A Look at “Jim Crow” America

The South may have lost the Civil War on the battlefield.

It may have had to officially ban slavery to be allowed back into the Union.

But that did not change the hearts and minds of many Southerners.

They still felt Black Americans were lesser people who did not deserve the same rights as white citizens.

They displayed those simmering grudges in a number of ways, including enacting discriminatory “Jim Crow” laws to limit the new freedoms obtained by former slaves.

Those restrictions remained legal and on the books for almost 100 years after the Civil War.

The remnants of this hateful attitude can still be seen today in the form of voting rights, housing discrimination, economic disadvantages and unequal treatment in the justice system.

And although the South is where the majority of these actions took place, the backlash against newly freed Black Americans has been evident throughout the country during our history.

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The Jim Crow laws were instituted in some places just months after the Civil War ended.

The restrictions were approved at the state and local level.

Their main purpose was to legalize racial segregation, but the laws reached into all sectors of life. Among the restrictions were denying Black citizens the right to vote, limiting their ability to hold jobs and restricting educational opportunities.

The initial round of Jim Crow laws included the “black codes.”

These local regulations detailed when, where and how formerly enslaved people could work. In some states, Black citizens were required to sign yearly labor contracts. Under those agreements, Black employees worked for minimal pay and could only hold certain jobs. Refusal to sign a contract could lead to arrest, fines and even forced unpaid labor.

In 1881, Tennessee became the first state to officially sanction segregation when it approved legislation that established separate sections on train cars. Other Southern states soon followed.

The Supreme Court aided segregationists in their quest.

In 1883, the court declared that the Civil Rights Act, which was approved in 1875 to provide Black citizens with equal treatment in public places, was unconstitutional.

In 1896, the court ruled in the Plessy vs. Ferguson case that racial segregation was constitutional under a “separate but equal” provision.

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The Jim Crow era quickly led to the formation of the Ku Klux Klan.

The organization of hooded white supremacists was formed by a group of former Confederate soldiers in the town of Pulaski in southern Tennessee on Christmas Eve in 1865, eight months after the Civil War officially ended.

The KKK grew from a secret social fraternity into a paramilitary force whose primary objective was to reverse the federal government’s Reconstruction policies, especially those that elevated Black Americans.

The Klan’s acts of violence included nighttime raids against African-Americans as well as white citizens who supported integration and equal rights. The burning of a cross on a front lawn was one of their chief signatures. The organization was also known to carry out acts of lynching.

In 1871, Congress approved the Ku Klux Klan Act that authorized the use of military force to suppress the KKK. Nine South Carolina counties were placed under martial law and thousands of Klan members were arrested.

The Klan faded for a while, but the group made a comeback in the 1910s and 1920s when immigration laws were loosened. The KKK also experienced a revival in the 1950s and 1960s during the Civil Rights era.

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The Jim Crow laws initially were imposed in the South, but as Black residents left that region to seek opportunities elsewhere the restrictions were also adopted in northern and western cities.

In the 1880s, cities began implementing laws that segregated theaters and restaurants. Blacks were forbidden to enter certain parks.

That led to segregated waiting areas at bus stations and train depots as well as separate restrooms, water fountains and elevators. Some cemeteries were even divided by race.

Laws were also developed that prohibited Blacks from living in white neighborhoods or attending white schools.

All these restrictions were considered legal until the 1950s and 1960s when court rulings and new laws struck them down.

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The Jim Crow era was powered in part by a movement known as The Lost Cause.

This movement was promulgated by many white Southerners for decades after the Civil War.

The basic thrust was a romanticizing of the Old South and the Confederate war effort while conveniently forgetting the horrors and injustice of slavery.

Historians say The Lost Cause had six basic tenets.

One of the main themes is that states’ rights and not slavery was the cause of the Civil War. There was also the belief that African-Americans were “faithful slaves” who were unprepared for the responsibilities of freedom.

The Lost Cause followers also contended the South lost the war only because the North had more soldiers and resources. They also insisted Confederate soldiers were heroic and saintly with General Robert E. Lee being the most holy of them all.

In addition, they romanticized Southern women as being loyal to the Confederate cause even if their husbands were killed in battle.

In the 1880s and 1890s, white Southern leaders began to use the tenets of The Lost Cause as the reasoning for undoing Reconstruction programs that provided Black citizens with freedom and opportunity.

The Lost Cause followers were among the primary proponents in making the Confederate Flag a symbol of the South.

