Jim Crow: A Complicated History

History tells us that in 1865, Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves a century goes by, then we have a Civil Rights movement then fifty years later, Black Lives Matter. Most American history books do not dig further into what happened in between. Sure people know who Dr. Martin Luther King Jr is and others know that after the Civil War, there was an era known as Jim Crow, but what exactly is Jim Crow? Is he a person? Laws? Many students do not know the answer and we here at Reconstructing Black Facts will tell you the answer. But like most history blogs, there is so much detail that goes into telling exactly what and who is Jim Crow. Today we will look into who he was, what the cultural meaning of Jim Crow was and how Jim Crow shapes life today. To do this, we will go back in time.

1830s-1870s:

If we want to know who Jim Crow the person is, we have to look at where Jim Crow came from. Jim Crow originated from minstrel shows. Minstrel shows are comedic plays that White people put on to make fun of Black people. Minstrel shows date back to the 1830s and gained popularity between the 1850s through the 1870s. The character Jim Crow gained popularity because of a man named, Thomas Rice in 1828. The way that he would get ready was to paint his face black; all except his eyes and around his mouth to display a big mouthed individual; and talk in broken English as a slave would. Slaves would talk the way that they did due to a lack of education because in most states, African Americans and Enslaved African Americans were not allowed to get an education. Rice began this act known as Jim Crow and it became extremely popular among minstrel show viewers. The audience's attendance is the equivalent of a football game where people would cheer, boo and laugh hysterically. As the character, Jim Crow grew in popularity, so did the suffering of African Americans. Slavery was still going on during the rise of Jim Crow the character and it was not sunshine and daisies. Enslaved Blacks were still being tortured, raped, beaten and overworked by their slave masters and this would not end until the 1860s and 1870s, when Jim Crow the character was at his height of existence.

1870s-1920s:

After slavery ended, the Confederate States had to rejoin the Union, but under some conditions. The Confederate states were told that each political figure had to be pardoned by President Andrew Johnson personally, ratify their own amendments by stating that succession was wrong and to put in their constitutions that slavery was officially over. For a bit of context, after the war ended, President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated and his vision for what was to come for Black people after slavery was over would not happen. Instead, President Andrew Johnson created his own idea for Black people and what their rights would be. The Thirteenth amendment; which got rid of slavery; was a starting point for Black people to no longer be under the authority of their slave masters and now instead of being labeled property, now they were considered people. The Fourteenth amendment made it possible for Black people to become citizens of the United States, which would allow them to be able to vote, own property, and have businesses. What the Fifteenth amendment did was prohibited the Federal Government from telling a United States citizen that they cannot vote based on their race. You would think that after these laws were written, that everything would be okay for Black people, but this was not the case. Many events would happen that made it close to impossible for Black people to still be considered full citizens.

Ironically, the Three-Fifths Compromise of 1788 says that "Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons," so having Black people still feeling like 3/5th a person even after slavery was over was ironic. Also, Southern States began implementing Black Codes, which were laws laid out specifically for Black people telling them what they could and could not do. These laws prevented Black people from voting, having mass gatherings, and owning property. Black people were being more and more restricted and after Federal troops were pulled from Southern States, the laws got worse for them. In 1865, the Ku Klux Klan was founded by former Confederates to figure out how to combat the issue of Black people having the same freedoms and rights that they did. Violence began to take the lives of many Black people and this would cause Southern States to implement segregation laws. Segregation was a form of "separate but equal" mentality that said that White people and Black people did not have to work, go to school together and allow someone from another race to use your business. Plessy vs Ferguson was the court case that ruled on this in 1896. Black people now have terrible schools, businesses and jobs because they were still subhuman in the eyes of White people which in return made it difficult for them to achieve greatness.

What Does This Have To Do With Jim Crow?

What this has to do with Jim Crow is the era in which Black people were living in and having to live in these terrible times. The term Jim Crow shifted meaning. It was not about a fictional character that was goofy and silly, but now a time period of violence and difficulty for Black people. For Black people, it was more difficult to get a job, go to school, vote and not be pestered for their own race.

White people continued to look down on Black people as inferior and did not want anything to do with them. The violence that Black people endured during the Jim Crow era was large. Lynchings were more widespread during the end of Reconstruction. Lynching is a group activity where White people gather around and torture one Black person or multiple and make it into a spectacle. These were seen as fun, special events where children were able to leave school early, you could leave work early and it was the equivalent of a concert. The excitement of the crowd did not matter, if you were a White person watching the event, you were proud of your race for participating in it. Lynching for Black people was always a fear in the back of their heads. Between 1880 and 1890, one person would be lynched every other day in America. Between 1880 and 1968, one person would be lynched a week in America. The disgusting act of lynching will always be unjust, but in most of these cases, the reasons a lynching would happen was because a Black person doing something that they should not have been, or wrong place wrong time. White people did not discriminate against who they would lynch either. Men, women, and children were subjected to lynchings. Lynchings were a massive problem but so were race riots. If a Black person was accused of committing a crime, mostly Black men being accused of raping a White women with no evidence, they would be lynched or if they were able to escape without harm, White people wanted nothing more than to make other Black people pay. The race riot of Tulsa happened because someone thought that a Black man assaulted a White woman. Black Wall Street was burned to the ground with many Black people burned alive, shot, killed and ran out of their towns with no reparations to this day.

