Origins Of Jim Crow
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Origins of Jim Crow
The term Jim Crow comes from a minstrel show performer known as Thomas “Daddy” Rice. He performed in black face and danced a ridiculous jig while singing. He created the character after seeing an elderly black man dancing and singing a song while he traveled in the South. Other historians believe that the origins come from a slave owning Mr. Crow who inspired Rices act. By the 1850s, the Jim Crow character had become a standard part of the minstrel show and the word “Jim Crow” also became a racial slur. The Jim Crow laws in the South were named for this mistrel show character.
The Jim Crow laws were enacted to support racial segregation after the reconstruction of the South because of the Civil War. By 1883, The U.S. Supreme Court began to strike down the foundations of the post-Reconstruction South, declaring the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional. In 1896, the Plessy v. Ferguson case legalized the principle of “separate but equal.” The Court held that separate accommodations did not deprive blacks of equal rights if the accommodations were equal. The ruling led to a growth of Jim Crow laws. Between 1890 and 1910, many state governments prevented most blacks from voting by tactics such as poll taxes and literacy tests. Others laws including separate blacks and whites in aspects of society like different sections in restaurants. The first major change came in 1954, when the Supreme Courts unanimously decided in favor of Brown in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, and declared segregation in the public schools unconstitutional. The Civil Rights Movement was about to begin and Jim Crow was about to come to an end.