What Were Jim Crow Laws?

Jim Crow laws were implemented in the former Confederate states. Just after the Civil War was the reconstruction period where a fair amount of control was imposed on the former Confederate states from the national government. Black people could vote, own land and businesses and the like. Black people were elected to public office, including people sent to the House of Representatives and two black people were elected to the US Senate from Mississippi. Ordinary black people could buy land, build up a little wealth, run businesses and the like. Obviously, the white people in the south who had started the Civil War and lost it did not like this. There was segregation and many other problems during this period, but it seemed like many steps in the right direction.

But national politics turned, and the southerners managed to get the federal controls on the south removed, allowing the whites to reassert their racist power, leading to the Jim Crow period from about 1890 to the Civil Rights era starting in the late 1950s

The most obvious aspect of Jim Crow was segregation. Separate schools for black and white kids, with the schools for black kids being very underfunded. In many stores, restaurants and the like, black people could not enter the front door - the businesses wanted their money, but if they wanted to buy something, they had to wait at the back door on the alley near the trash cans. Obviously, black people weren't allowed to do any "good" jobs and were relegated to difficult, low-paid jobs. Also, many towns had things like "sundown rules" - black people were only allowed to live on the outskirts of towns or in certain areas, and would be either legally punished or violently attacked if they were caught in "white" areas of town after sunset.

But it was much more than that. A range of things were done to prevent black Americans from being able to vote in elections. In some cases it was things like a poll tax to prevent all poor people from voting, in others it was a trumped up test, where white people were always graded correct, and black always wrong. But in some cases was simply violence - if a black person tried to register to vote, the KKK would come and attack them.

During this period, most black farmers and business owners were run out of business. They would be denied loans by banks, they would be cheated or intimidated into selling their land and buildings, keeping almost all black people in poverty.

But there were even worse aspects of this period. Above I've written about all the types of problems I learned about at an excellent American high school in a northern big city. But recent work by historians has uncovered much worse problems that existed through this period.

One summary of these is the book Slavery by Another Name by Douglas Blackmon. During this period, healthy black men could be arrested and charged with a wide range of bogus crimes, such as "vagrancy" - not being able to prove you have a job. They would be denied any contact with their families, convicted of these "crimes" and sentenced to a fine. Without contact with anyone else, they couldn't pay the fine, so the corrupt court would "sell" them to various businesses, who would use them as de facto slaves.

These businesses often did very dangerous work in isolated places, such as mining or the production of turpentine deep in isolated pine forests. They were free to starve and beat the men, and other than loosing a worker, there was no consequence if they murdered these men.

Many thousands of black men across the south would disappear. Many would never return and their families would never know that they had died and been dumped into shallow, unmarked graves. Others would return years later, broken from the torture.

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