power from keeping seats
apportioned for the total population in the South (although hundreds of
thousands had been disenfranchised), Congress did not pass another civil
rights law until 1957.
In 1887, Rev. W. H. Heard lodged a complaint with the Interstate Commerce Commission against the Georgia Railroad
company for discrimination, citing its provision of different cars for
white and black/colored passengers. The company successfully appealed
for relief on the grounds it offered "separate but equal" accommodation.
In 1890, Louisiana passed a law requiring separate accommodations
for colored and white passengers on railroads. Louisiana law
distinguished between "white", "black" and "colored" (that is, people of
mixed European and African ancestry). The law had already specified
that blacks could not ride with white people, but colored people could
ride with whites before 1890. A group of concerned black, colored and
white citizens in New Orleans formed an association dedicated to rescinding the law. The group persuaded Homer Plessy to test it; he was a man of color who was of fair complexion and one-eighth "Negro" in ancestry.
In 1892, Plessy bought a first-class ticket from New Orleans on
the East Louisiana Railway. Once he had boarded the train, he informed
the train conductor of his racial lineage and took a seat in the
whites-only car. He was directed to leave that car and sit instead in
the "coloreds only" car. Plessy refused and was immediately arrested.
The Citizens Committee of New Orleans fought the case all the way to the
United States Supreme Court. They lost in Plessy v. Ferguson
(1896), in which the Court ruled that "separate but equal" facilities
were constitutional. The finding contributed to 58 more years of
legalized discrimination against black and colored people in the United
States.
In 1908 Congress defeated an attempt to introduce segregated streetcars into the capital.
Racism in the United States and defenses of Jim Crow
1904 caricature of "White" and "Jim Crow" rail cars by John T. McCutcheon.
Despite Jim Crow's legal pretense that the races be "separate but
equal" under the law, non-whites were given inferior facilities and
treatment.
White Southerners encountered problems in learning free labor
management after the end of slavery, and they resented black Americans,
who represented the Confederacy's Civil War defeat: "With white supremacy
being challenged throughout the South, many whites sought to protect
their former status by threatening African Americans who exercised their
new rights."
White Democrats used their power to segregate public spaces and
facilities in law and reestablish social dominance over blacks in the
South.
One rationale for the systematic exclusion of black Americans
from southern public society was that it was for their own protection.
An early 20th-century scholar suggested that allowing blacks to attend
white schools would mean "constantly subjecting them to adverse feeling
and opinion", which might lead to "a morbid race consciousness". This perspective took anti-black sentiment for granted, because bigotry was widespread in the South after slavery became a racial caste system.
World War II and post-war era
In 1944, Associate Justice Frank Murphy introduced the word "racism" into the lexicon of U.S. Supreme Court opinions in Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944). He stated that by upholding the forced relocation of Japanese Americans
during World War II, the Court was sinking into "the ugly abyss of
racism". This was the first time that "racism" was used in Supreme Court
opinion (Murphy used it twice in a concurring opinion in Steele v Louisville & Nashville Railway Co 323 192 (1944) issued that day).
Murphy used the word in five separate opinions, but after he left the
court, "racism" was not used again in an opinion for two decades. It
next appeared in the landmark decision of Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967).
Numerous boycotts and demonstrations against segregation had occurred throughout the 1930s and 1940s. The NAACP
had been engaged in a series of litigation cases since the early 20th
century in efforts to combat laws that disenfranchised black voters
across the South. Some of the early demonstrations achieved positive
results, strengthening political activism, especially in the post-World
War II years. Black veterans were impatient with social oppression after
having fought for the United States and freedom across the world. In
1947 K. Leroy Irvis of Pittsburgh's
Urban League, for instance, led a demonstration against employment
discrimination by the city's department stores. It was the beginning of
his own influential political career.
After World War II, people of color increasingly challenged
segregation, as they believed they had more than earned the right to be
treated as full citizens because of their military service and
sacrifices. The Civil Rights Movement was energized by a number of flashpoints, including the 1946 police beating and blinding of World War II veteran Isaac Woodard while he was in U.S. Army uniform. In 1948 President Harry S. Truman issued Executive Order 9981, desegregating the armed services.
