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Etymology
The origin of the phrase "Jim Crow" has often been attributed to "Jump Jim Crow", a song-and-dance caricature of African Americans, which first surfaced in 1832.[1] Its origins may, however, precede this production.[1] The term had become an adjective by 1838, and the phrase Jim Crow Law first appeared in the Dictionary of American English in 1904.[1]
Even before its appearance in the dictionary, at least as early as the 1890s, the phrase "Jim Crow Law" had achieved common usage.[1]
Origins of Jim Crow
During the Reconstruction period of 1865-1877 in the defeated South (the Confederacy), federal law protected the civil rights of "freedmen" — the liberated African slaves. Reconstruction ended in 1877, when the federal Army withdrew from the South, [2] followed, in each Southern state, by a white, Democratic Party Redeemer government that legislated Jim Crow laws segregating Black people from the state's population.
While the separation of African Americans from the general population was becoming legalized and formalized in the Progressive Era (1890s-1920s), it was also becoming customary. Even in cases in which Jim Crow laws did not expressly forbid black people to participate in, for instance, sports or recreation or church services, the laws shaped a segregative culture.[1] In 1913, for instance, the acting Secretary of the Treasury—an appointee of the first Southern-born president of the postwar period—was heard to express his consternation at 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?"[3]
In the Jim Crow context, the presidential election of 1912 was steeply slanted against the interests of Black Americans. Poll taxes and literacy requirements banned many Americans from voting, yet, said requirements had loopholes exempting White Americans from these paying the poll tax or knowing how to read. For example, in Oklahoma, anyone qualified to vote before 1866, or who is related to someone qualified to vote before 1866, was exempted from the literacy requirement; the only Americans who could vote before 1866 were, of course, White Americans, so White Americans were exempted from the literacy requirement, while all Black Americans were segregated by law. [4]
President Woodrow Wilson, a Southern Democrat, furthered the segregation of Washington, despite much protest. [5] Mr Wilson appointed Southern politicians who were segregationists, because of his sincere belief that racial segregation was in the best interest of Black Americans and White Americans alike.[5] At Gettysburg on 4 July 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!
— [6]
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. [6] One historian notes that, in this period, lynching had become "a social ritual", such 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."[6]
Early attempts to break Jim Crow
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 impact, and was later found by the Supreme Court to be largely unconstitutional, as Congress is not afforded control over private persons or corporations. Congress did not pass another civil rights law until 1957.
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 white and black ancestry). The law already specified that blacks could not ride with white people, but colored people could ride with whites prior to 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, who was only one-eighth "Negro" and of fair complexion, to test it.
In 1892, Plessy purchased 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 Supreme Court of the United States. 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.
Racism in the United States and defenses of Jim Crow
One explanation for the systematic exclusion of Black Americans from American society was that it was for their own protection. One early 20th century scholar suggests that allowing Blacks in White schools would mean "constantly subjecting them to adverse feeling and opinion", which might lead to "a morbid race consciousness".[7] This perspective takes anti-Black sentiment for granted, because bigotry was widespread in the South, where Black Americans seemed to embody and continually reaffirm the Confederacy's Civil War defeat: "With white supremacy challenged throughout the South, many whites sought to protect their former status by threatening African Americans who exercised their new rights."[8]
World War II era
After World War II, public attitudes turned against segregation. The Civil Rights movement was energized by a number of flashpoints in this period, including the brutalization of WWII veteran Isaac Woodard while he was still in uniform. As the Civil Rights movement gained momentum and used federal courts to attack Jim Crow, the white governments of many of the states of the Southeast countered with more numerous and strict segregation laws on the local level until the start of the 1960s.
The NAACP Legal Defense Committee (a group independent of the NAACP)—and its lawyer Thurgood Marshall—brought the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, before the Supreme Court. In the landmark 1954 decision, which had far-reaching social ramifications, the court unanimously overturned the 1896 Plessy decision. The Supreme Court found that legally mandated (de jure) public school segregation was unconstitutional. The practice was not brought to a final end until the 1970s.citation needed
The court ruling did not stop de facto, or residentially-based, school segregation, which continues today in many regions.
