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Having been raised in a segregated city, Houston, I have as an adult been fascinated about the widespread employment of segregation both in the North and South subsequent to the Civil War. That is, until the middle of the twentieth century, many petitioners except Blacks seemed to successfully redress wrongs using the equal protection clauses of the 14th Amendment. Since this amendment was specifically passed to protect Blacks from discrimination, the de jure and de facto implementation of Jim Crow practices needs some historical review. 

 

C. Vann Woodward, the most eminent and influential authority on southern history, punctured many of the romantic myths and illusionary southerners’ views of the past. His books Origins of the New South, 1877-1913, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, and Tom Watson, Agrarian Rebel emphasized that legally mandated racial segregation in the South relatively new. That is until the late 1880’s, blacks and whites intermingled in public places. When the Compromise of 1877, allowed the Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes to the presidency of the nation after the disputed election of 1876, the federal government essentially abandoned the attempt to enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteen Amendments in the South. Political power in the South was returned to white Democrats. Nevertheless, blacks still held lower level offices, and in some cases received white support. Until 1900, there were several gerrymandered districts in North Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi, under Black control.

 

Starting in 1880, a rigid system of legal and political segregation became pervasive, separating schools, restaurants, hospitals, parks, and even public restrooms. Through our more racially sensitized antennae we can recognize the absurdities of enforced segregation. The most common types of laws forbade intermarriage and ordered business owners and public institutions to keep their black and white clientele separated. I am including a sampling of some of these segregation statutes.

 

Toilet Facilities: Every employer of white or Negro males shall provide for such white and Negro males reasonably accessible and separate toilet facilities.

 

Pool and Billiard Rooms: 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.

 

Juvenile Delinquents: There shall be separate buildings, not nearer than one- fourth mile to each other.

 

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. My mother, a schoolteacher for mentally retarded, and her pupils were one of the first whites assigned to a Black school when the Houston school board reluctantly integrated the school system.

 

Blind: The board of trustees shall maintain a separate building on separate grounds for the care of all blind persons of the colored race.

 

Hospital Entrances. There shall be separate entrances for white and colored patients.

 

Textbooks: Books shall not be interchangeable between the white and colored schools, but shall continue to be used only the race first using them.

 

Fishing, Boating, and Bathing: The Commission shall have the right to make segregation of white and colored races.

 

Telephone Booths: Telephone companies must maintain separate booths for white and colored patrons.

 

Vending Machines: Separate machines must be provided for members of the white and black races.

 

Woodward argued that the South’s history of defeat, poverty, and racial bigotry shaped the region. He often quoted from a William Faulkner book, Intruder, “The Past is never dead. It is not even past.”

 

During his lifetime, Woodward’s optimism about a quick ending to segregation was premature. However, the large number of black publicly elected officials in the South, and the unprecedented step of hiring the first black head football coach, Sylvester Croom, in the Southeastern Conference by Mississippi State University are positive signs. This represents a remarkable change from the riots, and attendant deaths of two people in 1962 when James Meredith sought to integrate the University of Mississippi. 

 

The term Jim Crow is believed to have originated around 1830 when a minstrel show performer, Thomas “Daddy” Rice, blackened his face with paste or burnt cork and danced a ridiculous jig while singing lyrics to “Jump Jim Crow.” Rice supposedly saw a black boy singing a song ending with these chorus words:

“Weel about and turn about and do jis so, 

Eb’ry time I weel about I jump Jim Crow.

 

Rice incorporated this skit into his minstrel act, and by the 1850s, the “Jim Crow” character became a standard part of the minstrel show scene in America. Jim Crow became one of the many stereotypical images of black inferiority in the culture of the day—along with Sambos, Coons, and Zip Dandies. The work Jim Crow became a racial slur synonymous with black, colored, or Negro in the vocabulary of many whites. By the end of the 19th century, acts of racial discrimination were often referred to as Jim Crow practices.

 

Interestingly enough, the rigid segregation that I witnessed as a child did not become a fixture until the 1890’s. That is, while some segregation did exist throughout the Nation subsequent to the Civil War, only in the 1890’s did states begin systematically to codify in law and state constitutional provisions subordinate positions for African Americans in societies. Segregation laws were supported by brutal acts of suppression and lynching. From 1889 to 1930, 3,700 men and women were reported lynched in the United States.

 

Jim Crow segregation laws gained significant impetus from the U.S. Supreme Court rulings in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. In 1883 the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional the Civil Rights Acts of 1875. Chief Justice Joseph Bradley held that the 14th Amendment did not protect black people from discrimination by private businesses and individuals only discrimination by states. He said that blacks should stop being “special favorite of the laws.”

 

In Plessy v. Ferguson, the Court asserted that “separate but equal accommodations” did not stamp the “colored race with a badge of inferiority.” The Court quickly showed that they were going to enforce the separate not equal in subsequent decisions.

 

The year 1890, when Mississippi wrote a disenfranchisement provision into its state constitution is considered the beginning of legalized Jim Crow. Within a few years, all former Confederate states introduced legislation designed to eliminate black suffrage.

 

The impetus behind legalized segregation and disenfranchisement was one or a combination of the following reasons: (1) efforts by lower-class whites to gain political power fr0m the merchants and large landowners (who controlled the vote of their indebted tenants) (2) fear by whites in general that a new generation of “uppity” blacks threatened the culture and racial purity of the superior white society (3) the desire of elites to use blacks as scapegoats to side-track the efforts of lower-class whites to seize political power (4) the appearance of pseudo-science of eugenics that lent respectability to the views of black inferiority and (5) the continued depiction of blacks as lazy, stupid, and less than human in the popular minstrel shows. New laws strengthened the political power of a white elite within the Democratic Party. Poll tax, grandfather laws and the all white primary effectively ended Black suffrage eliminating the suffrage protections of the Fifteenth Amendment.