The movement got a boost in 1915 when the film “The Birth of a Nation” was released. The D. W. Griffith production portrayed the Ku Klux Klan as valiant warriors in the post-war South who were besieged by Northerners as well as by immoral freed slaves.

The movie became a recruiting tool for the KKK as well as a justification of Jim Crow laws and the beliefs of The Lost Cause.

President Woodrow Wilson, who was born and raised in Virginia, helped champion some of the myths propagated by The Lost Cause. It was under Wilson’s guidance that new military bases that opened in the South during World War One were named after Confederate leaders.

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The Lost Cause found new momentum as that war ended in 1918.

The 380,000 Black soldiers who came home from the battlefield had a renewed determination to fight segregation. After serving their country, they felt they deserved more respect and more freedom.

Their return coincided with The Great Migration, where than 6 million Black Americans left the South for better opportunities in the North, Midwest and West between 1916 and 1970. By the end of 1919, the first 1 million of these transplants had resettled.

All this did not sit well with many white Americans, in particular former soldiers. They felt Black residents were taking away jobs and housing for which they had risked their lives.

That led to a series of violent actions known as the Red Summer. Between April and November 1919, there were 25 riots and 97 recorded incidents of lynching. At least 13 of the lynching victims were Black veterans.

Many of the riots were ignited by single incidents and then escalated when Black residents, in particular former soldiers, fought back.

In Washington, D.C., as many as 40 people were killed during a four-day race riot in July that was initially sparked by a white woman’s claim that she was assaulted by two Black men.

Two days later, 15 white and 23 Black people died during a weeklong series of riots in Chicago that also injured 100 people and left 1,000 Black families homeless.

The surge in Jim Crow sentiment continued into the next decade.

In 1921, as many as 300 African-Americans were killed during two days of racially motivated attacks in Tulsa, Oklahoma. During those two days, angry white citizens looted and burned African-American homes and businesses. More than 1,400 houses were destroyed and nearly 10,000 people were left homeless. Much of the mob’s ire was aimed at Black Wall Street, an area considered one of the more affluent African-American communities in the country at the time.

The Jim Crow era continued with vigor during the 1920s.

In fact, the time between 1900 and 1920 was when the most Confederate statues were built in the United States.

The Lost Cause aura was propped up again by the 1939 movie, “Gone With the Wind,” which critics say painted the slavery-riddled South with a romantic and sanitized brush.

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It’s not necessarily easy to keep a segment of the population subjugated, even if they are outnumbered.

The supporters of segregation needed some tools to ensure that the laws and practices of the Jim Crow era were obeyed.

They came up with two primary enforcement actions.

One involved power. The other involved fear.

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Throughout the post-Civil War era, voting regulations were used to help keep power in the hands of white legislative leaders.

Some of the tactics used by segregationists included telling Black citizens that they were wrong about the date or location of a polling place. Or they had filled out an application incorrectly. Or they had insufficient literacy skills.

Some Southern states adopted laws that allowed only property owners to vote. Since many Black residents didn’t own property, that restricted their voting rights.

Other states didn’t allow Black voters to cast ballots in primary elections, saying that the Democrat and Republican parties were “clubs” that had the right to restrict membership. Some of these restrictions remained in place as late as 1960.

There was also the practice of “purging” voter registration rolls in the name of efficiency. Many of the names removed were African-Americans.

Those who were able to register were many times threatened and even beaten if they actually tried to cast a ballot.

Some jurisdictions adopted poll taxes in which voters had to pay in order to cast a ballot. This prevented many Black as well as poor white citizens from voting. In 2021, Georgia purged its voter rolls of more than 100,000 names, a move that critics said was done in part to reduce the number of eligible Black voters.

Dallas County in Alabama was one of many places with Jim Crow laws that made it difficult for African-Americans to vote. Starting in 1901, the county used the literacy tests and poll taxes approved under the Alabama State Constitution to deny Black citizens the right to vote. In 1961, only 156 of Dallas County’s 15,000 African-Americans eligible to vote were actually registered.

Concerns over voter suppression have risen again in the wake of the 2020 presidential election. In 2021, there were 19 states that passed 34 laws restricting access to voting. In 2022, it was reported that at least 8 states had enacted voting restriction laws. On the other hand, another 12 states enacted laws to expand voter access.

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The fear factor was carried out in the form of lynching.

This public display of mob murder didn’t just happen in the 1800s. The hangings were still relatively common during the first half of the 1900s.