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)[9], in which he charged 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 the word "racism" found its way into the lexicon of words used in Supreme Court opinion (he used it twice in a concurring opinion in Steele v. Louisville & Nashville R. Co. 323|192 (1944) issued that same day).[10] He would use that word in five separate opinions, although the word "racism" disappeared with Murphy and from the court for almost two decades, not reappearing until the landmark decision of Loving v. Virginia, .
Indeed, the question of the alleged "color-blindness" of the constitution has become increasingly a source of controversy on the Supreme Court. Some observers believed the Court is moving from trying to prevent oppression of minorities, to protecting the status quo.[11]
End of Jim Crow
Courts
In the 20th century, the Supreme Court began to overturn Jim Crow laws on constitutional grounds. In Buchanan v. Warley 245 US 60 (1917), the court held that a Kentucky law could not require residential segregation. The Supreme Court in 1946, in Irene Morgan v. Virginia ruled segregation in interstate transportation to be unconstitutional, in an application of the commerce clause of the Constitution. It was not until 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka 347 US 483 that the court held that separate facilities were inherently unequal in the area of public schools, effectively overturning Plessy v. Ferguson, and outlawing Jim Crow in other areas of society as well. This landmark case consisted of complaints filed in the states of Delaware (Gebhart v. Belton); South Carolina (Briggs v. Elliott); Virginia (Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County); and Washington, D.C. (Spottswode Bolling v. C. Melvin Sharpe). These decisions, along with other cases such as McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Board of Regents 339 US 637 (1950), NAACP v. Alabama 357 US 449 (1958), and Boynton v. Virginia 364 US 454 (1960), slowly dismantled the state-sponsored segregation imposed by Jim Crow laws.
In addition to Jim Crow laws, in which the state compelled segregation of the races, businesses, political parties, unions and other private parties created their own Jim Crow arrangements, barring blacks from buying homes in certain neighborhoods, from shopping or working in certain stores, from working at certain trades, etc. The Supreme Court outlawed some forms of private discrimination in Shelley v. Kraemer 334 US 1 (1948), in which it held that "restrictive covenants" that barred sale of homes to blacks or Jews or Asians were unconstitutional, on the grounds that they represented state-sponsored discrimination, in that they were only effective if the courts enforced them.
The Supreme Court was unwilling, however, to attack other forms of private discrimination. It reasoned that private parties did not violate the Equal Protection clause of the Constitution when they discriminated, because they were not "state actors" covered by that clause.
In 1971, the Supreme Court, in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, upheld desegregation busing of students to achieve integration.
Public arena
Rosa Parks' 1955 act of civil disobedience, in which she refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man, was a central event of the Civil Rights movement. Her action, and the demonstrations that it spawned, led to a series of legislative and court decisions that contributed to undermining the Jim Crow system.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott led by Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., which followed Rosa Parks' action, was, however, not the first of its kind. Numerous boycotts and demonstrations against segregation had occurred throughout the 1930s and 1940s. These early demonstrations achieved positive results and helped spark political activism. K. Leroy Irvis of Pittsburgh's Urban League, for instance, led a demonstration against employment discrimination by Pittsburgh's department stores in 1947, launching his own influential political career.
In 1964, the U.S. Congress attacked the parallel system of private Jim Crow practices. It invoked the commerce clause to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination in public accommodations (privately owned restaurants, hotels, and stores, and in private schools and workplaces). This use of the commerce clause was upheld in Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States 379 US 241 (1964). [12]
End of de jure segregation
Building a coalition of northern Democrats and Republicans, President Lyndon B. Johnson pushed Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which immediately annulled Jim Crow laws that segregated restaurants, hotels and theaters. These facilities (with rare exceptions) immediately dropped racial segregation. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 ended legally sanctioned barriers to voting for all federal, state and local elections. It also provided for Federal oversight and monitoring of counties with historically low voter turnout, a sign of discriminatory barriers.
