Jim Crow Era

By: Thomas J. Davis

Source:

 Black Women in America, Second Edition

Jim Crow Era

Jim Crow's scandalous history as a term of opprobrium signifying black/white racial segregation started, then, years before the United States abolished slavery in 1865. The phrase settled as a castelike social description marking African Americans as simultaneously accommodated yet ostracized. Jim Crow cropped up in Louisville, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and New York City in the 1830s as the name of a song and dance, “Jump Jim Crow.” The term quickly became more than a minstrel show title. It appeared in Massachusetts in 1841 to describe railroad cars set apart for blacks, but the name became attached to more than the seating arrangements on railroad cars, as Sarah Roberts's case showed in 1848. When the City of Boston's school board barred five-year-old Sarah from attending her neighborhood public primary school and instead assigned her to one of two “schools appropriate to colored children,” her father, the antislavery social reformer Benjamin F. Roberts, sued on her behalf. Sarah lost. In Roberts v. City of Boston (1849), the state's highest court, in an opinion by one of its most highly regarded jurists, ruled that Sarah was not “unlawfully excluded from public school.” Massachusetts law allowed separate public schools for blacks and whites. As with every aspect of African American experience, the Sarah Roberts suit showed that from the beginning black females were at the front and center of the Jim Crow era.

Civil War and Emancipation

Jim Crow burdened only the small percentage of free blacks before the Civil War (1861–1865). Almost nine in ten (89.2 percent) of the nation's 4,427,294 African Americans in 1860 were slaves and hence subject to more than the strictures of Jim Crow. After the war, patterns shifted. In December 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution outlawed slavery. In July 1868 the Fourteenth Amendment barred any state from “deny[ing] to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

First Market Lunchroom, Richmond, Virginia. Its sign, “For Colored,” was typical in the south during the Jim Crow period.

Austin/Thompson Collection, by permission of Valentine Richmond History Center

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The move to emancipate slaves and to articulate civil rights changed black women's positions. It did not, however, reach into the separate spheres that relegated female activity primarily to the shadows. Black women bore the heavy burdens of detailed, day-in-day-out organizing and operating that sustained the institutions of emancipation, but were shunted from the spotlight in the public policy discourse of community representatives and spokespersons. Beginning with churches, schools, and self-help groups, black women toiled tirelessly to keep black bodies and souls together on the upward climb. They scratched out space to survive and thrive. They sheltered what they could and faced the storm of slavery's demise during Reconstruction (1865–1877) and beyond with determination to vindicate human dignity. They built on their continued tradition of struggle and survival in battling racial oppression and inequality in its sundry insidious guises.

Declaring an end to slavocracy was not to declare an end to patriarchy. Rule by men in male-dominated and male-oriented complexes modeled on a family's deference to the father stood as a matter of fact, as American society announced the end of old-style rule by slaveholders under slavery. Hence Jim Crow attacked postbellum black women on the levels of race, sex, and class.

The new law of emancipation focused on black men, as established American law focused on men. Consistent with its traditional view of females as male appendages, the law cast black women in connection with black men. The legislation creating the primary federal agency handling slaves' transition to emancipation from 1865 to 1870 showed the law's slight to black women. The acts of March 1865 and July 1866 addressed “freedmen.” Indeed, they created a Freedmen's Bureau. In providing for rights to the much-spoken-of forty acres (no mule was mentioned), the 1865 act specified that recipients were to be male. The 1866 act shifted the terms to “heads of families of the African race,” which allowed black women to qualify. The shift was not to accommodate women's rights, however; it was to privilege men with wives and children over single men.

Freedwomen got little as women from the law. What rights they gained in emancipation arose primarily from race. The gender distinction appeared clearly in the Fifteenth Amendment, adopted in March 1870. It declared “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” That allowed black men access to the ballot but not black women, who were denied suffrage with other women until the Nineteenth Amendment, adopted in August 1920. They nevertheless proved they could wield significant political and other influence without ballots.

