JIM CROW

The white minstrel show performer Thomas Dartmouth "Daddy" Rice popularized the term "Jim Crow" in the 1830s. The term originated from a song and dance that he had seen an elderly slave perform, which ended with the lyrics "Wheel about an' turn about an' do jes so, / An' eb'ry time I wheel about, I jump Jim Crow." The popularity of minstrel shows based on racist African American stereotypes transformed "Jim Crow" into a familiar word in the nation's vocabulary. Jim Crow, or racial segregation, began in northern states, where slavery was abolished in 1830, and later moved south. While northern blacks held obvious advantages over southern slaves, northerners systematically segregated free blacks and denied them the rights of citizenship, and western states such as Illinois, Indiana, and Oregon either restricted or banned blacks from entering their borders. Alexis de Tocqueville, in Democracy in America (1835), responded to this racial bias, commenting that "the prejudice of race appears to be stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists" (p. 414). Still, by 1890 the term had become synonymous with the South's systematic segregation and disfranchisement of African Americans; by 1910 every former Confederate state had codified into law and state constitutions provisions that controlled blacks and supported white supremacy. Other measures to control blacks across the nation included acts of terror such as lynching and ritualized mob violence. Until the civil rights movement dismantled Jim Crow, its legal and social barriers hindered blacks' ability to participate fully in society.

JIM CROW RECONSTRUCTION AND ITS AFTERMATH

While Reconstruction refers to the political process of readmitting southern states to the Union after the Civil War, it also represents a period marked by the South's attempts to regain economic, political, and social power over emancipated slaves. Black Codes enacted in 1865 and 1866 laid the groundwork for Jim Crow laws that appeared in the 1890s. Like earlier slave codes, Black Codes were a series of statutes that restricted blacks' civil and political rights and included legal definitions of race, employment requirements and regulations, segregation of public facilities, and prohibitions against blacks' assembling or learning to read and write. Viewed as another effort to reintroduce slavery, Congress dismantled the codes to secure blacks the full rights of citizenship through the Civil Rights Act of 1875 and ratification of the Fourteenth (1868) and Fifteenth (1870) Amendments, after which blacks voted, participated in the political process, bought land, sought employment, built their own schools, and used public facilities. Southern Democrats elected Rutherford B. Hayes as president in 1876 with his promise to end Reconstruction with the Compromise of 1877, which cleared the way for a legally sanctioned Jim Crow. Jim Crow laws legalized segregation, and customary barriers separating the races became enforceable legal barriers.

Even the U.S. Supreme Court supported segregation. In 1883 it declared unconstitutional the Civil Rights Act of 1875 and ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibited racial discrimination by state governments, not private organizations or individuals, which led railroads, businesses, and schools to practice segregation. When blacks protested an 1890 Louisiana state law that required segregated railroad cars, the Supreme Court ruled, in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), that "separate but equal" accommodations were constitutional.

American literature reflected Americans' multifarious and changing attitudes toward Jim Crow. Writing during Reconstruction, Thomas Nelson Page and Joel Chandler Harris romanticized slavery. Their "plantation literature"—including In Ole Virginia (1887), Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings (1880), Nights with Uncle Remus (1883), and Uncle Remus and His Friends (1892)—depicts the antebellum South as racially harmonious. In contrast, some African American writers challenged the nostalgic vision of antebellum life for slaves; consider, for example, Charles W. Chesnutt's Uncle Julius McAdoo in The Conjure Woman (1899) and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Aunt Chloe and Uncle Jacob in Sketches of Southern Life (1872).

In The Grandissimes (1880) and Madame Delphine (1881), George Washington Cable (1844–1925) critiqued race and class distinctions, but he would more openly advocate for blacks' full civil rights in The Silent South (1885) and The Negro Question (1890). Although the South legalized segregation, the North continued to perpetuate "de facto segregation," which Frederick Douglass challenged by advocating for political action in his "The Color Line" (1881) and "Address to the Louisville Convention" (1883) as well as by entering whites-only establishments. To survive in a racially charged climate, blacks learned how to adapt and cope through artful deception. In Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896), Paul Laurence Dunbar's (1872–1906) poem "We Wear the Mask" reveals the dual nature of black life. This poem attacks the need for blacks to wear a veil when in the presence of whites and anticipates W. E. B. Du Bois's (1868–1963) exploration of "double consciousness" in The Souls of Black Folk (1903): "It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity" (p. 45). Du Bois urged blacks to step from behind the veil. Dunbar's poem also elicits another reading. The mask as symbol provides a measure of subversive power because it can hide emotion. Dunbar validates the African American experience and the indignities suffered under white supremacy. The poem also highlights the importance of not sharing the agony with those who inflicted pain.