As the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum and used federal
courts to attack Jim Crow statutes, the white-dominated governments of
many of the southern states countered by passing alternative forms of
restrictions.
Decline and removal
Historian William Chafe
has explored the defensive techniques developed inside the
African-American community to avoid the worst features of Jim Crow as
expressed in the legal system, unbalanced economic power, and
intimidation and psychological pressure. Chafe says "protective
socialization by blacks themselves" was created inside the community in
order to accommodate white-imposed sanctions while subtly encouraging
challenges to those sanctions. Known as "walking the tightrope," such
efforts at bringing about change were only slightly effective before the
1920s.
However, this did build the foundation for later generations to
advance racial equality and de-segregation. Chafe argued that the places
essential for change to begin were institutions, particularly black
churches, which functioned as centres for community-building and
discussion of politics. Additionally, some all-black communities, such
as Mound Bayou, Mississippi and Ruthville, Virginia served as sources of
pride and inspiration for black society as a whole. Over time, pushback
and open defiance of the oppressive existing laws grew, until it
reached a boiling point in the aggressive, large-scale activism of the
1950s civil rights movement.
Brown v. Board of Education
In landmark case Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren ruled unanimously that public school segregation was unconstitutional.
The NAACP Legal Defense Committee (a group that became independent of the NAACP) – and its lawyer, Thurgood Marshall – brought the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) before the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren. In its pivotal 1954 decision, the Warren Court unanimously (9-0) overturned the 1896 Plessy decision. The Supreme Court found that legally mandated (de jure) public school segregation was unconstitutional. The decision had far-reaching social ramifications.
Integrating collegiate sports
Racial integration of all-white collegiate sports teams was high on
the Southern agenda in the 1950s and 1960s. Involved were issues of
equality, racism, and the alumni demand for the top players needed to
win high-profile games. The Atlantic Coast Conference
(ACC) of flagship state universities in the Southeast took the lead.
First they started to schedule integrated teams from the North. Finally
ACC schools--typically under pressure from boosters and civil rights
groups--integrated their teams.
With an alumni base that dominated local and state politics, society
and business, the ACC schools were successful in their endeavor--as
Pamela Grundy argues, they had learned how to win:
- The widespread admiration that athletic ability inspired would help transform athletic fields from grounds of symbolic play to forces for social change, places where a wide range of citizens could publicly and at times effectively challenge the assumptions that cast them as unworthy of full participation in U.S. society. While athletic successes would not rid society of prejudice or stereotype—black athletes would continue to confront racial slurs...[minority star players demonstrated] the discipline, intelligence, and poise to contend for position or influence in every arena of national life.
Public arena
In 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a city bus to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama. This was not the first time this happened — for example Parks was inspired by 15 year old Claudette Colvin doing the same thing nine months earlier — but the Parks act of civil disobedience was chosen, symbolically, as an important catalyst in the growth of the Civil Rights Movement; activists built the Montgomery Bus Boycott
around it, which lasted more than a year and resulted in desegregation
of the privately run buses in the city. Civil rights protests and
actions, together with legal challenges, resulted in a series of
legislative and court decisions which contributed to undermining the Jim
Crow system.
End of legal segregation
President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964
The decisive action ending segregation came when Congress in bipartisan fashion overcame Southern filibusters to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
A complex interaction of factors came together unexpectedly in the
period 1954–1965 to make the momentous changes possible. The Supreme
Court had taken the first initiative in Brown v. Board of Education
(1954) making segregation of public schools unconstitutional.
Enforcement was rapid in the North and border states, but was
deliberately stopped in the South by the movement called Massive Resistance,
sponsored by rural segregationists who largely controlled the state
legislatures. Southern liberals, who counseled moderation, where shouted
down by both sides and have limited impact. Much more significant was
the Civil Rights Movement, especially the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) headed by Martin Luther King, Jr..
