The Jim Crow Laws is an unofficial name which is commonly applied to the system of racial segregation which was introduced in the southern states of the United States in the aftermath of the American Civil War (1861–1865). The war ended in defeat for the southern Confederacy and brought an end to slavery. A policy of Reconstruction was briefly attempted and failed, leading in the 1870s to the inception of the Jim Crow Laws. Through these African Americans were treated as second-class citizens in states from Georgia and the Carolinas west through Alabama and Tennessee to places like Texas and Louisiana. For instance, better schools and public services were reserved for white Americans, while separate or segregated public bathrooms and even seating areas on buses were put in place for different racial groups. The Jim Crow Laws lasted for the better part of a century and were only finally brought to an end through the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Segregation contributed towards quite a lot of African American migration in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. Millions of Americans joined the Great Migration from southern states to cities like Detroit, St Louis, Atlanta, New York, Pittsburgh and Chicago to take up industrial jobs, aware that both their social and economic positions would be better in what were primarily northern cities.[1]
Research your ancestors on MyHeritage
Jim Crow Laws chronology of eventsJim Crow Laws chronology of events
The first permanent English colony in North America was founded at Jamestown in Virginia in 1607. The first slaves from western Africa were transported here in 1619, although the system of slavery only developed over time into the system of mass abuse which it became. Early on, many Africans were treated as indentured servants, much like poor Irish people arriving to the colonies, and were able to win their freedom at the end of a period of hard labor, usually consisting of seven years. By the second half of the seventeenth century this was changing quickly and a series of increasingly more Draconian slave laws were instituted in colonies like Virginia, Maryland and the Carolinas in the 1660s and 1670s that created the chattel slavery of the Southern Colonies.[2]
Slaves were transported into each of the Thirteen Colonies that the English developed along what is now the East Coast of the United States, from New England south to Georgia. But the level of slavery practiced in these varied greatly. Owing to the more urban and proto-industrial nature of their societies and economies, the Northern Colonies in New England such as Massachusetts did not practice slavery extensively, though it was a feature of life there at the same time. The picture was more mixed in the Middle Colonies around New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Slavery was not uncommon at all in New York, but it was virtually unseen in Pennsylvania, a colony established by the Quakers and other religious minorities who viewed it as unethical and who led the trans-Atlantic Abolition movement in England and the United States from the mid-eighteenth century onwards. In the Southern Colonies (Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia), it was practiced to a huge extent. The economy of these five colonies was overwhelmingly reliant on cultivation of tobacco and cotton as cash crops. Therefore slavery was practiced wholesale on large rural estates and became central to how life operated here.[3]
The divisions over the issue of slavery within the different regions of the nascent United States were evident from the very birth of the country. By the 1780s, just as the American Revolutionary War was ending in US independence, some northern states were already moving towards ending slavery. Conversely, a majority of white people in the southern states remained adamant that there would be no outlawing of the institution in their part of the new country. These tensions were put to one side until well into the nineteenth century. What caused them to boil over was the expansion of the country westward from the 1810s onwards and the issue of whether or not slavery should be allowed in newly created states.[4]
Although successive government in the 1840s and 1850s tried to ignore the growing problem as the American West opened up and new states were starting to come into existence every few years, it escalated and the election of Abraham Lincoln as the US President in the election of November 1860 saw things reach a tipping point. Several of the southern states, led by South Carolina initially, seceded from the Union and formed a separate Confederate States of America. This triggered the outbreak of the American Civil War in April 1861. The war, as is well-known, went on for four years, eventually ending in the defeat of the South and the victory of the North. In the middle of it, Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation, whereby slavery was decreed to be at an end throughout the country. This came into effect in each Confederate state as Confederate forces were defeated in them in 1864 and 1865.[5]
The anti-slavery North had emerged victorious from the civil war, but ending slavery and removing an entrenched culture of one racial group completely dominating another were two different things. In an effort to address this, Lincoln’s two immediate successors as President, Andrew Johnson and Ulysses S. Grant, attempted a policy known as Reconstruction. This sought to reform the southern states and make them more like the northern ones, in particular by addressing the racial issue. It failed, in part because the 1877 US Presidential Election was so close that in order for Rutherford B. Hayes to get over the line in the electoral college dispute, a political compromise was reached whereby the southern states would be allowed to end Reconstruction and adopt a more reactive set of policies.[6]
The reactive set of policies that ensued are known as the Jim Crow Laws or the policy of Segregation. The name 'Jim Crow' comes from a character that appeared in black face in minstrel performances in the southern states in the nineteenth century.[7] These laws involved creating a post-slavery society in the south wherein African Americans were still categorized as second-class citizens. Laws were introduced to separate society, creating different schools, bathrooms and many other services for white and black people.
