The Strange Career of Jim Crow

On May 17, 1954, the US Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision that ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. The separate-but-equal system established by Plessy v. Ferguson was unconstitutional and reinforced social, educational, and economic disadvantages in African American communities. The Supreme Court left implementation of its decision to local districts, and integration happened slowly and unevenly across the South. Segregationists challenged the ruling, but by January 1956, 19 court decisions involving school segregation cases sided with the Supreme Court decision. In that same period African Americans organized for integration. The NAACP filed petitions for desegregation with 170 school boards in 17 states in summer 1955. Southern resistance to the ruling also fueled the civil rights movement.

“Carpetbagger” is a derogatory term for Northerners who moved to the South during Reconstruction. The term implies someone moving for financial or political gain despite having no prior ties to that place.

On July 2, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned discrimination on the grounds of race, color, religion, gender, or national origin. It also ended segregation in public places. First proposed by President John F. Kennedy and enacted by President Johnson, it guaranteed all citizens equal protection under the 14th Amendment and voting rights under the 15th Amendment.

Frederick Douglass described racial segregation as “the color line” in an 1881 article. The phrase has since entered common usage to reference racial discrimination and segregation. For instance, Woodward quotes the Times from Richmond, Virginia, which wrote that “God Almighty drew the color line and it cannot be obliterated” (171).

The right to vote is called enfranchisement. During Reconstruction, African Americans were granted the right to vote in elections. Disenfranchisement refers to a series of laws, customs, and practices that prevented African Americans from voting. This involved both legal and illegal measures, and the methods varied from state to state. Political disenfranchisement was ended with the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The Harlem Renaissance was a social and artistic movement centered in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City. The movement began in the 1910s and lasted until the mid-1930s. The period is considered a defining moment in African American cultural production and involved prominent artists and intellectuals such as Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Marcus Garvey and W. E. B. Du Bois. Woodward writes, “Negro art for a time enjoyed an enormous vogue, and the Negro himself acquired a prestige as a cause célèbre among intellectuals and the philanthropically inclined, a prestige second only to that of the proletariat in the thirties” (215). The Harlem Renaissance was characterized by racial pride and progressive politics.

Jim Crow is the common name for a set of laws and conventions that mandated racial segregation in the Southern United States. Jim Crow laws were introduced in the 1870s and 1880s. The Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 solidified the doctrine of “separate but equal” in the South. Woodward writes:

[the] code lent the sanction of law to a racial ostracism that extended to churches and schools, to housing and jobs, to eating and drinking. Whether by law or by custom, that ostracism extended to virtually all forms of public transportation, to sports and recreations, to hospitals, orphanages, prisons, and asylums, and ultimately to funeral homes, morgues, and cemeteries (36).

Despite claims to equality, facilities for African Americans were underfunded, and the system reinforced social, educational, and economic disadvantages.

Following the surrender of the Confederacy in the American Civil War, legislative changes granted civil rights to African Americans in the South, ushering in an era widely known as Reconstruction, which lasted from 1863 to 1877.

Woodward clarifies that in The Strange Career of Jim Crow, segregation means the “physical separation of people for reasons of race” (17). Social distance does not fall under this definition. Woodward clarifies:

[segregation’s] opposite is not necessarily ‘integration’ as the word is currently used, nor ‘equality.’ Nor does the absence of segregation necessarily imply the absence of other types of injustice or the lack of a caste structure of society (17).

As a system, segregation was never absolute.