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. The three were volunteers aiding in the registration of African-American voters as part of the Mississippi Summer Project. Forty-four days later, the Federal Bureau of Investigation recovered their bodies, which had been buried in an earthen dam. The Neshoba County deputy sheriff, Cecil Price and 16 others, all Ku Klux Klan members, were indicted for the crimes; seven were convicted. On July 2, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.[13]
According to the United States Department of Justice, "By 1965 concerted efforts to break the grip of state disfranchisement had been under way for some time, but had achieved only modest success overall and in some areas had proved almost entirely ineffectual. The murder of voting-rights activists in Philadelphia, Mississippi, gained national attention, along with numerous other acts of violence and terrorism against the president. Finally, the unprovoked attack on March 7, 1965, by state troopers on peaceful marchers crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, en route to the state capitol in Montgomery, persuaded the President and Congress to overcome Southern legislators' resistance to effective voting rights legislation. President Johnson issued a call for a strong voting rights law and hearings began soon thereafter on the bill that would become the Voting Rights Act."[14]
Legacy
Legal
The Supreme Court of the United States held in the Civil Rights Cases 109 US 3 (1883) that the Fourteenth Amendment did not give the federal government the power to outlaw private discrimination, and then held in Plessy v. Ferguson 163 US 537 (1896) that Jim Crow laws were constitutional as long as they allowed for "separate but equal" facilities. In the years that followed, the court made this "separate but equal" requirement a hollow phrase by upholding discriminatory laws in the face of evidence of profound inequalities in practice.
Political
Jim Crow laws were a product of the solidly Democratic South. Conservative white Southern Democrats, exploiting racial fear and attacking the corruption (real or perceived) of Reconstruction Republican governments, took over state governments in the South in the 1870s and dominated them for nearly 100 years, chiefly as a result of disfranchisement of most blacks through statute and constitutions. In 1956, southern resistance to the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education resulted in a resolution called the Southern Manifesto. It was read into the Congressional Record and supported by 96 southern congressmen and senators, all but two of them southern Democrats.
African-American life
The Jim Crow laws were a major factor in the Great Migration during the early part of the 20th century, because opportunities were so limited in the South that African Americans moved in great numbers to northern cities to seek a better life.
While African-American entertainers, musicians, and literary figures had broken into the white world of American art and culture after 1890, African-American athletes found obstacles confronting them at every turn. By 1900, white opposition to African-American boxers, baseball players, track athletes, and basketball players kept them segregated and limited in what they could do. But their prowess and abilities in all-African-American teams and sporting events could not be denied. Changing social attitudes and leadership by pioneers such as Jackie Robinson, who entered formerly all-white professional baseball in 1947 (albeit via playing first in Montréal, Quebec, Canada), aided in lowering the barriers. African-American participation in all the major sports began to increase rapidly in the 1950s and 1960s.
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.[15]
State-by-state examples
The following examples of segregation are excerpts from examples of Jim Crow laws shown at the National Park Service website. The examples include anti-miscegenation laws. Although sometimes counted among the "Jim Crow laws" of the South, those laws also were passed by other states for many years. Anti-miscegenation laws were not repealed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 but were declared unconstitutional in the 1967 Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia.
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."
Arizona
- "The marriage of a person of Caucasian blood with a Negro, Mongolian, Malay, or Hindu shall be null and void."
Arkansas
- Various laws from 1884 to 1947 prohibited marriage or relations between whites and blacks or mulattoes, providing for specific fines and imprisonment of up to three years.[16]
- Various laws from 1891 to 1959 segregated rail travel, streetcars, buses, all public carriers, race tracks, gaming establishments, polling places, washrooms in mines, tuberculosis hospitals, public schools and teachers' colleges.
- A poll tax was first imposed in the 1890s.
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."
- "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."
- "The schools for white children and the schools for Negro children shall be conducted separately."
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."
- "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."