At the turn of the century, violent confrontation was one of the consequences of Jim Crow. Thomas Dixon's The Clansmen (1905) became the basis for D. W. Griffith's movie The Birth of a Nation (1915), which exacerbated racial tensions and led to race riots. Chesnutt based his novel The Marrow of Tradition (1901) on the 1898 race riot in Wilmington, North Carolina, depicting problems afflicting the New South. Race riots also occurred in northern states. The fall and summer of 1919 became known as "Red Summer," following the death of hundreds of blacks in race riots all across the United States. Claude McKay's poem "If We Must Die" (1919) urged black men to fight back and pursue their honor and dignity. Pauline Hopkins's novel Winona (1902), set in Kansas, affirmed organized violence against racist oppression. Seemingly rejecting Booker T. Washington's doctrine of self-help, moral virtue, industrial education, and social segregation as a means to race progress, Winona calls for public protests against the escalating mob violence endorsed by Jim Crow culture.

The founder and head of Tuskegee Institute, Washington (1856–1915) offered a less-confrontational solution to racial violence; he advised blacks to accept segregation and stop demanding equal rights. He also advocated a vocational rather than a college education as a way for blacks to build skills that could lead to their eventual economic prosperity. His "Atlanta Compromise" speech (1895) and autobiography, Up from Slavery (1901), explained his educational and political philosophies of accommodation and appeasement, which won him southern white support. A Harvard-educated historian and sociologist, Du Bois vehemently opposed Washington's tactics. In The Souls of Black Folk, he openly criticized Washington for asking blacks to surrender their rights and human dignity. Unlike Washington, Du Bois advocated higher education as a way to create a "talented tenth," a group of black leaders who could lead resistance efforts against Jim Crow.

Literature also explored Jim Crow's emphasis on color. In Kate Chopin's "Désirée's Baby" (1893), Désirée Aubigny's husband questions her ancestry when their newborn's physical features are clearly black. Similarly, in Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), Mark Twain explored the color line that Jim Crow established when he created a story of mixed identities instigated when a slave woman exchanged her light-skinned child with her master's. The increase in education and employment opportunities among blacks led to the rise of a middle class. In certain instances, skin color played a role within black communities as this largely "mulatto elite" sought to maintain the privileged status that many had acquired during slavery. A number of mulattoes adopted the prejudices Jim Crow created by segregating themselves in communities where skin color became the key to access. In "The Wife of His Youth" (1899), Charles Chesnutt sensitively portrayed the moral dilemmas in communities such as the New Orleans or Nashville Blue Vein Societies that restricted admittance to those who were light enough to see the veins in their wrists. Many light-skinned blacks escaped Jim Crow's violence and degradation by concealing their identities and passing as white. James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) illustrates how Jim Crow forced many to agonize over choosing one identity over another.

THE ECONOMICS OF JIM CROW

In addition to the eradication of civil and political rights, Jim Crow also prevented blacks from bettering themselves economically. Most were forced into low-paying jobs for whites as farmhands or domestics. Jim Crow laws even insisted that blacks be employed, or they would be jailed for vagrancy. Employment laws supported sharecropping and the convict lease system, both of which resembled slavery. Former plantation owners had land but little money to pay workers for continued crop cultivation (usually cotton). In exchange for land and a portion of the crops, landowners contracted with blacks for their labor. Local stores extended them credit throughout the year to purchase seeds, food, and equipment, but high interest rates meant that blacks fell further into debt, even forcing their children to continue sharecropping. Like lynching, sharecropping became a familiar literary theme. Sharecropping also informed the lyrics of blues songs like "Cotton Field Blues" and "Boll Weevel Blues."

Many southern blacks responded to inequality, vigilante violence, and sharecropping by fleeing the South. Between 1880 and 1890 thousands made new homes in Kansas and Oklahoma. Later, in what became called the "Great Migration," hundreds of thousands moved to New York City, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and other industrial urban areas to take advantage of employment opportunities created by World War I. This large influx of blacks to New York City contributed to the rise of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, a movement that refers to the blossoming of African American literature and art. Harlem Renaissance writers celebrated African American culture.