Black Codes

The immediate postwar response to racial readjustment in the defeated South hardly embraced black/white equality. Reactionary Southern legislatures in 1865 and 1866 enacted state Black Codes to legalize paternalistic and otherwise restrictive racial patterns and practices. Mississippi led the way in many respects, from family and labor law to transportation. In November 1865, for example, the Mississippi legislature enacted a statute to prohibit railroads in the state from permitting blacks to ride in cars reserved for whites. This was Jim Crow in full feather. Justifications for the laws would come later not only from lawyers, judges, and politicians but also from the social science fields and from pseudo-scientific biological studies and experiments in the 1880s and 1890s, as not only white Americans struggled to control the black population, but also as European imperialist powers, especially in Africa and Asia, undertook what the English writer Rudyard Kipling described in his 1899 poem of the same name, “The White Man's Burden.”

Black women instantly protested, particularly provisions that abolished or abused the family relations they viewed as essential to emancipation's meaning. They decried the announcement and action of law that, for example, made only black children subject to forced apprenticeships. Authorizing state agents to snatch children away from parents and to give former slaveholders first choice as guardians, as Mississippi's 1865 apprenticeship act did, was something black women refused to tolerate. The emancipation that recognized their right to freedom also meant recognizing their children's rights. Black women demanded justice from the state—and not in the South alone; black women chorused with the black men at an 1865 convention in Xenia, Ohio, in denouncing “laws unjustly making distinction on account of color.” They demanded, in the words of the convention, that state laws “be purified, and made to conform to the requirements of Republican justice.”

Political power came after Congress in March 1867 demanded that black men be allowed to vote in the South and that states cease racial discrimination, thus staying Jim Crow's sweep—at least momentarily. For example, Louisiana's 1868 Constitution declared:

"All persons shall enjoy equal rights and privileges upon any conveyance of a public character; and all places of business or public resort, or for which a license is required by either State, parish or municipal authority, shall be deemed of a public character, and shall be open to the accommodation and patronage of all persons without distinction or discrimination on account of race or color."

The Transportation Struggle

Josephine DeCuir of Pointe Coupe Parish, Louisiana, became an early champion in the struggle for civil rights. When Capt. John C. Benson of the Mississippi River steamboat Governor Allen denied her a berth in the ladies' cabin for a trip upriver from New Orleans in July 1872, DeCuir sued him under Louisiana law. She won. In DeCuir v. Benson (1875), Louisiana's Supreme Court upheld her award of $1,000 in damages and upheld, too, the state's power to outlaw racial discrimination in public accommodations.

The discrimination that vexed DeCuir was hardly new to black women, nor was it confined to the South. In 1867, five years before DeCuir's troubles aboard the Governor Allen, Mary E. Miles suffered similar treatment—not on a Mississippi steamboat but on a West Chester and Philadelphia Railroad Company streetcar. Boarding the streetcar in the City of Brotherly Love, in an act of defiance that would resonate almost a century later in Montgomery, Alabama, Miles refused the conductor's direction, following Jim Crow rules of the road, to sit toward the rear. When she persisted, Miles was forcibly removed from the car. She sued and won in Philadelphia County's Court of Common Pleas.

Miles's victory proved short-lived. In West Chester and Philadelphia Railroad Company v. Miles (1867), Pennsylvania's Supreme Court reversed the lower court, finding fault with a jury instruction. But Justice Daniel Agnew's opinion for the high court majority went beyond ordering a new trial. The court's decision emphasized that the railroad company had a legal right to separate black and white passengers. “The right of the carrier to separate his passengers is founded upon two grounds—his right of private property in the means of conveyance, and the public interest,” the court announced. Moreover, it declared that there was a

"natural, legal and customary difference between the white and black races in this state which made their separation as passengers in a public conveyance the subject of a sound regulation to secure order, promote comfort, preserve the peace and maintain the rights both of carriers and passengers."

If their state supreme court's ruling held any solace for Miles and other black Pennsylvanians, it rested in the court's acknowledging that since Miles had brought her case, the legislature had changed Pennsylvania law to declare it an offense for railroads to discriminate between passengers on account of race or color. The court further acknowledged that even before the March 1867 statute, Pennsylvania's common law recognized blacks' right not to be excluded from “a public carrier on account of color…or prejudice.”