Kentucky
- "The children of white and colored races committed to the houses of reform shall be kept entirely separate from each other."
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."
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."
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 not exceeding five hundred (500.00) dollars or imprisonment not exceeding six (6) months or both."
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."
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. "
- "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."
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."
- "The baths and lockers for the negroes shall be separate from the white race, but may be in the same building."
- "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."
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."
- "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."
Texas
Twenty-seven Jim Crow laws were passed in the Lone Star state from 1866 to 1958. Some examples include:
- 1950: Separate facilities required for white and black citizens in state parks
- 1953: Public carriers to be segregated
- 1958: No child compelled to attend schools that are racially mixed. No desegregation unless approved by election. Governor may close schools where troops used on federal authority.
Virginia
- "Every person... operating... any public hall, theater, 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."
- "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."
West Virginia
- "White and colored persons shall not be taught in the same school."
This point-blank requirement for segregated schools was proclaimed in West Virginia's State Constitution as Article XII Section 8. In a remarkable show of the persistence of segregationist attitudes extending to the highest levels of state government, numerous attempts to remove this article from the constitution were defeated in the state legislature until it was finally repealed on Nov 8, 1994.
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."
See also
References
- ^ a b c d e Woodward, C. Vann and McFeely, William S. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. 2001, page 7
- ^ Woodward, C. Vann and McFeely, William S. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. 2001, page 6
- ^ King, Desmond. Separate and Unequal: Black Americans and the US Federal Government. 1995, page 3.
- ^ Tomlins, Christopher L. The United States Supreme Court: The Pursuit of Justice. 2005, page 195
- ^ a b Schulte Nordholt, J. W. and Rowen, Herbert H. Woodrow Wilson: A Life for World Peace. 1991, page 99-100.
- ^ a b c Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. page 9-11
- ^ Murphy, Edgar Gardner. The Problems of the Present South. 1910, page 37.
- ^ Gates, Henry Louis and Appiah, Anthony. Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience. 1999, page 1211.
- ^ Full text of Korematsu v. United States opinion courtesy of Findlaw.com.
- ^ Steele v. Louisville, full text of the opinion courtesy of Findlaw.com.
- ^ *Lopez, Ian F. Haney, "A nation of minorities": race, ethnicity, and reactionary colorblindness, Stanford Law Review, February 1, 2007.
- ^ See generally, Lopez, Ian F. Haney, "A nation of minorities": race, ethnicity, and reactionary colorblindness, Stanford Law Review, 01-FEB-07.
- ^ LBJ for Kids CIVIL RIGHTS DURING THE JOHNSON ADMINISTRATION.
- ^ United States Department of Justice Introduction To Federal Voting Rights Laws
- ^ Jim Crow Museum, Ferris State University, Detroit Free Press
- ^ The History of Jim Crow—Inside the South
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- Ayers, Edward L. The Promise of the New South Oxford University Press, 1992, a general history of the South in the late 19th century
- Barnes, Catherine A. Journey from Jim Crow: The Desegregation of Southern Transit Columbia University Press, 1983.
- Bartley, Numan V. The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South during the 1950s Louisiana State University Press, 1969.
- Bond, Horace Mann. “The Extent and Character of Separate Schools in the United States.” Journal of Negro Education 4(July 1935):321–27. online via JSTOR
- Gabriel Chin & Hrishi Karthikeyan, Preserving Racial Identity: Population Patterns and the Application of Anti-Miscegenation Statutes to Asians, 1910 to 1950, 9 Asian L.J. 1 (2002)
- Campbell, Nedra. "More Justice, More Peace: The Black Person's Guide to the American Legal System" Lawrence Hill Books; Chicago Review Press], 2003, which includes in its chapter "Free at Last" a chronology of laws during the Jim Crow era. ISBN 1-55652-468-4
- Jane Dailey, Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, and Bryant Simon, eds. Jumpin' Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights (2000), essays by scholars on impact of Jum Crow on black communities
- Fairclough, Adam. “‘Being in the Field of Education and Also Being a Negro…Seems…Tragic’: Black Teachers in the Jim Crow South.” Journal of American History 87 (June 2000): 65–91. online via JSTOR
- Feldman, Glenn. Politics, Society, and the Klan in Alabama, 1915–1949. University of Alabama Press, 1999.