Also blossoming was a motion picture industry with black entrepreneurs such as Oscar Micheaux (1884–1951). Inspired by Booker T. Washington's call for blacks and whites to get along with each other and Horace Greeley, who encouraged everyone to move west, Micheaux purchased land in South Dakota in 1905. His homesteading experience became the basis for his first novel, The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer (1913), which he later rewrote into The Homesteader (1917) and made into his first film. The Homesteader demonstrated Micheaux's understanding of segregation and desire to unite white and black communities.

Like Micheaux, many blacks discovered that their social and economic conditions in the North had remained unchanged. Restricted to menial jobs, poor housing and education, and unfamiliar with city life, blacks founded institutions to promote racial uplift and to fight Jim Crow. Two organizations formed during this time are still in existence. They include the Committee on Urban Conditions among Negroes, which eventually become the National Urban League (1910), and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in 1909 by Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, and others. The NAACP's numerous legal battles set a series of precedents that courts would use to strike down Jim Crow. In Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Supreme Court ruled "separate but equal" in education was unconstitutional. This helped spark the civil rights movement, and with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965 and the Voting Rights Act of 1966, Jim Crow was effectively dismantled.

See alsoBlacks; Civil Rights; Lynching; Race Novels; Racial Uplift; Reconstruction; The Souls of Black Folk; Up from Slavery

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Cable, George Washington. The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life. 1880. New York: Penguin, 1988.

Cable, George Washington. Madame Delphine. 1881. New York: Firebird, 2001.

Cable, George Washington. The Negro Question: A Selection of Writings on Civil Rights in the South. 1890. Edited by Arlin Turner. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958.

Cable, George Washington. The Silent South. 1885. Montclair, N.J.: Patterson Smith, 1969.

Chesnutt, Charles W. The Marrow of Tradition. 1901. New York: Penguin Books, 1993.

Chesnutt, Charles W. Stories, Novels, Essays. New York: Library of America, 2002.

Chopin, Kate. "The Father of Désirée's Baby." Vogue, 14 January 1893.

Chopin, Kate. Kate Chopin: Complete Novels and Stories. Edited by Sandra M. Gilbert. New York: Library of America, 2002.

Dixon, Thomas. The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan. 1905. Ridgewood, N.J.: Gregg, 1967.

Douglass, Frederick. "Address to the Louisville Convention." 1883. In Frederick Douglas: Selected Speeches and Writings, edited by Philip S. Foner. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999.

Douglass, Frederick. "The Color Line." 1881. In Frederick Douglas: Selected Speeches and Writings, edited by Philip S. Foner. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999.

Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. Edited by David W. Blight and Robert Gooding-Williams. Boston: Bedford Books, 1997.

Dunbar, Paul Laurence. The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Edited by Joanne M. Braxton. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993.

Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins. Sketches of Southern Life. Philadelphia: Ferguson Brothers, 1891. Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library. Available at http://etext.lib.virginia.edu.

Harris, Joel Chandler. The Complete Tales of Uncle Remus. Edited by Richard Chase. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002.

Hopkins, Pauline. The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Johnson, James Weldon. Writings: James Weldon Johnson. New York: Library of America, 2004.

McKay, Claude. Complete Poems: Claude McKay. Edited by William J. Maxwell. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004.

Micheaux, Oscar. The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer. 1913. New York: Washington Square Press, 2003.

Page, Thomas Nelson. In Ole Virginia; or, Marse Chan and Other Stories. 1887. Nashville, Tenn.: J. S. Sanders, 1991.

Twain, Mark. The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson. 1894. Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing, 1900. Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library. Available at http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/Twa2Pud.html.

Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. 1835. New York: Bantam Classics, 2000.

Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery: An Autobiography. 1901. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1901. Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library. Available at http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/WasSlav.html.

Secondary Works

Dailey, Jane, Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, and Bryant Simon, eds. Jumpin' Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Gilmore, Glenda Elizabeth. Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1869–1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

Hale, Grace Elizabeth. Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940. New York: Pantheon Books, 1998.

Kaplan, Amy. "Nation, Region, and Empire." In Columbia History of the American Novel, edited by Emory Elliott, pp. 240–266. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.

Packard, Jerrold M. American Nightmare: The History of Jim Crow. New York: St. Martin's, 2002.

Wilson, Kirt H. The Reconstruction Desegregation Debate: The Politics of Equality and the Rhetoric of Place, 1870–1875. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2002.

Wormser, Richard. The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow. New York: St. Martin's, 2003.

Elizabeth Archuleta