The Pennsylvania court's distinction between being excluded from accommodations and being relegated to Jim Crow accommodations proved crucial. Its decision in Miles's case echoed the lawful-separation note that Massachusetts Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw sounded in his 1849 school decision in Sarah Roberts's case. It also echoed a theme of Michigan Supreme Court in response to blacks' 1858 challenge to Jim Crow treatment on a Great Lakes steamer. In Day v. Owen (1858), Michigan's highest court ruled it “reasonable” for a common carrier to separate black and white passengers. In fact, the Michigan court went so far as to state that while blacks had a right to be passengers, they had no right to any particular accommodations. The carrier decided what blacks got as part of his “control over his own property in his own way,” the court said. “The right to be carried is one thing—the privileges of a passenger on board of the boat, what part of it may be occupied by him, or he have the right to use, is another thing. The two rights are very different,” the court held.

So DeCuir's troubles in Louisiana were part of a long line of black women's trials and tribulations in the struggle for equal treatment on public transportation. They established the right of blacks not to be excluded as passengers. Whether blacks had rights to the same accommodations for the same fare, however, and whether states could, as did Pennsylvania in 1867 and Louisiana in 1869, dictate equal accommodation on common carriers remained unsettled.

The U.S. Supreme Court Speaks

The U.S. Supreme Court's handling of DeCuir's case on appeal closed some questions and directed attention to the struggle ahead. In Hall v. DeCuir (1877), the nation's high court reversed DeCuir's victory. Finding that the Governor Allen operated in interstate commerce over which Congress had exclusive power, the Court, in an opinion by Chief Justice Morrison Waite, held Louisiana's 1869 nondiscrimination act to be unconstitutional in its reach to the Mississippi steamer. The Court explicitly declared that its ruling had “nothing whatever to do with [the equal accommodations act] as a regulation of internal commerce, or as affecting anything else than commerce among the States.” Yet the ruling limited state law's reach to the most significant modes of transportation. DeCuir thus lost the legal grounds on which she had sued. Her action was nevertheless important: hers and similar cases helped move Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which entitled

"citizens of every race and color, regardless of any previous condition of servitude [to] the full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement."

The public accommodations provisions in the Civil Rights Act of 1875 offered no long-standing shelter to blacks who, like DeCuir, had claims of racial discrimination against common carriers. In a consolidated series of five cases from California, Kansas, Missouri, New York, and Tennessee, the U.S. Supreme Court in 1883 ruled that Congress lacked authority under the Thirteenth or the Fourteenth Amendment to reach private acts of racial discrimination. So if a railway conductor refused to allow a black woman to ride in the ladies' car, as happened in the Tennessee case Robinson & Wife v. Memphis and Charleston Railroad Company, it was a private matter, not material for a federal case. Thus did the Civil Rights Cases (1883) remove federal protection from the hopes of many African Americans, male and female.

Without recourse in federal courts against individual acts of racial discrimination, black women redoubled their efforts to keep states from sanctioning Jim Crow. Twenty-one-year-old Ida Bell Wells (later Wells-Barnett) exemplified the drive in May 1884 when she challenged Tennessee's separate-but-equal law on a ten-mile trip from Woodstock to Memphis on the Chesapeake, Ohio & Southwestern Railroad. Having paid her fare, she elected to sit in the ladies' car and ignored the conductor's directive that it was reserved for whites only. Reports noted that she was “assisted from the car.” She sued and won at trial in Shelby County Circuit Court, but the state supreme court reversed her $500 award. Repeating the line of other cases, the Tennessee high court upheld the railroad's discretion to seat passengers at its direction. In a personal slap at Wells, the court chastised her for being harassing and acting “not in good faith to obtain a comfortable seat for the short ride.”

Plessy v. Ferguson

The fact of segregation appeared in custom and practice far beyond the Jim Crow rules that excluded Ida Bell Wells, Mary E. Miles, Josephine DeCuir, and other African American women from the equal accommodations for which they paid. It seeped throughout American society. As in Tennessee in Wells's case and Pennsylvania in Miles's case, state courts deemed it discretionary to separate whites and blacks. Indeed, more than one state court ruled such discrimination “reasonable” decades before the U.S. Supreme Court, in its infamous 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, sanctioned state laws that mandated “equal, but separate, accommodations for the white and colored races.”