It largely displaced the old, much more moderate NAACP in taking
leadership roles. King organize massive demonstrations, that seized
massive media attention in an era when network television news was an
innovative and universally watched phenomenon.
SCLC, student activists and smaller local organizations staged
demonstrations across the South. National attention focused on
Birmingham, Alabama, where protesters deliberately provoked Bull Connor
and his police forces by using young teenagers as demonstrators – and
Connor arrested 900 on one day alone. The next day Connor unleashed
billy clubs, police dogs, and high-pressure water hoses to disperse and
punish the young demonstrators with a brutality that horrified the
nation. It was very bad for business, and for the image of a modernizing
progressive urban South. President John F. Kennedy, who had been
calling for moderation, threatened to use federal troops to restore
order in Birmingham. The result in Birmingham was compromise by which
the new mayor opened the library, golf courses, and other city
facilities to both races, against the backdrop of church bombings and
assassinations.
In summer 1963, there were 800 demonstrations in 200 southern cities
and towns, with over 100,000 participants, and 15,000 arrests. In
Alabama in June 1963 Governor George Wallace escalated the crisis by defying court orders to admit the first two black students to the University of Alabama. Kennedy responded by sending Congress a comprehensive civil rights
bill, and ordered Attorney General Robert Kennedy to file federal
lawsuits against segregated schools, and to deny funds for
discriminatory programs. Doctor King launched a massive march on
Washington in August, 1963, bringing out 200,000 demonstrators in front
of the Lincoln Memorial, the largest political assembly in the nation's
history. The Kennedy administration now gave full-fledged support to
the civil rights movement, but powerful southern congressman blocked any
legislation.
After Kennedy was assassinated President Lyndon Johnson called for
immediate passage of Kennedy civil rights legislation as a memorial to
the martyred president. Johnson formed a coalition with Northern
Republicans that led to passage in the House, and with the help of
Republican Senate leader Everett Dirksen
with passage in the Senate early in 1964. For the first time in
history, the southern filibuster was broken and The Senate finally
passed its version on June 19 by vote of 73 to 27.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the most powerful affirmation of equal
rights ever made by Congress. It guaranteed access to public
accommodations such as restaurants and places of amusement, authorized
the Justice Department to bring suits does desegregate facilities in
schools, gave new powers to the Civil Rights Commission;
and allowed federal funds to be cut off in cases of discrimination.
Furthermore, racial, religious and gender discrimination was outlawed
for businesses with 25 or more employees, as well as apartment houses.
The South resisted until the very last moment, but as soon as the new
law was signed by President Johnson on July 2, 1964, it was widely
accepted across the nation. There was only a scattering of diehard
opposition, typified by restaurant owner Lester Maddox in Georgia.
In January 1964, President Lyndon Johnson met with civil rights leaders. On January 8, during his first State of the Union address,
Johnson asked Congress to "let this session of Congress be known as the
session which did more for civil rights than the last hundred sessions
combined." On June 21, civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney disappeared in Neshoba County, Mississippi, where they were volunteering in the registration of African-American voters as part of the Mississippi Summer Project.
The disappearance of the three activists captured national attention
and the ensuing outrage was used by Johnson and civil rights activists
to build a coalition of northern and western Democrats and Republicans
and push Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
On July 2, 1964, Johnson signed the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964. It invoked the Commerce Clause
to outlaw discrimination in public accommodations (privately owned
restaurants, hotels, and stores, and in private schools and workplaces).
This use of the Commerce Clause was upheld by Warren Court in landmark case Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States 379 US 241 (1964).
