Jim Crow is the term denoting the racial caste system that predominated primarily, but not exclusively, in the Southern and border states of the United States from 1877 until the mid-1960s. More than a collection of stringent anti-Black laws, Jim Crow was an all-encompassing way of life. This system relegated African Americans to a status of second-class citizenship and fundamentally legitimized anti-Black racism across American society.
The foundations of Jim Crow were deeply embedded in societal beliefs and reinforced by influential institutions. Religious leaders propagated the idea of white people as divinely chosen and Black people as inherently subservient, even citing religious texts to justify racial segregation. Pseudo-scientific fields like craniology, eugenics, and phrenology, alongside Social Darwinism, were used to promote the false notion of Black intellectual and cultural inferiority. Politicians fueled segregationist sentiments with rhetoric about the dangers of racial integration and the supposed threat of “mongrelization” of the white race. The media, including newspapers and magazines, routinely employed derogatory terms for Black people and perpetuated harmful stereotypes in their reporting. This prejudiced portrayal even permeated children’s games, subtly shaping societal views from a young age. Every major institution within society mirrored and upheld the systemic oppression of Black people.
Alt text: Historical sign reading “Colored Served in Rear,” illustrating Jim Crow era segregation and discriminatory service practices.
The Jim Crow system was built upon a bedrock of discriminatory beliefs and justifications. Central to this ideology was the assertion of white superiority over Black people in every facet of life, encompassing intelligence, morality, and social conduct. Fear of racial mixing and its supposed consequence – the creation of a “mongrel race” that would corrupt America – was a driving force. Any semblance of treating Black people as equals was perceived as an encouragement of interracial relationships, which were vehemently opposed. The very notion of social equality was seen as a slippery slope towards interracial intimacy. Ultimately, violence was considered a necessary tool to maintain the racial hierarchy and keep Black people subjugated at the bottom.
These discriminatory beliefs manifested in a pervasive set of Jim Crow etiquette norms that governed daily interactions and reinforced racial hierarchy in subtle yet powerful ways:
- Handshakes: A Black man was prohibited from offering to shake hands with a white man, as this gesture implied social equality. Any physical contact with a white woman was even more fraught with danger for a Black man, carrying the risk of false accusations, particularly of rape.
- Dining: Black and white individuals were not expected to eat together. In the rare instances where they did, white people were always served first, and physical barriers or partitions were often used to separate them.
- Offering Cigarettes: Under no circumstances could a Black man offer to light a white woman’s cigarette, as this act was interpreted as a gesture of intimacy and social transgression.
- Public Affection: Black people were discouraged from showing affection towards each other in public, especially kissing, as such displays were deemed offensive to white sensibilities.
- Introductions: Jim Crow etiquette dictated that Black people were always introduced to white people, never the reverse. Introductions would often emphasize the racial hierarchy, for example, “Mr. Peters (white person), this is Charlie (Black person), that I spoke to you about.”
- Courtesy Titles: White people routinely omitted courtesy titles like Mr., Mrs., Miss., Sir, or Ma’am when addressing Black people, referring to them by their first names only. Conversely, Black people were required to use courtesy titles when addressing white people and were forbidden from using their first names.
- Transportation: When a Black person rode in a car driven by a white person, they were relegated to the back seat, or the back of a truck, further emphasizing their subordinate status.
- Right-of-Way: White motorists were granted automatic right-of-way at all intersections, symbolizing their dominance even in everyday situations.
Stetson Kennedy, author of Jim Crow Guide (1990), distilled the unwritten rules of Jim Crow etiquette in conversations between Black and white individuals into seven simple, yet impactful directives for Black people:
- Never contradict or imply that a white person is lying.
- Never question or suggest dishonorable motives in a white person.
- Never imply that a white person is socially inferior.
- Never claim or excessively demonstrate superior knowledge or intelligence compared to a white person.
- Never curse at a white person.
- Never laugh derisively at a white person.
