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US history
Course: US history > Unit 6
Lesson 2: The South after the Civil War- Life after slavery for African Americans
- The origins of Jim Crow - introduction
- Origins of Jim Crow - the Black Codes and Reconstruction
- Origins of Jim Crow - the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments
- Origins of Jim Crow - Compromise of 1877 and Plessy v. Ferguson
- Plessy v. Ferguson
- The Compromise of 1877
- Jim Crow
- The New South
- The South after the Civil War
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The origins of Jim Crow - introduction
Who or what was Jim Crow? Kim discusses the origin of Jim Crow segregation in the American South.
Want to join the conversation?
- how long did it take segregation to completely stop?(2 votes)
- The legacies of segregation such as redlining, steering and white flight that result in de-facto segregation still exist today.(13 votes)
- Why was the Jim Crow laws not called unconstitutional?,(4 votes)
- There was a broad consortium of forces including local, state and regional, both political and social, that conspired to create, promote, sustain and grow the Jim Crow laws. Combined with judicial support and a lack of Federal intervention this culture was allowed to flourish until the 1960's and in many ways still exists today.(6 votes)
- What time frame were these laws active?(4 votes)
- They lasted for about 100 years. Some were still "active" as late as 1968. See:https://www.history.com/topics/early-20th-century-us/jim-crow-laws(3 votes)
- How did Jim Crow become legal?(2 votes)
- The legal system was stacked against African Americans. There wasn't anyone going up against the laws, so it was made easier to pass the laws.(6 votes)
- Who were the other characters in the Minstrel Show?
Did they also watch it in the South?
Why was it so popular in the North.
Were some of the characters African American.
When did slavery start and how did it start?
If someone could answer these questions that would be a great help.(4 votes) - Why didn't anyone(The Government) find out about people were abusing the law?(2 votes)
- Those in the government where the law was being abused just. flat. didn't. Care. OR, they were the ones abusing it themselves and it.worked.for. them.(4 votes)
- Atwhy is it 1877, wouldn't it start immediately after the states were readmitted? 0:14(1 vote)
- Up until 1877, the U.S. Army was stationed in the Southern states to ensure that they followed the law, that the rights of African-Americans were observed. After the Compromise of 1877, the troops were pulled out, and the Southern states began enacting the Black Code laws.(6 votes)
- why did he wear make-up on his face(2 votes)
- Because he wasn't actually black, so he used the makeup to act as though he was in order to play the character.(4 votes)
- Why did the end of slavery cause a problem?They were enlsaved for more than 200 years.(3 votes)
- Was jim crow the name of someone who hated colored people(2 votes)
- No, it was the name of a stereotypical character who was part of the minstrel show. This eventually became synonymous with African-Americans in the early 1900s(2 votes)
Video transcript
- [Voiceover] In this
video I want to talk about the System of Jim Crow Segregation, which was common in the United States from about 1877 to approximately 1954; although, it goes a little
bit further than that. Now, you're probably familiar
with some of the aspects of Jim Crow Segregation from
the Civil Rights Movement. Jim Crow Segregation involved
the loss of voting rights for African Americans, as well as, separate
public accommodations, and by public accommodations, I mean all sorts of public
spaces in American life. So, this might be transportation, separate areas in trains and buses, or hotels, bathrooms, swimming pools, water fountains. So, these places in public life, where African Americans were put in the place of a
second-class citizenship. Where they could not experience the
full range of movement, job benefits, protection of the law, or really any of the aspects
of American citizenship, that are the benefits that
come with paying taxes and abiding by the law. And during this period of Jim Crow this kind of segregation was legal, this was not just in practice, but encoded in the law. So, where did this System
of Jim Crow come from? Well, let's start with the name Jim Crow. Jim Crow was not the name
of a specific person. Actually, Jim Crow was the
name of a stock character. A stock character is kind of
a basic well-known character, in usually a comedy, and we
still have stock characters in comedy today, in lots of different forms of entertainment; Think of, the absent-minded
professor, or more recently, the manic-pixie-dream
girl, the girl who is going to change your whole life
by being so off-the-wall. Well, Jim Crow was one of these characters in a form of entertainment
called the minstrel show. And the minstrel show was a very popular, kind of vaudeville-type live performance. The minstrel show was
actually very popular in the north of the United States, places like New York City. And in the 1830s, 1840s, kind
of this antebellum period, before the Civil War. So, this character of Jim Crow was supposed to be kind
of the stupid slave who lived on the plantation, and this character of Jim
Crow was almost always played by a white man wearing
black makeup on his face. So, it was not an actual
African American person, but rather a caricature of
an African American person by a white man who was
part of a minstrel troupe. And so the name, Jim Crow,
became kind of synonymous with African American's
and with enslaved people in the early 19th century, the way that say Patty became synonymous with an Irish person. So, the term Jim Crow Law,
or the Jim Crow System means laws that were specifically aimed at African Americans. Alright, so that's the origin of the name, but where did they system come from? And for that we're gonna
have to do fairly deep dive into American history, and I won't be able to
go into everything here but let's kind of look at this
from the thousand-foot view and get a sense of the
overall pattern of slavery, the Civil War, and race
relations after the Civil War to see where Jim Crow starts. Now, I've been daring here
and done a vertical timeline. The first thing we have on here
is the end of the Civil War. Now, before the Civil War in the southern part of the United States, which I have outlined in red here, most of these states had legal slavery. And in these states, or the colonies that preceded them, starting about 1620, they imported African
slaves to be unfree laborers on cash-crop plantations, and these might include tobacco, or cotton. And that system of slavery persisted until the balance of
power between the north, where slavery was largely illegal, and the South, where
slavery was the backbone of the economic and political system. Eventually it tore the country
apart into the Civil War. In 1863, Abraham Lincoln, the President of the United States issued the Emancipation Proclamation, saying that all enslaved people, and the states which were currently in rebellion were now free. But it wasn't until the
end of the Civil War that slavery's end was official everywhere in the United States. And the end of slavery
really posed a problem for the states of the South. Now obviously this was a wonderful thing for people who had been enslaved, now they had full freedom
to move, and work, and marry whomever they
pleased, at least in theory. But it also meant that
the system of slavery, which had dominated the
politics, the economics, the social system of the
South for more than 200 years was now over, and something
had to replace it. So, in the immediate
period after the Civil War the question is, what are race relations going
to look like in the South? How will whites and blacks
relate to each other without the system of slavery, which has dominated the entire region for more than 200 years? And we'll get into that in our next video.