Lynching wasn’t done just to punish the accused person. A report by the Equal Justice Initiative notes that these killings were also done to intimidate Black citizens so a fearful environment with segregation and subordination was maintained. The violent incidents, the report authors write, were acts of terrorism that traumatized Black people across the country.

The report states that acts of lynching were common in virtually all Southern states but also occurred frequently in Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Maryland, Missouri, Ohio and Oklahoma.

Texas was one of the hotbeds for these types of violent acts. The Lone Star State was third among states for the most lynchings between 1885 and 1942.

One of the most famous and heinous of these public killings happened in Waco in 1916.

Jesse Washington, a 17-year-old Black teen, was arrested for the murder of Lucy Fryer, a 53-year-old white woman. Washington reportedly confessed to the crime. He was found guilty by a jury of 12 white men after four minutes of deliberations. A mob grabbed Washington as he was being escorted out the back door of the courthouse. The angry citizens poured coal oil over the teenager. They then dangled him from a tree and lit wood boxes afire. The vigilantes lowered Washington in and out of the flames while his body caught fire. The ordeal lasted for two hours while a crowd of more than 15,000 watched. The mob then hung Washington’s charred body on a utility in the nearby town where Fryer lived.

The NAACP used the “Waco Horror” as an impetus for its campaign to establish anti-lynching laws in the United States.

Florida had the most lynchings per capita of any state between 1900 and 1930. One of the most famous public killings there happened in 1934.

Claude Neal, a Black farmhand, was arrested on suspicion of murdering a white woman in Jackson County. Neal apparently signed a confession with an “X.” For his safety, he was moved 200 miles to a jail in Alabama. However, a Florida mob found him, killed him and brought his mutilated body back to Marianna, Florida, to be hung from a tree. For good measure, some of the white citizens of Marianna attacked Black residents after they learned Neal’s body was removed from the tree the next day by the local sheriff.

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After World War Two, the tide finally began to turn and the Jim Crow era slowly started to fade.

In 1948, President Harry Truman ordered the U.S. military be integrated.

The strong church community in Selma, Alabama, began an effort in the late 1950s to register Black voters in Dallas County. The registration campaign led to the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery.

In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down school segregation when it issued its Brown vs. Board of Education decision. The ruling stemmed from a case in Topeka, Kansas. It stated that racial segregation of children in public school was unconstitutional.

The supporters of segregated schools didn’t go down without a fight.

In Virginia, a “Massive Resistance” effort began after the 1954 ruling. It led to Prince Edward County closing its public schools from 1959 to 1964. White students went to private academies with tuition grants from local agencies. Black students were left to fend for themselves. Many moved to other counties.

In 1957, nine Black children were enrolled at the all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. The governor of that state sent National Guard soldiers to the campus to block the Black students from entering. President Dwight Eisenhower countered by sending federal troops to ensure the integration orders were carried out.

In 1960, Black university students staged sit-ins at Woolworth and S. H. Kress department stores in Columbia, South Carolina, to protest the “whites only” lunch counters. In 1962, they achieved victory as lunch counters in the city were desegregated. In response, state legislators voted to raise the Confederate flag over the State Capitol building.

In the 1960s, a series of new laws started to chip away at the Jim Crow institutions.

In 1964, the Civil Rights Act was signed by President Lyndon Johnson.

In 1965, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act.

And in 1968, the Fair Housing Act was approved.

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A campaign has begun by a number of civil rights groups to engage the country in a public discussion of race in America.

One of the hallmarks of this movement is the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opened in Montgomery, Alabama, in 2018. The facility is the nation’s first memorial dedicated to enslaved Black people as well as those who suffered under Jim Crow laws and those who have been the targets of police violence.

One of the prime topics the memorial highlights is the more than 4,000 lynchings that took place in the United States between 1877 and 1950. At the center of the site are 800 steel monuments representing the 800 U.S. counties where a racial terror lynching took place.

Other memorials in other towns are smaller but no less significant.

In 2019, two historical markers were dedicated in downtown Nashville, Tennessee, to remember four Black men who were lynched.

A historical marker is installed just outside Coatsville, Pennsylvania, to remember Zachariah Walker, a steel mill worker who shot and killed a security guard after a scuffle in 1911. A mob of about 2,000 people showed up and dragged Walker from his hospital bed. They built a bonfire and threw him in, not once, but three times as he tried to escape. He finally succumbed to the flames.