- Never comment on the physical appearance of a white woman.
These Jim Crow etiquette norms operated in tandem with formal Jim Crow laws, also known as black codes. While Jim Crow etiquette governed social interactions, Jim Crow laws provided the legal framework for racial segregation and discrimination. Often, when people think of Jim Crow, they primarily recall these laws, which systematically excluded Black people from public transportation, public facilities, jury duty, employment opportunities, and desirable neighborhoods.
The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, passed after the Civil War, were intended to grant Black people the same legal protections and rights as white citizens. However, starting in 1877, following the election of President Rutherford B. Hayes and the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, Southern and border states began enacting laws to systematically curtail the freedoms and rights of Black Americans.
Tragically, the Supreme Court played a significant role in undermining the Constitutional protections afforded to Black people. The infamous Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision of 1896 provided legal justification for Jim Crow laws and the entire Jim Crow system of life.
The Plessy v. Ferguson case originated with Louisiana’s “Separate Car Law” of 1890. This law, deceptively framed as promoting passenger comfort, mandated “equal but separate” railway cars for white and Black passengers. In reality, it was a pretext for segregation, as facilities designated for Black people, including railway travel, were consistently inferior and unequal. The Louisiana law explicitly prohibited Black people from sitting in railway car seats reserved for white people, and vice versa.
In 1891, a group of Black citizens decided to challenge this Jim Crow law. Homer A. Plessy, who was of mixed racial heritage – seven-eighths white and one-eighth Black (and legally considered Black under Louisiana law) – intentionally sat in a “white-only” railroad coach. He was arrested for violating the law. Plessy’s legal team argued that the state of Louisiana had no right to classify citizens by race to restrict their rights and privileges.
However, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court sided with the state of Louisiana. The Court declared that as long as state governments provided legal processes and freedoms to Black people that were ostensibly equal to those provided to white people, they could legally maintain separate institutions and facilities to administer these rights. By a 7-2 majority, the Supreme Court upheld the Louisiana law, asserting that racial separation did not inherently imply inequality.
In practical terms, the Plessy v. Ferguson decision served to legitimize the creation of two distinct societies within the United States: one white, privileged, and advantaged; and the other, Black, disadvantaged, and subjected to systemic discrimination and contempt.
Beyond segregated facilities, Black Americans were systematically disenfranchised and denied fundamental political rights. Poll taxes, designed to financially burden poor Black citizens, were implemented to restrict voting. “White primaries,” which limited voting in primary elections to Democrats only (and effectively excluded Black people in the South, where the Democratic Party dominated), further eroded Black political participation. Literacy tests, often unfairly administered and designed to be impossible to pass (such as requiring applicants to “Name all the Vice Presidents and Supreme Court Justices throughout America’s history”), were another tool used to prevent Black people from exercising their right to vote. The Plessy v. Ferguson ruling sent a clear message to Southern and border states: discrimination against Black people was legally sanctioned and acceptable under the U.S. Constitution.
Alt text: “White” and “Colored” labeled drinking fountains showcase the stark reality of segregated public facilities during the Jim Crow era.
Jim Crow states enacted a wide array of statutes that rigorously regulated social interactions between races, extending segregation into virtually every aspect of life. Jim Crow signs became ubiquitous, prominently displayed above water fountains, building entrances and exits, and throughout public facilities, clearly demarcating spaces based on race. Separate facilities became the norm: hospitals for white and Black patients, prisons segregated by race, separate public and private schools, churches divided along racial lines, segregated cemeteries, public restrooms designated for “white” and “colored” individuals, and separate public accommodations of all kinds.
In the vast majority of cases, facilities for Black people were demonstrably inferior – often older, poorly maintained, and under-resourced compared to their white counterparts. In some instances, Black facilities were simply nonexistent – no “Colored” public restrooms, no public beaches for Black people, no designated spaces for Black people to sit or eat in public areas. Plessy v. Ferguson provided Jim Crow states with the legal cover to disregard their constitutional obligations to their Black citizens and perpetuate systemic inequality.
