Jim Crow

Jim Crow refers to the legal and social order that separated white and Black Americans and kept Black people subordinate after Reconstruction. Many states and cities — not only in the South — punished interracial marriage and required businesses and public institutions to separate Black and white customers.

After federal troops withdrew from the South in 1877, white Democrats regained control and the number of Black officeholders declined. In the 1880s and 1890s, Southern states began writing segregation into law, and in the early 1890s they adopted literacy tests, “grandfather clauses” exempting men whose ancestors had voted before the Civil War, and other devices to disenfranchise Black voters despite the Fifteenth Amendment. The Supreme Court approved segregation in 1896. Lynching and other violence enforced the system, as journalists such as Ida B. Wells documented.

Black Americans resisted throughout: building institutions, challenging laws in court through organizations such as the NAACP, and, in the Great Migration, leaving the South by the millions.

Laws collected by the National Park Service show how far segregation reached: - Georgia barred Black and white amateur baseball teams from playing within two blocks of each other’s playgrounds. - Alabama required separate waiting rooms and ticket windows at bus stations. - Georgia forbade burying Black people in ground set apart for whites. - Florida punished unmarried interracial couples who lived together with up to a year in prison.