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THE ORIGIN OF "JIM CROW"
Jim Crow laws were named for an ante-bellum mistral show character. The minstrel show is one of the first indigenous forms of American entertainment.
The tradition began in February 1843 when a group of four white men from Virginia, billed as the "Virginia Minstrels", applied black cork to their faces and performed a song-and-dance act in a small hall in New York City. The performance was such a success that the group was invited to tour to other cities and imitators sprang up immediately. These troups were successors to individual performers who imitated Negro singing and dancing. One of the earliest and most successful individual performers was Thomas Dartmouth "Daddy" Rice.
Rice, a white actor, was inspired by an elderly Negro in Louisville, Kentucky crooning and dancing to a song that ended with the same chorus:
"Weel about and turn about and do jis so, Eb'ry time I weel about I jump Jim Crow."
Rice's imitation of the Negro's song and dance routine took him from Louisville to Cincinnati to Pittsburgh to Philadelphia and finally to New York City in 1832.
Jim Crow laws, named for the minstrel show character, were late-19th-century statutes passed by the legislatures of the Southern states that created a racial caste system in the American South.
After the Reconstruction years, blacks and whites often rode together in the same railway cars, ate in the same restaurants, used the same public facilities, but did not often interact as equals. The emergence of large black communities in urban areas and of a significant black labor force in factories presented a new challenge to white Southerners. They could not control these new communities in the same informal ways they had been able to control rural blacks, who were more directly dependent on white landowners and merchants than their urban counterparts. In the city, blacks and whites were in more direct competition than they had been in the countryside. There was more danger of social mixing. The city, therefore, required different, and more rigidly institutionalized, systems of control. The Jim Crow laws were a response to a new reality that required white supremacy to move to where it would have a rigid legal and institutional basis to retain control over the black population. What had shifted was not their commitment to white supremacy but the things necessary to preserve it.
In 1883, The U.S. Supreme Court began to strike down the foundations of the post-Civil War Reconstruction, declaring the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional. The Court also ruled that the Fourteenth Amendmentprohibited state governments from discriminating against people because of
race but did not restrict private organizations or individuals from doing so. Thus railroads, hotels, theaters, and the like could legally practice segregation. Eventually, the Court also validated state legislation that discriminated against blacks. In 1896 it legitimized the principle of "separate but equal" in its ruling Plessy v. Ferguson. The Court held that separate accommodations did not deprive blacks of equal rights if the accommodations were equal. In 1899, the Court went even further declaring in Cumming v. County Board of Education: Laws establishing separate schools for whites were valid even if they provided no comparable schools for blacks.
The high court rulings led to a profusion of Jim Crow laws. By 1914 every Southern state had passed laws that created two separate societies; one black, the other white. Blacks and whites could not ride together in the same railroad cars, sit in the same waiting rooms, use the same washrooms, eat in the same restaurants, or sit in the same theaters. Blacks were denied access to parks, beaches, and picnic areas; they were barred from many hospitals. What had been maintained by custom in the rural South was to be maintained by law in the urban South.
Starting in 1915, victories in the Supreme Court began to chip away at the Jim Crow Laws. In Guinn v. United States (1915), the Supreme Court supported the position that a statute in Oklahoma law denying the right to vote to any citizen whose ancestors had not been enfranchised in 1860 (grandfather clause) was unconstitutional. In Buchanan v. Worley(1917), the Court struck down a Louisville, Kentucky, law requiring residential segregation.
The first major blow against the Jim Crow system of racial segregation was struck in 1954 by the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Educationof Topeka, Kansas, which declared segregation in the public schools unconstitutional.
This began what is known as the "Civil Rights Movement" and began the end of the Jim Crow Laws.
Jim Crow Laws
Starting in the 1890s, states throughout the South passed laws designed to prevent Black citizens from improving their status or achieving equality. These statutes, which together were known as Jim Crow, were in place and enforced until the 1950s and 60s. Here is a sampling of those laws, grouped by topic.
EDUCATION
Florida: The schools for white children and the schools for negro children shall be conducted separately.
Kentucky: The children of white and colored races committed to reform schools shall be kept entirely separate from each other.
Mississippi: Separate schools shall be maintained for the children of the white and colored races.
Mississippi: Separate free schools shall be established for the education of children of African descent; and it shall be unlawful for any colored child to attend any white school, or any white child to attend a colored school.
New Mexico: Separate rooms shall be provided for the teaching of pupils of African descent, and such pupils may not be admitted to the school rooms occupied and used by pupils of Caucasian or other descent.
North Carolina: School textbooks shall not be interchangeable between the white and colored schools, but shall continue to be used by the race first using them.
ENTERTAINMENT
Alabama: It shall be unlawful to conduct a restaurant or other place for the serving of food in the city, at which white and colored people are served in the same room, unless such white and colored persons are effectually separated by a solid partition extending from the floor upward to a distance of seven feet or higher, and unless a separate entrance from the street is provided.
Alabama: It shall be unlawful for a negro and white person to play together or in company with each other at any game of pool or billiards.
Alabama: Every employer of white or negro males shall provide for such white or negro males reasonably accessible and separate toilet facilities.
Georgia: All persons licensed to conduct a restaurant, shall serve either white people exclusively or colored people exclusively and shall not sell to the two races within the same room or under the same license.
Georgia: It shall be unlawful for any amateur white baseball team to play on any vacant lot or baseball diamond within two blocks of a playground devoted to the Negro race, and it shall be unlawful for any amateur colored baseball team to play baseball within two blocks of any playground devoted to the white race.
Georgia: 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.
Louisiana: All circuses, shows, and tent exhibitions, to which the attendance of more than one race is invited shall provide not less than two ticket offices and not less than two entrances.