Jim Crow laws permeated every facet of daily life, extending far beyond public facilities. In 1935, Oklahoma explicitly prohibited Black and white individuals from boating together, as boating was deemed to imply social equality. In 1905, Georgia established racially segregated parks. In 1930, Birmingham, Alabama, made it illegal for Black people and white people to engage in games of checkers or dominoes together.
The Martin Luther King, Jr., National Historic Site Interpretive Staff compiled a list of typical Jim Crow laws, illustrating the breadth and absurdity of this system of segregation:
- Barbers: “No colored barber shall serve as a barber (to) white girls or women” (Georgia).
- Blind Wards: “The board of trustees shall…maintain a separate building…on separate ground for the admission, care, instruction, and support of all blind persons of the colored or black race” (Louisiana).
- Burial: “The officer in charge shall not bury, or allow to be buried, any colored persons upon ground set apart or used for the burial of white persons” (Georgia).
- Buses: “All passenger stations in this state operated by any motor transportation company shall have separate waiting rooms or space and separate ticket windows for the white and colored races” (Alabama).
- Child Custody: “It shall be unlawful for any parent, relative, or other white person in this State, having the control or custody of any white child…to dispose of, give or surrender such white child permanently into the custody, control, maintenance, or support, of a negro” (South Carolina).
- Education: “The schools for white children and the schools for negro children shall be conducted separately” (Florida).
- Libraries: “The state librarian is directed to fit up and maintain a separate place for the use of the colored people who may come to the library for the purpose of reading books or periodicals” (North Carolina).
- Mental Hospitals: “The Board of Control shall see that proper and distinct apartments are arranged for said patients, so that in no case shall Negroes and white persons be together” (Georgia).
- Militia: “The white and colored militia shall be separately enrolled, and shall never be compelled to serve in the same organization. No organization of colored troops shall be permitted where white troops are available and where whites are permitted to be organized, colored troops shall be under the command of white officers” (North Carolina).
- Nurses: “No person or corporation shall require any White female nurse to nurse in wards or rooms in hospitals, either public or private, in which negro men are placed” (Alabama).
- Prisons: “The warden shall see that the white convicts shall have separate apartments for both eating and sleeping from the negro convicts” (Mississippi).
- Reform Schools: “The children of white and colored races committed to the houses of reform shall be kept entirely separate from each other” (Kentucky).
- Teaching: “Any instructor who shall teach in any school, college or institution where members of the white and colored race are received and enrolled as pupils for instruction shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and upon conviction thereof, shall be fined…” (Oklahoma).
- Wine and Beer: “All persons licensed to conduct the business of selling beer or wine…shall serve either white people exclusively or colored people exclusively and shall not sell to the two races within the same room at any time” (Georgia).
Alt text: Vintage employment sign reading “White Men Rip Rap Employment” exemplifies job market segregation and racial preference in hiring practices under Jim Crow.
The Jim Crow laws and the associated system of etiquette were not merely social customs or legal statutes; they were enforced and maintained through violence, both real and threatened. Black individuals who dared to violate Jim Crow norms, such as drinking from a “white” water fountain or attempting to exercise their right to vote, faced significant risks to their homes, their livelihoods, and even their lives. White individuals could physically assault Black people with impunity, knowing they were unlikely to face legal consequences. The Jim Crow criminal justice system, staffed entirely by white individuals – police officers, prosecutors, judges, juries, and prison officials – offered little to no legal recourse for Black victims of violence.
Violence was not an ancillary aspect of Jim Crow; it was instrumental to its functioning. It served as a primary method of social control, ensuring Black people remained subjugated and compliant. The most extreme and brutal manifestation of Jim Crow violence was lynching.
