Jim Crow

A term that refers to the racial segregation that had existed de facto in the United States prior to the Civil War (primarily brought about as a result of the massive immigration of the European working class and peasantry to the United States in the early 1800s) that became de jure, mostly but not only in the South, following the abolition of slavery. This juridically-based form of segregation arose by means of a set of discriminatory racist laws that were enacted by mostly Southern states on the back of the old "slave codes" and the newer (1865-1866) racially discriminatory "black codes" with the return to power of the former confederate governments (effected through political corruption and terrorism—see Nieman [1991]) in the post-Reconstruction era, in spite of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. constitution that had firmly established the civil and human rights of African Americans.[1]

The power of an alliance of Euro-American agrarian and urban capitalist classes in the U.S. South bent on restoring as many features of the old slave order as possible, operating through such terrorist groups as the Ku Klux Klan, was such that not only did they systematically and brutally disenfranchise African Americans (and other racial/ethnic minorities), but managed to create a political and legal environment in which a racist U.S. Supreme Court unjustly reversed the legislative intent of the Amendments—by means of a ruling in an infamous case called Plessey v. Ferguson (1896) in which the Court came up with the bogus doctrine of “separate but equal.” (This doctrine would not be overturned until a ruling in another Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education [1954]). However, like its counterpart, Apartheid, Jim Crow evolved to be more than simply racial segregation; it was a neo-fascist political economic order, a proto-totalitarian system, at the heart of which was the massive economic exploitation of African Americans and in which the civil and human rights of those whites who opposed racial segregation (albeit a courageous but very tiny minority) were also wiped out.

The term "Jim Crow" itself is said to have originated from a song sung by an enslaved and disabled African American "owned" by a Mr. Jim Crow and overheard and later popularized (beginning in 1828 in Louisville) by Daddy Rice (Thomas Dartmouth Rice) through the medium of black minstrel shows—comedic song and dance routines performed by whites in blackface based on highly demeaning negative stereotypes of African Americans. The song’s refrain went:

Wheel about and turn about

And do jis so,

Ebry time I wheel about

I jump Jim Crow