By 1965, efforts to break the grip of state disenfranchisement by
education for voter registration in southern counties had been under
way for some time, but had achieved only modest success overall. In some
areas of the Deep South, white resistance made these efforts almost
entirely ineffectual. The murder of the three voting-rights activists in
Mississippi in 1964 and the state's refusal to prosecute the murderers,
along with numerous other acts of violence and terrorism against
blacks, had gained national attention. Finally, the unprovoked attack on March 7, 1965, by county and state troopers on peaceful Alabama marchers crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge en route from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery,
persuaded the President and Congress to overcome Southern legislators'
resistance to effective voting rights enforcement legislation. President
Johnson issued a call for a strong voting rights law and hearings soon
began on the bill that would become the Voting Rights Act.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965
ended legally sanctioned state barriers to voting for all federal,
state and local elections. It also provided for federal oversight and
monitoring of counties with historically low minority voter turnout.
Years of enforcement have been needed to overcome resistance, and
additional legal challenges have been made in the courts to ensure the
ability of voters to elect candidates of their choice. For instance,
many cities and counties introduced at-large
election of council members, which resulted in many cases of diluting
minority votes and preventing election of minority-supported candidates.
Influence and aftermath
Interracial marriage
Although sometimes counted among "Jim Crow laws" of the South, such statutes as anti-miscegenation laws were also passed by other states. Anti-miscegenation laws were not repealed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but were declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court (the Warren Court) in a unanimous ruling Loving v. Virginia (1967). Chief Justice Earl Warren
wrote in the court opinion that "the freedom to marry, or not marry, a
person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be
infringed by the State."
Jury trials
The Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution
required individuals on criminal convictions to be tried by a jury of
their peers. While federal law required that convictions could only
granted from an unanimous jury vote for federal crimes, states were free
to decide on this process for themselves. All but two states, Oregon
and Louisiana, had opted for the same unanimous jury conviction
requirements. Both Oregon and Louisiana allowed jury votes of at least
10-2 to decide a criminal conviction. Louisiana's law was eventually
changed to require unanimous jury votes for criminal convictions for
crimes after 2019, but before that point, the law was seen as a remnant
of Jim Crow laws, since it allowed minority voices on a jury to be
marginalized. In 2020, the Supreme Court found in Ramos v. Louisiana
that unanimous jury votes are required for criminal convictions at
state levels, nullifying Oregon's remaining law and overturning previous
cases in Louisiana.
African-American life
An African-American man drinking at a "colored" drinking fountain in a streetcar terminal in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, 1939
The Jim Crow laws and the high rate of lynchings in the South were major factors which led to the Great Migration
during the first half of the 20th century. Because opportunities were
so limited in the South, African Americans moved in great numbers to
cities in Northeastern, Midwestern, and Western states to seek better
lives.
Despite the hardship and prejudice of the Jim Crow era, several
black entertainers and literary figures gained broad popularity with
white audiences in the early 20th century. They included luminaries such
as tap dancers Bill "Bojangles" Robinson and the Nicholas Brothers, jazz musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Count Basie, and the actress Hattie McDaniel. In 1939 McDaniel was the first black person to receive an Academy Award when she won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance as Mammy in Gone with the Wind.
African-American athletes faced much discrimination during the
Jim Crow period. White opposition led to their exclusion from most
organized sporting competitions. The boxers Jack Johnson and Joe Louis (both of whom became world heavyweight boxing champions) and track and field athlete Jesse Owens (who won four gold medals at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin) earned fame during this era. In baseball, a color line instituted in the 1880s had informally barred blacks from playing in the major leagues, leading to the development of the Negro Leagues, which featured many fine players. A major breakthrough occurred in 1947, when Jackie Robinson
was hired as the first African American to play in Major League
Baseball; he permanently broke the color bar. Baseball teams continued
to integrate in the following years, leading to the full participation
of black baseball players in the Major Leagues in the 1960s.
Later court cases
In 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court (the Burger Court), in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, upheld desegregation busing of students to achieve integration.
Interpretation of the Constitution and its application to
minority rights continues to be controversial as Court membership
changes. Observers such as Ian F. Lopez believe that in the 2000s, the
Supreme Court has become more protective of the status quo.
Remembrance
Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan, houses the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, an extensive collection of everyday items that promoted racial segregation or presented racial stereotypes of African Americans, for the purpose of academic research and education about their cultural influence.
