Jim Crow laws, in U.S. history, statutes enacted by Southern states and municipalities, beginning in the 1880s, that legalized segregation between blacks and whites. The name is believed to be derived from a character in a popular minstrel song. The Supreme Court ruling in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson that separate facilities for whites and blacks were constitutional encouraged the passage of discriminatory laws that wiped out the gains made by blacks during Reconstruction. Railways and streetcars, public waiting rooms, restaurants, boardinghouses, theaters, and public parks were segregated; separate schools, hospitals, and other public institutions, generally of inferior quality, were designated for blacks. By World War I, even places of employment were segregated, and it was not until after World War II that an assault on Jim Crow in the South began to make headway. In 1950 the Supreme Court ruled that the Univ. of Texas must admit a black, Herman Sweatt, to the law school, on the grounds that the state did not provide equal education for him. This was followed (1954) by the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kans., declaring separate facilities by race to be unconstitutional. Blacks in the South used legal suits, mass sit-ins, and boycotts to hasten desegregation. A march on Washington by over 200,000 in 1963 dramatized the movement to end Jim Crow. Southern whites often responded with violence, and federal troops were needed to preserve order and protect blacks, notably at Little Rock, Ark. (1957), Oxford, Miss. (1962), and Selma, Ala. (1965). The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 finally ended the legal sanctions to Jim Crow. See affirmative action; civil rights; integration.
See C. V. Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1966); G. Gilmore,
Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy
in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (1996); J. Dailey et al., ed.
Jumpin' Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil
Rights (2001); J. M. Packard, American Nightmare: The
History of Jim Crow (2002); D. A. Blackmon, Slavery by
Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War
to World War II (2008); L. F. Litwack, How Free Is
Free? The Long Death of Jim Crow (2009); J. S. Holloway,
Jim Crow Wisdom: Memory and Identity in Black America since
1940 (2013); S. A. Berrey, The Jim Crow Routine:
Everyday Performances of Race, Civil Rights, and Segregation in
Mississippi (2015); S. Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender,
Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (2016); R.
Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our
Government Segregated America (2017); H. L. Gates, Jr.,
Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of
Jim Crow (2019).
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