Professor Ira Katznelson argues that U.S. government policies, beginning in the 1930s, favored white citizens over black citizens in practice, even if the policies' wordings were race-neutral. He discusses this in relation to affirmative-action policies favoring minorities today.
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Professor Mary Frances Berry reviews the life of Callie House, an ex-slave and civil rights activist in the late 1800s and early 1900s who started the Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association, which sought African-American pensions based on those offered Union soldiers. Berry presents House as a forerunner of figures such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Her presentation includes a question-and-answer session.
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How did segregation shape daily life for generations of African Americans and how do its legacies remain with us today?
Textbooks locate segregation’s origins in Southern disenfranchisement laws of the 1890s and highlight the Supreme Court's 1896 "separate but equal" ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson. New job opportunities during World War I and the Great Migration are briefly addressed along with "custom and tradition". Textbooks emphasize the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's legal challenges, and portray the 1954 Brown v. Board decision as the culmination of the fight. Thus, according to the textbooks, from the 1890s to the 1950s, African Americans endured as best they could.
Primary sources provide ample evidence of segregation's brutality. They demonstrate the kind of structural inequalities that white supremacist laws and practices institutionalized but also that African Americans embraced a variety of methods to combat Jim Crow's injustices, and that white allies occasionally joined them. Collectively, the primary sources included here reveal how geography, class, gender, and culture have influenced ongoing battles for justice, as have changing national and international contexts.
Historians debate the origins of Jim Crow, but it is important to remember that slavery had mandated the use of laws and practices to govern interracial relations. Separation from whites by choice accompanied freed people's desire for independence from their former white owners even as they expected the full and equal citizenship guaranteed to them by the 14th Amendment.
Segregation contradicts what most students have learned about American freedom and democracy. Textbooks discuss de jure [in law] segregation as a great inconvenience that began in the 1890s and soon spread to every aspect of Southern daily life. Most routinely ignore:
Textbooks that portray segregation as a prelude to a more celebratory narrative of the civil rights era collapse the history of earlier generations of African Americans into a monolithic victimhood.
While the South's vicious de jure system stands apart, the rest of the nation's reliance on both informal custom and formal policy means that segregation—as well as the white supremacy and federal complicity that sustained it—cannot be dismissed as a regional aberration in an otherwise democratic nation.
Segregation contradicts what most students have learned about American freedom and democracy. Textbooks locate segregation's origins in southern disenfranchisement laws of the 1890s and highlight the Supreme Court's 1896 "separate but equal" ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson. The majority of African Americans still lived in the south and worked as agricultural laborers for white landowners who denied them an education and exploited them economically. New job opportunities during World War I offered one escape.
Graduate student Rachel Reinhard explores the African American struggle to realize voting rights in Mississippi during and following the Civil Rights Movement.
During the World War II years, a series of groundbreaking radio programs tried to mend the deep racial and ethnic divisions that threatened America. At a time when blacks were usually shown on the radio as lazy buffoons, the federal government and civil rights activists used radio for a counter attack. Did radio unify America in the face of war? This documentary is divided into three downloadable sections.
To listen to this documentary, select "Part One," "Part Two," or "Part Three" beside the text "Radio Fights Jim Crow."
For much of the 20th century, African Americans in the South were barred from the voting booth, sent to the back of the bus, and walled off from many of the rights they deserved as American citizens. Until well into the 1960s, segregation was legal. The system was called Jim Crow. In this radio documentary, Americans—black and white—remember life in the Jim Crow times. The documentary is divided into three downloadable sections.
To listen to this documentary, select "Part One," "Part Two," or "Part Three" under "Listen."
This iCue Mini-Documentary describes how, at the outbreak of World War I, industries in the north opened employment to African Americans. They left the south in record numbers for jobs in the north.
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Following the 1896 Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson, "Jim Crow laws," which discriminated against African Americans, were justified as offering "separate but equal" accommodations. Overturned in 1954 by the case Brown v. Board of Education, segregation began long before Plessy. Answer these questions on the history of Jim Crow.
1. The term "Jim Crow" originally referred to:
b. A popular burlesque song and theatrical dance number
White actor, singer, and dancer, Thomas D. Rice, wrote and performed "Jim Crow" (sometimes called "Jump Jim Crow" because of the first line of the chorus) in 1829 or 1830. To perform the song, Rice dressed in tattered rags and frolicked comically to impersonate a very low caricature of a black man. His performances became an overnight sensation among white audiences, and he performed all over the country. He then took his act to Britain and France, where it became an even bigger hit.
