Jim Crow Laws

When I was a young girl, I’d hear on television people talking about “Jim Crow,” and I asked my mother over and over who Jim Crow was? I knew he couldn’t have been a good person, because every time I heard “Jim Crow,” it was related to, or in reference to, something unkind or unfair which was being done to Black people.

Turns out Jim Crow probably was a person, a white slaveowner who is said to have owned a slave which inspired the term. In 1830, a white minstrel show performer, Mr. Thomas “Daddy” Rice, blackened his face with charcoal paste or burnt coal and danced a jig while he would sing,
“Weel about and turn about and do jis so
Eb’ry time I weel about I jump Jim Crow”

It seems that Mr. Rice had seen a slave, a man who was crippled, dancing and singing those exact words! Mr. Rice thought it was entertaining, so he incorporated the little dance into his minstrel routine. From that beginning, the term “Jim Crow” became a racial slur, synonymous with negative images and perceptions of Black people, and laws which upheld discrimination against Black people became known as “Jim Crow laws.”

Jim Crow laws were upheld and respected by the American people and by its judicial system. The United States Supreme Court ruled that the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was unconstitutional. This law said that all people were entitled to full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages and facilities of places like hotels, inns, and places for pure entertainment and amusement, such as theaters, but the Court ruled that the law did not apply to Black people! Chief Justice Joseph Bradley said the law did not protect Black people from discrimination offered by private organizations, but only from discrimination by states. Then, he wrote that it was “time for black people to stop being the special favorite of the laws” and assume the rank of “mere citizens,” whatever that meant.

What were some of the Jim Crow laws? Here are a few:
• No person or corporation shall require any white female nurse to work in wards or rooms in hospitals, either private of public, in which Negro men are placed.
• All passenger stations in (Alabama) operated by any transportation company shall have separate waiting rooms or space and separate ticket windows for the white and colored races.
• It shall be unlawful to conduct a restaurant or other place for the serving of food in the city, in which white and colored people are served in the same room, unless such white and colored persons are separated by a solid partition extending from the floor upward to a distance of seven feet or higher and unless a separate entrance from the street is provided for each compartment.
• Every employer of white or Negro males shall provide for which white or Negro males reasonably accessible and separate toilet facilities.
• The marriage of a person of Caucasian blood with a Negro, Mongolian, Malay or Hindu shall be null and void.
• 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 prohibited.
• No colored barber shall serve as a barber to white women or girls.
• 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.
• Books shall not be interchangeable between white and colored schools, but shall continue to be used by the race first using them.
• Separate schools shall be maintained for the children of the white and colored races.
• 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 a fine note exceeding $500 or imprisonment not exceeding six (6) months, or both.

As you can see, there are a lot of Jim Crow laws which the governments made and enforced. They are fascinating to read, and important to know.

The Bible says that we are to tell our children our history, to “write it as frontlets between their eyes” so they will not forget! We have gotten through some pretty rough times and some amazingly ridiculous laws.