The Application Of Jim Crow Laws: A Historical Analysis

The Jim Crow laws were a collection of state and local statutes that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The laws, which were in place from the post-Civil War era until 1965, were used to marginalise and discriminate against African Americans, denying them the right to vote, work, get an education, and access other opportunities. The term Jim Crow comes from a black minstrel show character, a derogatory term for a black person. The Jim Crow laws were applied in various ways, including through the segregation of public facilities, the disenfranchisement of African Americans, and the use of literacy tests and poll taxes to prevent them from voting.

Public transport

Jim Crow laws were a collection of state and local statutes that enforced racial segregation in the American South between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. In public transport, the Jim Crow laws were applied as follows:

Railroads

During the 1880s and 1890s, the first Jim Crow laws were passed in the South to impose segregation in public facilities, starting with railroad car seating. Railway lines were rapidly spreading from cities to rural communities during this period. The laws mandated "separate but equal" accommodations for white and Black passengers, with Black people confined to separate and inferior cars. Railroad dining cars also featured a curtain separating Black and white passengers.

The "separate but equal" doctrine was validated by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case, which ruled that a Louisiana statute requiring separate accommodations for white and Black railroad passengers did not conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause. This decision set a precedent for the expansion of Jim Crow laws throughout the South, impacting schools, hotels, restaurants, streetcars, buses, theatres, hospitals, parks, courthouses, and even cemeteries.

The specific wording of these laws reveals the deep anxieties about race that underpinned the Jim Crow system. For example, laws gave railroad and bus officials "police powers" to enforce segregated seating and determine the race of passengers. Exemptions were made for nurses, servants, and prisoners to avoid disrupting ways of life that did not threaten white supremacy.

• Separate but equal waiting rooms were mandated.
• Conductors were required to tell each passenger where to sit based on their race, and those who refused to comply could be ejected from the train.
• Fines were imposed on anyone convicted of violating the segregation provisions.
• Conductors were given the power to assign separate places for passengers and enforce segregation.
• Exemptions were made for nurses, servants, lunatics, railroad employees, and prisoners.
• In some states, it was illegal for Black and white people to ride in the same train car or compartment.
• In other states, conductors were required to apportion seating to maintain segregation, and passengers could be fined or ejected for non-compliance.
• In the case of sleeping cars, dining cars, and other concessions, carriers were permitted to exclude or serve whomever they wished.

Buses

Jim Crow laws also applied to bus transportation, with similar segregation requirements and penalties as railroads. Bus stations had separate waiting rooms, ticket windows, and sometimes separate entrances for Black and white passengers. On buses, Black passengers were required to sit at the back and give up their seats to white passengers on demand.

• Separate but equal waiting rooms, space, and ticket windows were mandated in bus stations.
• Bus operators were authorized to provide separate but equal accommodations.
• Passengers who refused to comply with segregation directives could be fined or jailed.
• Bus drivers were given the same duties and police powers as train officials to enforce segregation.
• Waiting rooms in bus terminals were required to be clean, habitable, and decent, with racially separated waiting rooms maintained in some cases.
• Bus carriers had to designate separate areas for Black and white passengers, with fines imposed for non-compliance.
• Drivers could change the amount of space allocated to each racial group and compel passengers to move as needed.
• Drivers were given police powers and were the final judges of race when passengers refused to disclose their race.

Automobiles

While not directly governed by Jim Crow laws, automobiles also played a significant role in the era of racial segregation. For Black Americans, cars provided a means of escaping the insults and indignities of Jim Crow. They offered a degree of freedom and mobility that public transportation did not allow. However, Black motorists faced challenges such as finding accommodations, as most roadside motels and restaurants refused to admit them. Guidebooks like the "Negro Motorist Green Book" became essential tools for navigating travel while avoiding discrimination.

Interracial travel by car was especially dangerous, and civil rights activists often had to employ strategies like having a single Black driver with white passengers in the backseat to avoid arousing suspicion. Cars also became battlegrounds in the fight for racial equality, with confrontations between Black motorists and police occurring across the country.

Education

In practice, this meant that black and white children had to attend different schools. The separate school systems were not equal. Schools for white children received more public money, had better facilities, and employed better-trained teachers. Schools for black children were often overcrowded, with too many students per teacher, and lacked basic amenities such as glass in the windows. They were also more likely to have all grades taught together in one room.

Even before the Jim Crow laws, public education in the South had been segregated since its establishment after the Civil War. But the Jim Crow era entrenched and expanded this segregation, with black children receiving an inferior education that limited their opportunities in later life.

In addition to physical segregation, the content of the education that black children received was also controlled. They were not allowed to use books that included the Declaration of Independence or the US Constitution, as these documents assert that government should derive their power from the consent of the governed. White school leaders did not want black children to be exposed to ideas like equality and freedom.

The Jim Crow laws also made it more difficult for black children to access education in the first place. Black children were often pulled out of school because they were needed to work on farms. And even when they were able to attend school, the percentage of eligible African-American voters registered in the South was only three per cent by 1940, due to various discriminatory tactics such as literacy tests.

The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s brought an end to legal segregation in education. In 1954, the US Supreme Court declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional in the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. And in 1964, the Civil Rights Act was passed, which legally ended segregation in all public facilities.

