Jim Crow

 

After the American Civil War the former slaves of America was granted freedom thanks to an amendment to the American Constitution that prohibited slavery. The rural southern economy however, was heavily dependant on the cheap labor provided by former slaves and therefore a number of institutions were installed to ensure that the old order of things would remain as intact as possible. One of the most important of these institutions were the so-called Jim Crow laws, laws designed to maintain racial segregation and to exclude black individuals from the mainstream American Society.

 

The laws

 

The laws of Jim Crows were visible everywhere in the South. Every Public Facility had a white and a “colored” entrance. Schools were segregated and some of the Jim Crow laws even made it impossible for African-Americans to vote. The efforts to keep African-Americans from the polls were a combination between arbitrary literacy tests that made it impossible for African-Americans to vote, laws that implied that owning property (which most African-Americans did not) and violence.

According to a verdict by the Supreme Court of the United States enforced racial segregation was approvable as long as its facilities were separated but equal”. This was however a thing that no Southern state cared about. The facilities were obviously very unequal and the quality of the “white facilties” always higher and the racists political influence in the southern states as well as in the country was to big for any politician to react upon. It was to put it shortly a perfect example of a majority repressing a minority in a democracy.

 

The customs

 

There was also a large number of unwritten rules that was to be followed during the days of Jim Crow. A few of them, collected from http://www.ferris.edu/news/jimcrow/what.htm

are displayed here:

 

“A Black male could not offer his hand (to shake hands) with a White male because it implied being socially equal. Obviously, a Black male could not offer his hand or any other part of his body to a White woman, because he risked being accused of rape.

 

Blacks and Whites were not supposed to eat together. If they did eat together, Whites were to be served first, and some sort of partition was to be placed between them.

 

Under no circumstance was a Black male to offer to light the cigarette of a White female -- that gesture implied intimacy.

 

Blacks were not allowed to show public affection toward one another in public, especially kissing, because it offended Whites.

 

Jim Crow etiquette prescribed that Blacks were introduced to Whites, never Whites to Blacks. For example: "Mr. Peters (the White person), this is Charlie (the Black person), that I spoke to you about."

 

How it was upheld

 

The American South was under the years of Jim Crow a purely racist society where African-Americans were by birth second-class citizens with no or at least very small possibilities to succeed. A good analogy is to the Indian Caste system that also implies that people are born to a certain class just by virtue of her origin.

 

The system was maintained  and uphold by a white monopoly on violence. Lynching and violence on African-Americans who questioned white authority was common. Murders and lynching on black Americans were seldom tried in court and organizations as the well-known Ku Klux Klan with 4,5 million members in 1924 (Zinn page 353) lived outside the law. In fact “[f]ewer than 1% of lynch mob participants were ever convicted” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A black woman is lynched somewhere in the South

(http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/lynching/lynch_01.jpg)

 

According to http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAlynching.htm over 3000 African-Americans were lynched between the years 1889 and 1930.

 

Some groups that opposed the system (such as the NAACP, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) existed ever since the beginning of the 20th century and made important improvement, e.g. they had a succesfull campaign against lynchings (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAACP#1909_to_1949) but the segregation and the institutionalized racism was not yet threatened.

 

A beginning resistance

 

During the years after the second world war, however, the resistance against the system started to grow in the South. World War Two had learned African-Americans who served in the army that they were no second class citizens. They had fought for their country just as their fellow white Americans and therefore they ought to have the same rights.

 

The American military got integrated in 1948 by an executive order by President Truman (Ekendahl page. 120) which was a landmark since it was the first institution that changed its segregation policies.

 

Other occasions also boosted the movement. The horrifying pictures of the lynched boy Emmet Till were spread throughout the entire nation and showed the public the horrible implication that the Southern system might have. Other improvements were made by lawyers from the growing NAACP which in 1954 managed to get the US Supreme Court to overrule the “separated but equal” verdict from 1896 even if it only made the school system integrated. The verdict created a very tensed atmosphere in the South where many people still opposed everything that concerned integration (Ekendahl page 121).

 

In 1955 it was clear that the powers that fought for a new and non-racist order were growing and that the racists of the South would have to fight to maintain their way of life. This year, the most famous of all Civil Rights actions took place namely the Bus Boycott of Montgomery, Alabama which I try to describe on this page.

 

 

 

 

An overview

of

Jim Crow

A typical sign from a restaurant during the Jim Crow era (http://www.ferris.edu/news/jimcrow/rear.jpg)