Other Entertainment and Jim Crow:

Jim Crow never went away after people stopped performing the act, though it did evolve. One of the first ways that it evolved was through the form of film. One of the first few films that would signify how the Ku Klux Klan felt about Black people would be Birth of a Nation, which came out in 1915. Birth of a Nation had a scene in it where a Black man was trying to rape a White woman and the White woman jumped off of a cliff rather than be raped. The Klan found out and found the man who did it and found him guilty by comparing his skin to something that was black. They would kill him. The KKK would see a rise in men and women applying to be apart of the Klan. White people were excited to be vigilantes to the "black problem" and this single film would solidify the real truth that Black lives were not important to anyone. The sitting President at the time, Woodrow Wilson had the film projected at the White House calling it, "It's like writing history with lightening, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true" (History.com). The authenticity of this quote is currently being debated due to how racist President Wilson was. Birth of a Nation was the starting point of making Jim Crow reach more White people so that they can approve of the Jim Crow laws that were being implemented and what the KKK was doing to them. Four years after Birth of a Nation came out, Red Summer would spread across America. Red Summer were a number of Race Riots that happened during the Summer of 1919. Many African Americans died, but the influence of the KKK and the movie Birth of a Nation were the reasons that the race problem got so out of hand.

Birth of a Nation paved the way for more racist films, specifically racist cartoons. Cartoons became the new and popular attraction during the 1920s and 1930s. Characters such as Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny, though not started yet, were being paved for but these cartoons had racist undertones in them. Mickey Mouse would wear blackface just as the Jim Crow actors would in their comedic shows. This would not be the only celebrity cartoon to do this, Bugs Bunny, Tom and Jerry, and Minnie Mouse would also wear Blackface during some of their respective episodes. Merrie Melodies, the show that made Bugs Bunny famous, has a Censored 11, that is never allowed to be played on television. This is due to the extremely racist animation and characters that were featured in the episodes. I will link a playlist from YouTube so you can see how badly portrayed the Censored 11 is. Throughout the years, Disney has been giving warnings to their viewers about how racist some of their movies used to be. For example, The Jungle Book has a song about monkeys wanting to be like the humans. Though this was not directly an attack on Black people, many speculated that Walt Disney was a racist who thought White people were better than Black people. Today's Disney apologized for the episodes, shows and movies that depicted Black people as idiots and uneducated people. In the movie Dumbo, one of the characters is a crow. A crow named Jim. Jim Crow. How poetic.

Has it Gotten Better?

Jim Crow was officially over once the Civil Rights movement was at its peak. No more were Black people going to be segregated from White people. No more were literacy tests and having to pay stopped Black people from voting. No longer were racist governors going to prevent Black people from having the same rights as White people. The question of has it gotten better is tricky, so to answer the question, as a historian for African American history, you have to have a understanding that racist laws evolved. The election of 2020 was evident that there are some who have a problem with the mass of United States citizens voting in Presidential elections. Though they say their concern is fair voting, those same politicians were not screaming fair voting during the Civil Right's Movement and were calling for States' Rights when Black people were getting more freedoms after the Civil Right's movement. After Lyndon B Johnson, former Presidents Nixon were claiming States' Rights were being taken away because Black people were voting more than ever before.

According to John Ehrlichman, "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did...". The War on Drugs is another topic for another day, but just know that the War on Drugs was the beginnings of modern mass incarceration. arresting Blacks in mass was one of the ways the Jim Crow evolved. Keeping Black people in jail rather than not in jail prevents them from voting. Also, if you are a criminal, you cannot vote in the United States elections. Another way that Jim Crow evolved was the issue of ghettos. Black neighborhoods always existed due to segregation, but once the government brought drugs and guns into those neighborhoods, then criminalizing heavy drugs so that Black people could be arrested in mass, Black people began to fight one another instead of fighting the racist institutions that got them where they were in the first place.

It is important to know the backstory of history. Especially when the negative history is not being rid of but rather evolving. Everyone should know Black history because Black history is American history. If nothing is done to the racist laws that evolved than the racist laws will keep negatively affecting Black people. We must be educated on the racist past so that we can change the laws and make it so the government cannot make the laws happen again. Thank you for reading and remember to keep learning.

https://www.ferris.edu/htmls/news/jimcrow/origins.htm

https://www.americanheritage.com/blackface-sad-history-minstrel-shows

https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/generic/14thAmendment.htm

https://guides.lib.jjay.cuny.edu/c.php?g=288398&p=1922458

https://www.thirteen.org/wnet/slavery/experience/legal/docs2.html

https://www.crf-usa.org/brown-v-board-50th-anniversary/southern-black-codes.html

https://americanhistory.si.edu/brown/history/1-segregated/separate-but-equal.html

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jamerethnhist.30.1.0129

https://www.history.com/news/kkk-birth-of-a-nation-film

https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/wwi/red-summer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9EfD32Bjts

https://www.businessinsider.com/nixon-adviser-ehrlichman-anti-left-anti-black-war-on-drugs-2019-7