The Jim Crow system was highly oppressive, with white people often having much better services, more funding, better jobs and the like, while also largely monopolizing political power. In this sense it was similar to the Apartheid system that was developed in South Africa in 1948. Therefore, when large amounts of industrial jobs became available in cities like Detroit, New York, Pittsburgh, Chicago and St Louis in the more northerly states from the late nineteenth century onwards, African Americans from the southern states began moving in large numbers northwards, a process known as the Great Migration. This would eventually involve millions of African Americans.[8]
The Jim Crow Laws lasted almost exactly a century. They were being challenged in court by the early twentieth century. These legal cases garnered greater and greater attention in the aftermath of the Second World War and a number of landmark cases concerning Segregation were won such as Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which declared that Segregation in schools was fundamentally in breach of the US Constitution.[9] These legal cases, combined with the Civil Rights Movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s, led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, which officially brought the Jim Crow Laws to an end.[10]
Extent of migration associated with the Jim Crow LawsExtent of migration associated with the Jim Crow Laws
The migration of African Americans in the US took place over the entirety of the period between the end of the civil war in 1865 and the introduction of the Civil Rights Act 99 years later. It was most intense between 1910 and 1960, during which time an estimated six million African Americans moved from primarily rural communities in the southern states to growing cities in the north.[11] The most intense era of the Great Migration was actually in the post-Second World War period. An estimated 1.4 million African Americans migrated northwards in the 1940s, almost entirely in the second half of the decades once the war ended. This was followed by the movement of over a million more people in the 1950s and as much as two million in the course of the 1960s and early 1970s. Thus, the migratory impact of the Jim Crow Laws continued to be felt even after the Civil Rights Act had brought Segregation to an official end.[12]
Demographic impact of the Jim Crow LawsDemographic impact of the Jim Crow Laws
The demographic impact of the Jim Crow Laws and the Great Migration which they contributed to was immense. It led to the emergence of large African American communities in cities like St Louis, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, New York, Chicago and Detroit between the 1880s and the 1950s. Quantifying this is difficult. Even if Reconstruction had succeeded and the Jim Crow Laws had never been introduced, there would still have been a significant amount of migration from the southern states to the emerging industrial cities of the Gilded Age, as this was a common occurrence in any industrializing country of the era. The Great Migration, and the Jim Crow Laws which contributed in part to it, reshaped the demographic landscape of the United States.[13] It also led a cultural and social resurgence for the country's African American people, notably in the case of the Harlem Renaissance in New York during the 1920s.[14]
See alsoSee also
Explore more about the Jim Crow LawsExplore more about the Jim Crow Laws
- U.S. City Directories records collection on MyHeritage
- United States Newspapers from OldNews.com records collection on MyHeritage
- United States Obituary Index from Online Sources records collection on MyHeritage
- 1870 United States Federal Census records collection on MyHeritage
- 1900 United States Federal Census records collection on MyHeritage
- 1950 United States Federal Census records collection on MyHeritage
- African American Genealogy Challenges: What You Need to Know! at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Best Internet Resources for African American Genealogy at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- African American Genealogy Resources at the Library of Congress at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- African American Research 101 – Post-Civil War to the Present at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- African American Research 101 – Reconstruction Era at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
References
- ↑ Kenneth W. Mack, ‘Law, Society, Identity, and the Making of the Jim Crow South’, in Law & Social Inquiry, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Spring, 1999), pp. 377–409.
- ↑ https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1740/virginia-slave-laws-and-development-of-colonial-am/
- ↑ https://www.history.com/articles/slavery
- ↑ https://www.humanitiesforwisdom.org/uploads/5/8/9/8/58987361/a_house_divided.pdf
- ↑ https://www.history.com/articles/american-civil-war-history
- ↑ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/reconstruction-timeline/
- ↑ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/freedom-riders-jim-crow-laws/
- ↑ Stewart E. Tolnay, ‘The African American "Great Migration" and Beyond’, in Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 29 (2003), pp. 209–232.
- ↑ https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/brown-v-board-of-education
- ↑ https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/civil-rights-act
- ↑ https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/immigration/african/moving-north-heading-west/
- ↑ https://faculty.washington.edu/gregoryj/second_great_migration.htm
- ↑ Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck, ‘Black Flight: Lethal Violence and the Great Migration, 1900–1930’, in Social Science History, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Autumn, 1990), pp. 347–370.
- ↑ https://www.historytoday.com/focus/history-harlem-renaissance