There’s also a historic marker near the Stewart Road Bridge in Columbia, Missouri. It was there that James T. Scott, a 37-year-old employee at the University of Missouri, was lynched after he was accused of sexually assaulting the 14-year-old daughter of a university professor. A mob had abducted him from his jail cell and hanged him from the bridge while hundreds of spectators watched.

A sculpture sits in a park in Springfield, Illinois, across the street from the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum to commemorate the 1908 race riot in which seven people were killed and businesses and homes owned by Black residents were torched. During the melee, white protesters reportedly chanted “Lincoln freed you. Now, we’ll show you where you belong.”

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As civil rights activists will tell you, the racist sentiments behind Jim Crow can flare up at any time.

It happened immediately after the Civil War.

It happened in the 1910s and 1920s.

It happened in the 1960s.

And it happened in the 2010s after Barack Obama was elected as the nation’s first Black president.

From the moment Obama took office in January 2009, a racial backlash emerged.

In the early days of Obama’s presidency, a company began selling a “Jolly Obama Bank” modeled after a racist piggy bank sold 100 years ago.

At the same time, members of the self-proclaimed Tea Party unleashed some subtle and not-so-subtle racially tinged attacks. They included protest signs with references to Africa, slaves and Muslims. Some covered their racial feelings by labeling Obama as a “socialist.”

Those sentiments brought about the “birther” movement in which supporters of the theory claimed that Obama was an illegitimate president because he was born in Kenya. As late as 2017, a majority of Republicans still believed the notion.

In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its Shelby vs. Holder decision in which it struck down a provision of the Voting Rights Act that required jurisdictions with a history of voter discrimination to submit any changes in voting procedures to federal officials.

According to several studies, the election of a Black president gave people moral justification for feeling that the rights of African-Americans were being given too much consideration. As one study summed it up, “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”

These feelings of racial resentment as well as anti-immigrant sentiment were both factors in the 2016 election victory of President Donald Trump, one of the early proponents of the birther movement.

The country’s racial divide led to a deadly confrontation just eight months after Trump took office. In August 2017, demonstrators gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia, to protest the removal of Confederate statues in the town. During the first night, the protesters lit tiki torches and chanted racial slogans. The next day, a group of white supremacists clashed with civil rights activists. At one point, a speeding car rammed the civil rights proponents, killing one demonstrator.

After that incident, supporters of equal rights started to increase their vigilance.

Following the 2018 midterm elections, Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams helped establish the organization Fair Fight. The group’s prime objective is to eliminate some of the obstacles to voter rights, including registration purges, shortage of polling places and restrictions on mail-in ballots.

The Black Lives Matter movement has also gained in significance. It was founded in 2013 after the acquittal of a white security guard who shot to death Black teenager Trayvon Martin. In the ensuing years, the group has organized protests following the killings of other Black men at the hands of white police officers.

Support for Black Lives Matter seemed split across the country, but that changed on May 25, 2020. That’s when 46-year-old George Floyd died after a white Minneapolis police officer put his knee on Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes during an arrest over a counterfeit $20 bill.

The video showing Floyd repeatedly saying he couldn’t breathe appeared to strike a chord across a broad swath of the country.

Protests broke out in virtually every state and lasted for weeks. The words “Black Lives Matter” were printed on signs and painted on streets. This time, the demonstrations included a significant percentage of white people.

The focus of the protests also spread beyond police violence against Black citizens.

The high proportion of African-Americans in prison became another issue in the spotlight. In 2012, author Michelle Alexander examined the mass incarceration of African-Americans in her book “The New Jim Crow.”

Next came the long simmering dissatisfaction with statues, military bases and other items named after high-ranking Confederate officials as well as others with dubious pasts on racial equality.

Finally, the death of longtime Congressman John Lewis from Atlanta, Georgia, revived memories of the Civil Rights era in the 1960s. The passing of Lewis, one of the primary participants in the 1965 Selma march, reminded much of the nation what activists were striving for in that decade and how it was time to get back to that kind of work.

All these factors from voting rights to police protests to the outrage over statues put a spotlight on the wide range of effects that Jim Crow sentiment can have on the country.

For some, it seemed like the events of 2020 may had finally beaten back the latest resurrection of the Jim Crow era.

However, in 2022, debates erupted over voting restrictions and crime and as well as so-called “critical race theory” being taught in schools.

For many, it appears the scourge of racism may be raising its ugly head again.