Virginia: Any public hall, theatre, opera house, motion picture show or place of public entertainment which is attended by both white and colored persons shall separate the white race and the colored race.
FREEDOM OF SPEECH
Mississippi: Any person guilty of printing, publishing or circulating matter urging or presenting arguments in favor of social equality or of intermarriage between whites and negroes, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor.
HEALTH CARE
Alabama: 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.
Louisiana: The board of trustees shall maintain a separate building, on separate grounds, for the admission, care, instruction, and support of all blind persons of the colored or black race.
Mississippi: There shall be maintained by the governing authorities of every hospital maintained by the state for treatment of white and colored patients separate entrances for white and colored patients and visitors, and such entrances shall be used by the race only for which they are prepared.
HOUSING
Louisiana: Any person...who shall rent any part of any such building to a negro person or a negro family when such building is already in whole or in part in occupancy by a white person or white family shall be guilty of a misdemeanor.
Mississippi: The prison warden shall see that the white convicts shall have separate apartments for both eating and sleeping from the negro convicts.
LIBRARIES
Texas: Negroes are to be served through a separate branch or branches of the county free library, which shall be administered by a custodian of the negro race under the supervision of the county librarian.
North Carolina: 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.
MARRIAGE
Arizona: The marriage of a person of Caucasian blood with a Negro shall be null and void.
Florida: All marriages between a white person and a negro, or between a white person and a person of negro descent to the fourth generation inclusive, are hereby forever prohibited.
Florida: Any negro man and white woman, or any white man and negro woman, who are not married to each other, who habitually live in and occupy in the nighttime the same room, shall each be punished by imprisonment not exceeding 12 months, or by fine not exceeding five hundred dollars.
Maryland: All marriages between a white person and a negro, or between a white person and a person of negro descent, to the third generation, inclusiveare forever prohibited, and shall be void.
Mississippi: The marriage of a white person with a negro or mulatto or person who shall have one-eighth or more of negro blood, shall be unlawful and void.
Wyoming: All marriages of white persons with Negroes, Mulattos, Mongolians, or Malaya hereafter contracted in the State of Wyoming are, and shall be, illegal and void.
SERVICES
Georgia: No colored barber shall serve as a barber to white women or girls.
Georgia: 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.
TRANSPORTATION
Alabama: 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: The conductor of each passenger train is authorized and required to assign each passenger to the car or the division of the car, when it is divided by a partition, designated for the race to which such passenger belongs. Maryland: All railroad companies are hereby required to provide separate cars or coaches for the travel and transportation of the white and colored passengers.
WORK
Oklahoma: The baths and lockers for the negroes shall be separate from the white race, but may be in the same building. (Mining companies)
Jump Jim Crow is a song and dance from 1828 done in blackface by white comedian Thomas D. Rice. The number was supposedly inspired by the song and dance of a crippled African American in Cincinnati called "Jim Crow". The song became a great 19th century hit and Rice performed all over the country as Daddy Jim Crow. The tune was one of the first major examples of African American influence in popular music in the United States.
The tune became very well known not only in the United States but internationally; in 1841 the USA ambassador to Central America, John Lloyd Stephens, wrote that upon his arrival in Merida, Yucatan the local brass band played "Jump Jim Crow" under the mistaken impression that it was the USA's national anthem.
With time Jim Crow became a term often used to refer to African Americans, and from this the laws of racial segregation became known as Jim Crow laws.
The expression to jump Jim Crow came to mean "to act like a stereotyped stage caricature of a Negro".
Here are the lyrics of 'Jump Jim Crow':
Come, listen, all you gals and boys, I'm just from Tuckyhoe;
I'm gwine to sing a little song, My name's Jim Crow.
Chorus: Wheel about, an' turn about, an' do jis so;
Eb'ry time I wheel about, I jump Jim Crow.
I went down to de river, I didn't mean to stay,
But there I see so many gals, I couldn't get away.
I'm rorer on de fiddle, an' down in ole Virginny,
Dey say I play de skientific, like massa Pagganninny.
I cut so many munky shines, I dance de galloppade;
An' w'en I done, I res' my head, on shubble, hoe or spade.
I met Miss Dina Scrub one day, I gib her sich a buss;
An' den she turn an' slap my face, an' make a mighty fuss.
De udder gals dey 'gin to fight, I tel'd dem wait a bit;
I'd hab dem all, jis one by one, as I tourt fit.
I wip de lion ob de west, I eat de alligator;
I put more water in my mouf, den boil ten load ob 'tator.
De way dey bake de hoe cake, Virginny nebber tire;
Dey put de doe upon de foot, an' stick 'em in de fire.
Or, with a more conventional english translation:
Come, listen, all you girls and boys, I'm just from Tuckyhoe;
I'm going to sing a little song, My name's Jim Crow.
Chorus: Wheel about, and turn about, and do just so;
Every time I wheel about, I jump Jim Crow.
I went down to the river, I didn't mean to stay,
But there I saw so many girls, I couldn't get away.
I'm (rorer)? on the fiddle, and down in old Virgina,
They say I play the scientific, like master Pagganninny (Niccol Paganini - 19th century violin master).
I cut so many monkey shines, I dance the (galloppade)?;
And when I'm done, I rest my head, on shovel, hoe or spade.
I met Miss Dina Scrub one day, I give her such a buss (kiss);
And then she turn and slap my face, and make a mighty fuss.
The other gals are going to fight, I told them wait a bit;
I'd have them all, just one by one, as I thought fit.
I whip the lion of the west, I eat the alligator;
I put more water in my mouth, then boil ten loads of potato.
The way they bake the hoe cake (corn bread cooked on open fire on metal implement such as a hoe), Virginia never tire;
They put the dough upon the foot, and stick them in the fire.
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