Segregation, Racial, the southern social, economic, and political system that enforced the separation of races from the post‐
Reconstruction era to the mid‐twentieth century. Racial segregation was also called “Jim Crow,” an expression derived from the caricatured portrayal of blacks in antebellum minstrel shows. By the 1890s, however, “Jim Crow” had come to describe the segregation, social control, and political and economic subjugation of black people in the
South. Upheld by the
Supreme Court in
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and other decisions, segregation persisted until challenged by the anti‐colonialist politics of
World War II and the postwar
civil rights movement.
While C. Vann Woodward's
The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955) launched a debate over the origins and nature of racial segregation in the South, comparative studies of segregation in South Africa and the American South by John W. Cell and George Frederickson linked the phenomenon to a broader white‐supremacist ideology and demonstrated its variation over space and time. In America, restrictive customs and practices designed to separate the races were first devised by whites of the antebellum North in the 1840s. As historian Leon Litwack has noted, many abolitionist newspapers used the term “segregation” to describe separate facilities for blacks and whites in northern cities.
Segregation Imposed.
After the
Civil War, southern whites unwilling to accept the social and political equality of freedmen adopted the practice. The earliest postwar southern legislatures passed restrictive laws to maintain the prewar racial hierarchy and secure a cheap labor force perpetually tied to the land. These so‐called Black Codes were overturned as Radical Republicans took charge of Reconstruction, but in their place arose a system of
sharecropping, crop lien, disfranchisement, and violent repression.
African Americans struggled against the poverty and degradation born of tenancy and sharecropping, but as northern attitudes shifted, federal troops left, the southern
Democratic Party revived, and the
Ku Klux Klan and other racist organizations inaugurated a reign of terror, conditions very similar to
slavery took root.
Many historians hold that Jim Crow was already so firmly entrenched by custom that the rise of
de jure segregation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries merely ratified the prevailing situation. Historian Howard Rabinowitz, for example, has found that Baton Rouge,
Atlanta, Charlotte, Birmingham, and other southern cities excluded free blacks from militias, education, and welfare services in the antebellum and immediate post–Civil War eras. While radical legislators, Reconstruction officials, and black political leaders favored racially integrated facilities, fears of further antagonizing white southerners inhibited their efforts, and neither Republicans nor black legislatures proposed constitutional or legislative measures for achieving that goal. Indeed, as black churches, fraternal organizations, and mutual‐aid societies proliferated, patterns of voluntary racial separation arose. Government, political, and judicial bodies were often the only integrated institutions in the Reconstruction South.
By the 1880s, however,
railroads and streetcars, involving close contact between black and white passengers, became the focus of challenges to segregation. Amid growing racial tensions, exacerbated by
urbanization and
industrialization, southern state legislatures enacted railroad separate‐car laws that reshaped the region's social and political landscape. Blacks vigorously resisted. Prominent African‐American business and professional leaders staged boycotts and sued railroads, insisting on equal access, but to little avail. After the U.S. Supreme Court in 1883 sharply restricted the 1875 Civil Rights Act (see
Civil Rights Cases) and sanctioned the separate‐but‐equal doctrine in
Plessy v.
Ferguson, a torrent of segregation laws increasingly regulated all black‐white contact throughout the South, banning or sharply restricting black access to public and private facilities including schools, theaters, hotels, parks, libraries, and the like. Simultaneously, employers and labor leaders blocked blacks’ access to skilled jobs, limiting them to unskilled, semi‐skilled, or domestic occupations.
The spread of segregation and deteriorating race relations in the 1890s arose from southern white fears of racial mixing and miscegnation and from a desire to curb black aspirations for education and property. It coincided with an epidemic of
lynchings; antiblack riots in Atlanta, New Orleans, East St. Louis, Tulsa, and other cities; discrimination against black soldiers, as in the
Brownsville incident; and the propagation of racist ideas by politicians like Benjamin Tillman, James K. Vardaman, and Thomas Watson, and writers such as Thomas Nelson Page and Thomas Dixon, whose 1905 novel
The Clansman inspired D.W.
Griffith's racist movie
The Birth of a Nation. The legal imposition of strict racial segregation was also paralleled by a campaign of black disfranchisement through intimidation and terror; state constitutional amendments (in Mississippi, South Carolina, and Georgia); and poll taxes, literacy tests, property and residency requirements, and other devices intended to circumvent the
Fifteenth Amendment.
Segregation Challenged.
Black southerners responded to these developments in a variety of ways. Some embraced Booker T.
Washington's strategy of conciliation, racial uplift, and group solidarity. Others, such as Ida B.
Wells‐Barnett and W.E.B.
Du Bois, advocated militant challenges to the racist assumptions underpinning segregation. Still others, like Bishop Henry M. Turner (1834–1915) of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, West African chief Alfred Sam, and Marcus
Garvey, stressed racial solidarity, ethnic pride, and emigration to Africa. While novelists from Charles Chesnutt (1858–1932) to Langston
Hughes, Zora Neale
Hurston, and Richard
Wright, along with a host of African‐American
ragtime,
blues, and
jazz musicians, implicitly challenged segregation by underscoring African Americans’ cultural contribution to the nation as a whole, millions of southern blacks voted with their feet by moving north.
Amid black migration northward, the growing importance of the black vote, and the rising political awareness of African peoples worldwide in the 1920s and 1930s, African Americans fashioned a viable critique of the South's white‐supremacist and segregationist ideology. The international and domestic politics developed from this transformed perspective underlay the Supreme Court's landmark 1954
Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing racial segregation in public schools, and fueled the black freedom struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. By 1965 racial segregation had been all but dismantled throughout the South. The promise of economic, social, and political
equality in the region—and the nation—however, has yet to be fulfilled.
See also
African American Religion;
Antislavery;
Civil Rights;
Civil Rights Movement;
Gilded Age;
King, Martin Luther Jr.;
Minstrelsy;
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People;
New Deal Era, The;
Progressive Era;
Race and Ethnicity;
Race, Concept of;
Racism;
Randolph, A. Phillip;
Scottsboro Case;
Southern Christian Leadership Conference;
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee;
Trotter, William Monroe;
Twenties, The.
Bibliography
C. Vann Woodward , The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 3d ed., 1955; rep. 1974.
Lawrence W. Levine , Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro‐American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom, 1977.
Howard N. Rabinowitz , Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865–1980, 1978.
John W. Cell , The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South, 1982.
William Fitzhugh Brundage , Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930, 1993.
Leon F. Litwack , Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow, 1998.
Deborah Gray White , Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994, 2000.
Robert F. Jefferson