One dismayed English drama critic in the London Satirist, however, wrote: "Talent is of no country, neither is folly; and were 'Jim Crow' of English creation, we should have assuredly dealt as severely with it as we have now done with the bantling of the new world--perhaps more so, for we would have strangled it in its birth to prevent it begetting any more of its own species to offend the world's eye with their repulsive deformities. The circumstance of its being an exotic, the production of the pestilential marshes of backwood ignorance, has had no effect with us in giving our opinion. There is no concealing the fact, that Jim Crow owes its temporary triumph in this country to one of those lapses of human nature which sometimes occurs, when the senses run riot, and a sort of mental saturnalia takes place." Quoted in "Jim Crowism," Spirit of the Times (New York), February 4, 1837.
2. "Jim Crow cars" were separate railway passenger cars in which blacks were forced to travel, instead of in the passenger cars in which whites took their seats. The term "Jim Crow cars" first came into use:
a. In the mid-1830s, in Massachusetts and Connecticut
Segregated public transportation began in the North before the Civil War. In many parts of the South, a black could not travel at all, unless he or she was accompanying (or accompanied by) a white, or carrying a pass from a white person.
The inconsistencies themselves bred conflict. One Massachusetts newspaper editor wrote, "South of the Potomac, slaves ride inside of stage-coaches with their masters and mistresses—north of the Potomac they must travel on foot, in their own hired vehicles, or in the 'Jim Crow' car. … What a black man is, depends on where he is. He has no nature of his own; that depends upon his location. Moreover the contradictions that appertain to him, produce corresponding contradictions in the white man. … Seriously, very seriously—do not the incongruities, the strange anomalies, in the condition of the coloured race, clearly show there is terrible wrong somewhere? … The confusion of tongues is terrible; the confusion of ideas is worse." From "Incongruities of Slavery," The Friend, March 26, 1842, quoting the [Worcester] Massachusetts Spy.
3. Among the very first deliberate African American challengers to Jim Crow practices in public transportation was:
b. Frederick Douglass, who refused, in 1841, to give up the first-class seat on the Eastern Railroad he took when he boarded the train at Newburyport, MA, and move to the train's Jim Crow car
Douglass may not have been the very first, but he appears to have been one of the first. African Americans in New England, beginning in late 1839, along with white abolitionists, with some successes, deliberately challenged extra-legal but fairly common Jim Crow accommodations on railroads, on stagecoaches, in churches ("Negro pews"), and in schools. The persistence of Jim Crow practices in the North, however, gave Southern slave-holding whites the opportunity to reproach even abolitionist Northern whites for "not treating their free blacks better."
4. After the Civil War, the practice of formally segregating whites and blacks working in Federal Government offices was instituted during the administration of which U.S. President?
c. Woodrow Wilson
Woodrow Wilson, who had been born in Virginia, soon after he took office in 1913, began a government-wide segregation of blacks and whites in Federal workplaces, restrooms, and lunchrooms. The policy appears to have been instituted after Wilson's Georgia-born wife Ellen visited the Bureau of Printing and Engraving in Washington and "saw white and negro women working side by side." Wilson's Secretary of the Treasury, William McAdoo (also Georgia-born, and soon to be the Wilsons' son-in-law) took the hint. Shortly thereafter, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury John Skelton Williams issued an order segregating the races in the Bureau. A Washington-wide order, covering all Government offices, followed, and soon all Federal offices everywhere in the country were covered by the same order.
Looking for more on Jim Crow laws and the impact of segregation on African Americans' lives? Try American Public Media's Remembering Jim Crow, for excerpts of oral histories from those who lived through segregation. Their close-to-an-hour-long radio program, Radio Fights Jim Crow, also looks at segregation—this time, at World War II-era radio programs that challenged civil rights abuses and stereotypes of African Americans.
The History of Jim Crow, created to accompany the PBS documentary miniseries The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow, goes beyond guides to the series' four parts, providing essays, interactive maps, and lesson plans.
Race and Place: An African-American Community in the Jim Crow South: Charlottesville, VA, maintained by the University of Virginia, traces racism and segregation through the history of one city, with primary sources including oral histories, personal papers, newspapers, images, census data, maps, city records, and political materials.
For six lesson plans on segregation and education in a one-room Virginia schoolhouse, visit Teaching at Laurel Grove, from the Laurel Grove School Association.
From the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History:
"This seminar explores the rise of Jim Crow in the United States and tracks it forward to its modern post-civil rights manifestations. Seminar participants will work with a range of primary sources to interpret the shifting social, economic, political, psychological, and cultural trauma associated with this set of racial practices. Close attention will be paid to the effects of Jim Crow on both sides of the color line."
This iCue Mini-Documentary describes the early-20th-century setbacks in civil rights, as racial segregation was common on rail cars, in schools, and in the workplace.
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