Who or what was Jim Crow

Q. Who or what was Jim Crow
A. The Jim Crow Law is a general term covering any of the laws that were brought in to enforce racial segregation in the southern states of the USA.

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Q. Why Jim Crow
A. An American entertainer named Thomas Dartmouth 'Daddy' Rice had a huge hit in 1828 with song and dance routine called 'Jim Crow Jump', and thereafter he became known as Jim Crow Rice. Although not the first performer to 'black up', Rice made his mark with his minstrel shows, and was enormously popular both in the USA and Britain, where he toured in the 1830s. Other minstrel acts grew up from the 1840s onwards and remained a favourite form of entertainment until quite recent times - the first ever talking film, The Jazz Singer (1927), famously features Al Jolson in full black make-up singing 'Mammy', and, lest we forget, our own BBC was running that Saturday-night crowd-pleaser The Black and White Minstrel Show well into the 1970s. The less than flattering portrayal of African-Americans in these shows led to the term Jim Crow being used as a derogatory term for black people, for the segregation of whites and blacks and thence to the laws brought in after the American Civil War to uphold white supremacy in the South.

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Q. When was Jim Crow legally in force in the South
A. The starting date is given as 1877, the year that formal Reconstruction of the South after the American Civil War came to an end. After this time Southern state legislatures began to pass laws requiring the separation of whites from 'persons of colour' on public transport. The definition of 'person of colour' was so strict that anyone even suspected of some non-white ancestry, whether apparent or not, was classed as such. Segregation became a mission designed to make sure that white and black never mixed on equal terms. The principal soon spread to schools, public parks, cemeteries, theatres, restaurants and other public places.

This situation remained unchanged until the 1950s, when it finally began to break down. In 1954 the Supreme Court declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional and subsequent decisions ruled similarly on other kinds of Jim Crow legislation. The event that really kick-started the change and focused the world's attention on the absurdity of the laws came in 1955, when a black woman, Rosa Parks, was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for not giving up her seat on the bus to a white passenger who wanted it. As municipal law required her to give the seat up, she was, legally in the wrong. The incident sparked a year-long bus boycott, which marked the beginning of the modern civil-rights movement in the USA.

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Q. How does 'Jim Crow Jump' go
A. Here are a few lines [spellings sic]:

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Wheel about and turn about
And do jis so
Ebry time I wheel about
I jump Jim Crow

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Find out more about Phrases & Sayings here

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By Simon Smith