- Harvey Fireside, Separate and Unequal: Homer Plessy and the Supreme Court Decision That Legalized Racism, 2004. ISBN 0-7867-1293-7
- Eric Foner Reconstruction, America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (Harpercollins, 1988), ISBN 0-06-015851-4, standard history of Reconstruction from neoabolitionist school
- Gaines, Kevin. Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
- Gaston, Paul M. The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking Alfred A. Knopf, 1970.
- Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore; Gender and Jim Crow Women and the Politics ... in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (1996)
- Griffin, John Howard Black Like Me by (Signet, 1996) ISBN 0-451-19203-6. Author leaves privileged life as Southern white man and darkens his skin to experience segregation in the Deep South in 1959.
- Haws, Robert, ed. The Age of Segregation: Race Relations in the South, 1890– 1945 University Press of Mississippi, 1978.
- Sheldon Hackney, Populism to Progressivism in Alabama (1969)
- Johnson, Charles S. Patterns of Negro Segregation Harper and Brothers, 1943.
- Michael J. Klarman; From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality Oxford University Press, 2004
- Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (Alfred A. Knopf: 1998) "This is the most complete and moving account we have had of what the victims of the Jim Crow South suffered and somehow endured" — C. Vann Woodward
- Lopez, Ian F. Haney, "A nation of minorities": race, ethnicity, and reactionary colorblindness, Stanford Law Review, February 1, 2007.
- Kantrowitz, Stephen. Ben Tillman & the Reconstruction of (2000)
- McMillen, Neil R. Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow. University of Illinois Press, 1989.
- Medley, Keith Weldon. We As Freemen: Plessy v. Ferguson by Pelican Publishing Company, March, 2003. ISBN 1-58980-120-2. Popular story of Homer Plessy, who lost his case before the Supreme Court; the case legalized segregation in the U.S. for the next 58 years.
- Murray, Pauli. States' Law on Race and Color University of Georgia Press, 2d ed. 1997 (Davison Douglas ed.). ISBN 978-0820318837
- Myrdal, Gunnar. An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy Harper and Row, 1944. the most detailed analysis of the Jim Crow system in operation.
- Percy, William Alexander. Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter's Son. 1941. Reprint, Louisiana State University Press, 1993. by conservative white planter
- Rabinowitz, Howard N. Race Relations in the Urban South, 1856–1890 (1978)
- Smith, J. Douglas. Managing: Race, Politics, and Citizenship in Jim Crow Virginia University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
- Smith, J. Douglas. “The Campaign for Racial Purity and the Erosion of Paternalism in Virginia, 1922–1930: “Nominally White, Biologically Mixed, and Legally Negro.’” Journal of Southern History 68 (February 2002): 65–106.
- Smith, J. Douglas. “Patrolling the Boundaries of Race: Motion Picture Censorship and Jim Crow in Virginia, 1922–1932.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 21 (August 2001): 273–91.
- Sterner, Richard. The Negro's Share (1943) detailed statistics
- Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955) the classic history by Pulitzer prize winner.
- Woodward, C. Vann. The Origins of the New South: 1877-1913 (1951).
External links
- Racial Etiquette: The Racial Customs and Rules of Racial Behavior in Jim Crow America - A detailed article outlining the basics of Jim Crow etiquette.
- Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia
- An article on "New Racist Forms: Jim Crow in the 21st Century"
- "You Don't Have to Ride Jim Crow!" PBS documentary on first Freedom Ride, in 1947
- The History of Jim Crow
- A 1923 article in the SF Chronicle lauding California's Jim Crow handgun law, which is still in force today
- List of laws enacted in various states
- Ferris University page about Jim Crow
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