Lynchings were public acts of terror, often sadistic murders carried out by mobs of white individuals. Between 1882, the year reliable data collection began, and 1968, by which time lynchings had become infrequent, there were 4,730 documented lynchings in the United States. Of these victims, 3,440 were Black men and women. While hanging and shooting were the most common methods of lynching, victims were also subjected to horrific acts of torture, including being burned at the stake, castrated, beaten with clubs, and dismembered.
In the mid-1800s, white people constituted the majority of lynching victims and perpetrators. However, during the Reconstruction era following the Civil War, Black people became overwhelmingly the target of lynch mob violence. This shift indicates that lynching was increasingly used as a tool of racial intimidation to keep Black people, particularly newly freed individuals, “in their place” within the racial hierarchy. The vast majority of lynchings occurred in Southern and border states, where racial animosity and resistance to racial equality were most intense. Social economist Gunnar Myrdal noted in 1944 that “the southern states account for nine-tenths of the lynchings. More than two thirds of the remaining one-tenth occurred in the six states which immediately border the South.” (pp. 560-561).
Proponents of lynching, often white Southerners, attempted to justify these barbaric acts by claiming they were necessary supplements to the formal criminal justice system. They falsely asserted that Black men were inherently prone to violent crime, particularly the rape of white women. However, Arthur Raper’s extensive investigation into nearly a century of lynchings revealed that approximately one-third of all lynching victims were falsely accused of any crime whatsoever (Myrdal, 1944, p. 561).
Under the twisted logic of Jim Crow, any sexual interaction between a Black man and a white woman was deemed illegal, illicit, socially unacceptable, and often categorized as “rape” within the Jim Crow definition. Despite the fact that only 19.2 percent of lynching victims between 1882 and 1951 were even accused of rape, the myth of the Black rapist was persistently used to garner public support for lynchings and racial terror. Myrdal (1944) effectively dismantled this false justification: “There is much reason to believe that this figure (19.2) has been inflated by the fact that a mob which makes the accusation of rape is secure from any further investigation; by the broad Southern definition of rape to include all sexual relations between Negro men and white women; and by the psychopathic fears of white women in their contacts with Negro men” (pp. 561-562). In reality, most Black people were lynched for far less egregious “offenses” in the eyes of white supremacists: demanding civil rights, violating Jim Crow etiquette or laws, or simply being caught in the aftermath of racial conflicts.
Lynchings were particularly prevalent in small and medium-sized towns where Black economic advancement was often perceived as a direct threat by local white populations. These white individuals resented any economic or political gains made by Black people, and lynching served as a brutal means of suppressing Black progress. Lynchers were rarely arrested, and even when arrests were made, convictions were exceedingly rare. Raper (1933) estimated that “at least one-half of the lynchings are carried out with police officers participating, and that in nine-tenths of the others the officers either condone or wink at the mob action” (pp. 13-14). Lynching functioned as a multifaceted tool of white supremacy: it provided a gruesome form of public entertainment for white communities, served as a rallying point for white solidarity, boosted the egos of lower-status white individuals, and, most importantly, acted as a potent method of defending white domination and suppressing the nascent movement for racial equality.
While lynch mobs often targeted individual victims to send a message of terror, at times their violence escalated into broader attacks on entire Black communities, reminiscent of pogroms. These mobs would descend upon Black neighborhoods, destroying property, looting businesses, and murdering indiscriminately. The immediate objective was to drive out Black residents through violence and fear; the overarching goal was to maintain white supremacy at all costs. These pogrom-like actions are often euphemistically referred to as “race riots,” but Gunnar Myrdal (1944) accurately described them as “a terrorization or massacre…a mass lynching” (p. 566). Interestingly, these mass lynchings were primarily urban phenomena, while the lynching of individual victims was more common in rural areas.