In upholding Louisiana's 1890 Separate Car Act, the U.S. Supreme Court completed an ugly twist that reached back to DeCuir's case. The Court in Hall v. DeCuir denied state power to mandate that “all persons shall enjoy equal rights and privileges upon any conveyance of a public character.” Then, in Plessy, the Court returned to allow state power to mandate racial separation that insured unequal rights. So states could not enforce equality but could enforce inequality.

The U.S. Supreme Court hardly initiated the segregation that settled into an American version of apartheid; its 1896 sanction in Plessy nevertheless allowed Jim Crow to spread after long roosting. Black women had battled the beast from the beginning and they continued to resist at every turn. I. Wells, for example, did not linger over the Tennessee high court's rebuke of her. She spread the word against Jim Crow, becoming one of the foremost journalists and antisegregation advocates of her era.

Antilynching

Wells made lynching a special target after antiblack rioting swept Memphis in March 1892. As editor of the city's Free Speech and Headlight, she turned the weekly newspaper's focus from poor public education for blacks in the Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi Delta region to the near epidemic of brutal attacks on blacks that had become almost commonplace throughout the South. From 1882, when a systematic count began, an average of 100 lynchings had occurred annually by 1892, which proved a record year with 230. Not all the lynchings were of blacks. But the white mobs mostly murdered black victims—and not always males; black women were also lynched.

In a lead editorial in March 1892, Wells lambasted Memphis for tolerating lynching and castigated the practice as a vicious ritual of social control aimed more at intimidation than punishment. In savage response to her outraged words, a white mob wrecked the Free Speech and Headlight offices and threatened Wells with death if she were seen again in Tennessee's leading city. Although expelled, Wells was not silenced. Joining the New York Age, one of the nation's leading black newspapers, she further exposed lynching as having more to do with white recreation than with black crime. Her October 1892 feature story “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases” was a classic of investigative journalism and was published as a pamphlet, as was its companion piece, A Red Record (1895).

Wells's focus on lynching reflected the lead that black women took in the 1890s in vocally opposing barbarity. Their insistence on exposing the wrong done, often under the pretense of protecting womanhood, contributed later to an interracial women's movement to prevent lynching. It also reflected two broad avenues down which African American women strode in full cry against Jim Crow in all its manifestations at the beginning of the 1900s: journalism and local organizing.

Professionals in Protest

Working in church and local organizations and through the growing club movement, African American women joined together for self-help in bettering their race and racial conditions throughout the nation. The National Association of Colored Women (NACW), organized in 1896 with Mary Church Terrell as president, focused the drive for general reform against Jim Crow and all that oppressed the race. Under the theme “Lifting as We Climb,” the NACW promoted black self-development and advances against segregation.

The NACW stalwarts were almost exclusively black professional women and, almost by definition, they were civil rights activists. Reaching a professional position required such activism for black women. At the beginning of the 1900s, as in the Civil War era, Jim Crow closed most economic opportunities to black women. Farm and field or domestic service as maids or washerwomen alone stood open: for most, that was black women's work. A precious few pushed into female-dominated professions such as teaching, nursing, social work, and librarianship.

Not sufficiently noted among black women's tools was the press. Black women worked, as did Wells and her radical antilynching predecessor Lucy Parsons as independent journalists and also for institutional organs such as the Woman's Era, which began publishing in Boston in March 1894 as the first monthly magazine owned and edited by black women. At least forty-six black women had made national names for themselves as journalists as the 1900s opened. Most, like Wells and the bulk of the black population, were southerners. They wrote. They edited. They were owners and operators. They made public policy and every aspect of Jim Crow daily fare. They gave voice to rights and wrongs. They tore into stereotypes in battling against the abysmal place of both the Negro and women.

