Jim Crow Era Research Paper

The Jim Crow Era

The Jim Crow era began in the late 1870’s and originated from American pop culture (Gale). Jim Crow was the name of the racial caste system which operated in most southern and border states, but not exclusively (Pilgrim). A man named Dartmouth “Daddy” Rice performed a song that was a mocking imitation of a black plantation slave (Gale). Rice was the first person to ever wear blackface makeup, he used burnt cork to darken the color of his face (Gale). Jimcrow or jimcrowing refers to the injustice of segregating blacks to lesser facilities (Gale). At the start of the Jim Crow era, laws were put into place to enforce racial segregation (Urofsky). These laws extended to parks, cemeteries, theaters, schools, and restaurants to
Many of these laws prohibited blacks from doing many things. The basic types of laws forbade intermarrigage and ordered business owners and public institutions to keep their black and white clientele separated (Jim Crow laws). For instances where there are juvenile delinquents, there shall be separate buildings, one for black boys and one for white boys, these buildings are not allowed to be any closer than one fourth of a mile (Jim Crow laws). White boys and negro boys shall not, in any manner, be associated or worked together (Jim Crow laws). In mental hospitals, the Board of Control shall see that proper and distinct apartments are arranged ahead of time, so that no Negroes and white persons are together (Jim Crow laws). Intermarriages were also not approved of nor legal. It is illegal for a white person to marry anyone other than a white person. Any marriage that goes beyond these laws, will not lawfully exist (Jim Crow laws). When a colored person has died, the officer in charge shall not bury, or allow to be buried, anywhere except for the ground set apart or used for colored people (Jim Crow laws). A history professor, former middle school history teacher, and freelance writer, who holds a his Master of Arts in History, Nate Sullivan, “Jim Crow laws existed primarily between the end of the Civil War to the mid-1960s. They took many forms and varied considerably by locale, but segregation and discrimination were
The Jim Crow laws were enforced by lynchings (Mackaman). “Lynchings were violent and public acts of torture that traumatized black people throughout the country and were largely tolerated by state and federal officers” (Mackaman). The impact of lynching in the South, much like the pogroms against Jews in Germany, went far beyond those actually killed and their immediate families (Mackaman). There were many types of lynching. Some lynchings resulted from a wildly distorted fear and interracial sex, in response to casual social transgressions (Mackaman). There were public spectacle lynchings and some were based on the allegations of a serious violent crime (Mackaman). Lynchings that escalated into larger-scale violence targeting the entire African American community (Mackaman). There were numerous lynchings of sharecroppers, ministers, and community leaders who resisted mistreatment (Mackaman). More savage was the lynching of Mary Turner and her unborn child, killed for protesting her husband’s murder(Bouie). Historian Philip Dray in At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America writes, “[B]efore a crowd that included women and children,” writes Dray, “Mary was stripped, hung upside down by the ankles, soaked with gasoline, and roasted to death. In the midst of this torment, a white man opened her swollen belly with a hunting knife and her infant