Jim Crow Era

Jim Crow Era has been a significant part of our discussion in class. It left a crucial mark in the history of the United States and the development of segregation in particular. There several aspects of Jim Crow Era and its Growth that played big role in its existence.

The Jim Crow Show

The lights went down at the Park Theater in New York City for a one-man show performed by Thomas Dartmouth “Daddy” Rice. To the all-white audience, Rice’s character, Jim Crow, was uproariously funny. Dressed in a raggedy stable boy costume and straw hat, his white face darkened by burnt cork in a style known as “black face”.. He sang, he danced, he talked in a mockery of black dialect. Jim Crow showed blacks the way the 1840’s all-white audience wanted to see them portrayed: happy-go-lucky children who just couldn’t get enough of singing and dancing.

“Daddy” Rice grew rich and famous through his racist performances. But even after motion pictures killed the Jim Crow show the name lived on through a series of brutal (and totally illegal) laws that kept blacks inferior and segregated from whites throughout much of the United States. During the train wreck that historians call Reconstruction African-Americans almost had a real shot at equality in the United States. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments gave blacks their long overdue rights as citizens. In 1875, Congress even passed a Civil Rights Act that outlawed racial discrimination. Fear and ignorance of black people won out. In 1883, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the Civil Rights Act unconstitutional. White supremacy— not the U.S. Constitution— would become the law of the land, forcing millions of U.S. citizens into a state of poverty and terrorism unseen in American history.

Segregation

Parks, schools, taxis, buses, doctors’ waiting rooms, churches, movie theaters, swimming pools, libraries, restaurants, public beaches, mental asylums, telephone booths, hospitals, cemeteries; there literally wasn’t a single aspect of life that wasn’t Jim Crowed between 1890 -1965. The Jim Crow South was littered with “Whites Only” signs that hung like hideous halloween decorations on every imaginable place where whites and blacks might come into contact. These signs were the plug ugly face of Jim Crow, but segregation ran much deeper than signs. At its core Jim Crow was slavery with a new face (or should we say white hood).