Jim Crow
By Tejah Broser In the early 1830’s, a white man named Thomas Dartmouth Rice became famous for playing a character named Jim Crow who was a slave that acted clumsy and dumb, for the entertainment of white people. Thomas said that he got the idea from a song he heard a black man singing one time called Jump Jim Crow so he would dance around and sing this song and it became popular with white people and ‘Jim Crow’ became a derogatory term for black people. This started a system of laws called the Jim Crow laws which formed out of the black codes, which mostly operated in the south and the states bordering which spanned from 1876 to the 1960s. These laws were different in every state but they were mostly restricting African Americans and other non-white people from living their new found freedom from the civil war. A few examples of these laws were that you couldn’t have a restaurant unless you had two separate rooms to separate black and white people. A white person could not marry an African American person unless they were less than 12% African American, if they did get married, they would be fined $550 and imprisonment for 5 years. White children and black children could not go to school together or use the same books. They could not purchase or drink alcohol in the same building or they would be fined $500 and be sent to prison for up to two years. Over 200 different laws were passed during this time but one of the most prominent ones were that African Americans couldn’t vote. After the civil war, the 15th amendment was passed giving black men the right to vote but it didn’t work out that way. White people would make it very hard for black men to vote, telling them they got the day wrong or they were in the wrong place or in most southern states, they would make them recite the whole constitution before they could vote and if they could not, they were not aloud to vote. It took a very long time and many brave people to overturn these laws. One of these people was Rosa Parks, she refused to give up her seat in a bus to a white man and she was taken to jail and her case was contested which was one of the biggest and most effective act to end these laws. The laws were finally abolished on July 2nd, 1964 when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. |
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Sources: http://www.history.com/news/ask-history/was-jim-crow-a-real-person
https://ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/what/
https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/eras/civil-war-reconstruction/jim-crow-laws-andracial-segregation/
http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/voting-rights-act
http://americanhistory.si.edu/brown/history/1-segregated/white-only-1.html
https://ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/what/
https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/eras/civil-war-reconstruction/jim-crow-laws-andracial-segregation/
http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/voting-rights-act
http://americanhistory.si.edu/brown/history/1-segregated/white-only-1.html