Employment

Jim Crow laws, which existed from the post-Civil War era until 1968, were a collection of state and local statutes that legalized racial segregation. The laws were meant to marginalize African Americans by denying them the right to hold jobs, get an education, or access other opportunities.

Jim Crow laws were applied in the workplace, with white and African-American workers segregated. Before 1900, white and African-American workers frequently worked side by side in trade and unskilled positions. However, as the South became more industrialized, factory owners began to extend Jim Crow into the workplace. Factory owners and management throughout the South segregated the workplace by providing "Jim Crow" housing for their African-American employees. As industries grew, employers began to designate certain occupations for white labor only and other, less desirable, positions exclusively for African-American labor.

Positions that required domestic or manual labor were "racialized" occupations. In places like Mississippi, local whites referred to these occupations as "nigger" work, or reserved for African Americans only. Typically, many of these positions were in the service industry, reinforcing notions of white hegemony, as these positions placed African Americans in roles subordinate to whites. Other positions involved manual labor and usually required hard or possibly dangerous work. Southern whites believed that African-American workers could be pushed harder than white labor and were more expendable when danger was involved.

Factory owners had a monetary stake in creating "Jim Crow" positions throughout the South. By making certain positions exclusive to African Americans, management then drove the wages for those positions down well below equivalent white wages. Additionally, since certain jobs were reserved for whites, management reinforced an impression of racial status for white labor, keeping them tied to "Jim Crow" and making interracial cooperation between blacks and whites unlikely.

Service workers on the railroads, who were African American almost without exception, were often relegated to substandard sections of the train during breaks, meals, and sleep periods. They were not allowed to mingle with whites during their free time. They could neither purchase nor eat their meals in the dining car; instead, they had to eat in the baggage car. Additionally, they had the responsibility of removing African-American passengers who tried to ride in the first-class cars reserved for whites. As a result of these unfair labor practices, they faced reprisals from the African-American community and were often called "Uncle Toms" because they were perceived as complicit in enforcing "Jim Crow" regulations.

Labor Unions

Black labor unions in the United States have followed a path similar to the history of "Jim Crow". After the Civil War, some local labor unions accepted African-American members, yet many would not. As a result, African-American workers organized independent unions, such as the National Negro Labor Union in 1869, to combat labor issues that white unions refused to address. Other black and white workers participated in biracial unionism and organized in segregated divisions within specific local branches.

Although the national chapter of the AFL (American Federation of Labor) had allowed black workers to participate in national conferences by the end of World War I, and southern states like Florida encouraged black workers to engage in biracial unionism, the state chapter refused to allow black workers to participate in the state conference. White labor refused to allow black labor to participate with whites on an equal basis. Even though some African-American workers were not officially organized in unions, they still found ways to protest segregation. During World War I, black workers for the New Orleans streetcar company, for example, demanded higher wages, which the National War Labor Board recommended, yet the board also adhered to the "Jim Crow" scale of wages restricted to black labor in the South.

Civil Rights Act of 1964

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 made it illegal to discriminate based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. It ended unequal application of voter registration requirements and racial segregation in schools, at the workplace, and by facilities that served the general public.

Voting

Jim Crow laws were a series of segregation laws enacted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, primarily in the Southern United States. These laws were designed to restrict the rights of Black Americans, particularly in relation to voting.

Following the passage of the 15th Amendment in 1870, which barred states from depriving citizens of the right to vote based on race, Southern states began implementing various measures to suppress Black voter turnout. These included:

• Poll taxes
• Literacy tests
• All-white primaries
• Felony disenfranchisement laws
• Grandfather clauses
• Voter intimidation and violence
• Property tests
• Purges of voter rolls

Impact of Voter Suppression

These voter suppression tactics had a significant impact on Black voter turnout. By 1910, registered voters among African Americans had dropped to 15% in Virginia and under 2% in Alabama and Mississippi. In Louisiana, by 1900, only 5,320 Black voters remained on the rolls, despite comprising the majority of the state's population.

Legal Challenges

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in 1909, played a crucial role in challenging these discriminatory voting laws. One notable case was Smith v. Allwright (1944), in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Texas white primary system was unconstitutional, affirming the right of African Americans to vote in primary elections.

It was not until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that most discriminatory voting practices in Southern states, such as literacy tests, poll taxes, and grandfather clauses, were outlawed. This marked a significant victory for the civil rights movement and led to a substantial increase in Black voter turnout.

Housing

In the post-war era, suburban developments in the North and South were created with legal covenants that did not allow Black families to live there. Black people also found it difficult or impossible to obtain mortgages for homes in certain "red-lined" neighbourhoods. The Green Book, first published in 1936, was a guide to help Black Americans travel and find accommodation without fear of discrimination or violence.

In the 20th century, Jim Crow laws were increasingly challenged by civil rights activists, and in 1968, the Fair Housing Act ended discrimination in renting and selling homes. However, the legacy of Jim Crow in housing policy has persisted, with racial discrimination continuing in more subtle forms. For example, an investigation in 2019 revealed that real estate agents in Long Island were steering white clients towards predominantly white neighbourhoods and people of colour towards neighbourhoods with higher minority populations and lower incomes.

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