In the late 19th century the phrase 'Jim Crow' was a blanket term for a wave of anti-black laws laid down after Reconstruction. Restrictions on voting rights, required literacy tests, bans on interracial relationships and clauses that allowed businesses to separate their black and white clientele.
The name Jim Crow is often used to describe the segregation laws, rules, and customs which arose after Reconstruction ended in 1877 and continued until the mid-1960s. (READ MORE)
Jim Crow law, in U.S. history, any of the laws that enforced racial segregation in the South between the end of the formal Reconstruction period in 1877 and the beginning of a strong civil rights movement in the 1950s. (READ MORE)
“I can ride in first-class cars on the railroads and in the streets,” wrote journalist T. McCants Stewart. “I can stop in and drink a glass of soda and be more politely waited upon than in some parts of New England.” Perhaps Stewart’s comments don’t seem newsworthy. Consider that he was reporting from South Carolina in 1885 and he was black. (READ MORE)
This 1896 U.S. Supreme Court case upheld the constitutionality of segregation under the “separate but equal” doctrine.
The case came from Louisiana, which in 1890 adopted a law providing for “equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races”. (READ MORE)
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Jim Crow