Jim Crow Laws

Darian Trnka, Karley O’Connor, Lauren Ball, and Phoebe Defino

The term Jim Crow is believed to have originated around 1830 when a white minstrel show performer, Thomas “Daddy” Rice, blackened his face with charcoal and danced to the song “Jump Jim Crow”

“Weel about and turn about a do a jis so,Ev’ry time I well about I jump Jim Crow”

The term Jim Crow became synonymous with the Segregation Laws in the South by the 1900s due to the term being generally identified with the racist laws and actions depriving blacks of rights by naming them inferior.

The Compromise of 1877 marked the end of reconstruction. Although, slavery continued for African Americans. Blacks and whites were separated in schools, parks, restaurants, theaters and on public transportation.

Even though, African Americans had the right to vote, they were unable to. Whites made it almost impossible for them to vote. Everyone had to take a literacy tests in order to vote, and most blacks were unable to pass because they were uneducated. The grandfather clause was something else the whites put in place to make it harder for blacks to vote. The grandfather clause made it so that if your grandfather could not vote, you could not vote.Often times the whites would place taxes on the voters, requiring a payment in which blacks could not pay.

Plessy vs. Ferguson concluded that “separate but equal” facilities were more than constitutional. Because of this 1896 ruling, blacks were provided separate public squares that often were not as equal to the white sections.

Booker T. Washington was born in Virginia and founded the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama (Tuskegee University). He believed in education of African Americans and thought that this would be the best way for them to survive through racial clashes and discrimination."I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has had to overcome while trying to succeed.“

W.E.B. Dubois worked in Pennsylvania as a sociologist. His book The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899) discouraged the sentiment of racial inferiority and allowed him to promote his own racial activism. Dubois denied the integration format of programs led by the NAACP and believed that African American-run institutions would help blacks survive in racially-disputed America.

Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Dubois had different opinions on how to survive the South because they grew up in different settings, therefore, with different mindsets on racial inequality. Washington, having grown up in the South as a slave, coped with the fact that blacks were considered sub-par to whites. Dubois, however, grew up as a scholar, enjoying many of the liberties that whites did. As Washington got older, he gradually progressed in education, to becoming a teacher himself. He learned that hard work paid off, especially for blacks who achieve more respect.

Dubois had a difficult time wrapping his head around this perplexing case in which blacks were so heavily discriminated against by whites, simply because he did not grow up around it. Therefore, he tried a more aggressive attack on Washington. Something that seemed strange to him needed immediate reform in his mind.

The Great Migration ushered in approximately 6 million African Americans in the north. Northern industries such as railroads, meatpacking, and stockyards recruited African Americans away from widespread segregation, lynching, and terrible economic opportunities. No government assistance was involved, and most travelled to urban areas like Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, and NYC, where industrial workers were needed.