The year 1919 became known as “The Red Summer” by the renowned Black writer James Weldon Johnson. The term “red” signified both the intense racial tensions and the widespread bloodshed that characterized that period. During the summer of 1919, race riots erupted in Chicago, Illinois; Knoxville and Nashville, Tennessee; Charleston, South Carolina; Omaha, Nebraska; and dozens of other cities across the United States. W.E.B. DuBois (1986), the eminent Black sociologist and civil rights activist, documented the horrific events of that year: “During that year seventy-seven Negroes were lynched, of whom one was a woman and eleven were soldiers; of these, fourteen were publicly burned, eleven of them being burned alive. That year there were race riots large and small in twenty-six American cities including thirty-eight killed in a Chicago riot of August; from twenty-five to fifty in Phillips County, Arkansas; and six killed in Washington” (p. 747).
The riots of 1919 were not isolated incidents; they were part of a larger pattern of “mass lynchings” of Black communities that stretched back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Other notable examples include race riots in Wilmington, North Carolina (1898); Atlanta, Georgia (1906); Springfield, Illinois (1908); East St. Louis, Illinois (1917); Tulsa, Oklahoma (1921); and Detroit, Michigan (1943). Joseph Boskin, author of Urban Racial Violence (1976), identified several recurring characteristics of these riots in the early 20th century:
- White people, with few exceptions, initiated the violence in each race riot by attacking Black individuals and communities.
- Extraordinary social conditions, such as pre-war social changes, wartime population shifts, post-war adjustments, or economic depressions, often exacerbated racial tensions and contributed to the outbreak of riots.
- The majority of riots occurred during the hot summer months, when social tensions were already heightened.
- Rumors played a crucial role in igniting and escalating many riots. False rumors of criminal activity by Black people against white people were frequently used to incite white mobs to violence.
- Police forces, rather than acting as neutral peacekeepers, were consistently implicated as a primary cause or perpetuating factor in the riots. In almost every instance, police sided with the white attackers, either by actively participating in the violence or by deliberately failing to intervene to protect Black victims.
- The fighting and destruction overwhelmingly took place within Black communities, highlighting the targeted nature of the violence. (pp. 14-15)
Boskin’s analysis, while insightful, omitted several crucial factors. The mass media, particularly newspapers, often played a significant role in fueling racial tensions by publishing inflammatory articles about “Black criminals” immediately preceding riots. Furthermore, the consequences of these riots extended beyond physical violence; Black homes and businesses were systematically looted and destroyed, leaving countless individuals homeless and destitute. Crucially, the overarching objective of white rioters, mirroring that of white lynch mobs targeting individual victims, was to instill pervasive fear and terror within Black communities, thereby reinforcing white domination and suppressing any aspirations for racial equality.
The Jim Crow hierarchy was fundamentally reliant on violence and the constant threat of violence to maintain its oppressive structure. As historian George Fredrickson (1971) astutely observed: “Lynching represented…a way of using fear and terror to check ‘dangerous’ tendencies in a black community considered to be ineffectively regimented or supervised. As such it constituted a confession that the regular institutions of a segregated society provided an inadequate measure of day-to-day control” (p. 272).
Despite the pervasive fear and brutality of the Jim Crow era, countless Black individuals bravely resisted the indignities and injustices of this system. Their courage and resilience laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement that would eventually dismantle Jim Crow, though far too often, their acts of defiance were met with violence and they paid the ultimate price for their bravery with their lives.
© Dr. David Pilgrim
Professor of Sociology
Ferris State University
Sept., 2000
Edited 2012
References
Boskin, J. (1976). Urban racial violence in the twentieth century (2nd ed.). Beverly Hills, CA: Glencoe Press.
Dubois, W. E. B. (1986). Writings. N. Huggins, (Ed.). New York NY: Literary Classics of the United States.
Kennedy, S. (1959/1990). Jim Crow guide: The way it was. Boca Raton, FL: Florida Atlantic University Press.
Myrdal, G. (1944). An American dilemma: the Negro problem and modern democracy. New York, NY: Harper.
Raper, A. F. (1933). The tragedy of lynching. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