Entrepreneurs in Protest

Black women entrepreneurs also served more than local needs in their shops, stores, and markets. Sarah Breedlove went further than other burgeoning black businesswomen: her Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company, with its door-to-door and mail-order sales of hair straightener, put her in line by 1910 to be the first American, black, woman, self-made millionaire. But as with lesser successes, hers was not merely individual; it resounded in a triumph of advancing community to which Breedlove further contributed as a philanthropist. She gave generously to black educational and social institutions and so staunchly supported the antilynching movement that the U.S. State Department in 1919 labeled her a “race agitator” and denied her a passport. Many other black businesswomen left anonymous by history also contributed significantly to their communities in service and example that stayed Jim Crow's reach and enabled and extended African Americans' expectations.

Black women shouldered the daily burden of racial uplift. Battling prejudice and marginalization, they stitched together the community and countrywide support that allowed and sustained the creation of campaigns such as the League for the Protection of Colored Women (founded in 1906), the Committee for Improving the Industrial Conditions among Negroes in New York (1906), and the Committee on Urban Conditions among Negroes (1910). The three merged in 1911 to form the National League on Urban Conditions among Negroes. They also contributed to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), organized in 1910 and 1911. They backed local and national assaults on Jim Crow.

Entertainers against Jim Crow

In the 1920s black women moved further into official public roles in combating segregation, thanks in large part to the Nineteenth Amendment's eliminating sex as a bar to voting. In 1927 Minnie Buckingham-Harper became the first black woman legislator in the United States when she was appointed to finish the term of her deceased husband in the West Virginia legislature. In 1936 Mary McLeod Bethune, one-time NACW president (1924–1928) and a founder of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), became administrative assistant and then division director for Negro Affairs in President Franklin D. Roosevelt's National Youth Administration—the first black woman to hold so high a federal office, which she used to continue her crusade against Jim Crow.

Also in the public eye, black women entertainers struggled and succeeded against Jim Crow. The travail and triumph of the opera singer and contralto Marian Anderson in 1939 proved particularly telling. Unabashedly, the lily-white Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) barred Anderson, because she was black, from singing at the DAR's Washington, DC, concert house, Constitution Hall. Outrage moved First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to resign from the DAR and help arrange for Anderson to sing to an audience of seventy-five thousand at the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday, 1939. The incident spotlighted invidious prejudice for ridicule, but Jim Crow was scarcely affected.

Talented black women such as Anderson fought daily for entry and dignity in the face of segregation and persistent stereotypes on stage and screen, to say nothing of the club circuit. The actress Hattie McDaniel, who won the 1939 Academy Award for best supporting actress for her portrayal of Mammy in the film Gone with the Wind, snapped at both segregation and those who criticized her success with the biting comment, “I'd rather play a maid and make $700 a week, than be a maid for $7.”

Back to Court

With the NAACP, black women challenged segregation in court, as they had in the post–Civil War era. In 1946 Ada Lois Sipuel challenged Jim Crow admission policies at the University of Oklahoma law school. The state supreme court rejected her claim, but in Sipuel v. Board of Regents (1948), the U.S. Supreme Court directed Oklahoma to admit Sipuel as “concededly qualified to receive the professional legal education offered by the State.”

Black female teachers in the Jackson, Mississippi, public schools joined in a class action in March 1948 to challenge the Jim Crow pay schedules that left black teachers like Gladys Noel Bates earning 63 percent of their white colleagues' salaries. Bates and other black teachers received no relief in Bates v. Batte (1951). Nor did Vivian Brown receive relief when her father, Julius, in 1948 sued the school board in LaGrange, Texas, on her behalf against unequal public schools—as Benjamin F. Roberts had sued on his daughter Sarah's behalf in 1849. A federal district court in 1951 also denied relief to nine-year-old Linda Carol Brown and other black students in the Topeka, Kansas, public schools when their parents sued the segregated school system. But times were changing.

Brown v. Board of Education

Black students such as Linda Brown and their parents persisted in the more than century-old protest against Jim Crow inequality and discrimination. The NAACP carried Brown's case from Kansas—along with cases from South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware—to the U.S. Supreme Court. On 17 May 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren announced the unanimous opinion of the Court that Jim Crow had no place in public education. “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,” the Court ruled.

Jim Crow had been put to flight. However, the 1954 victory in Brown marked not the end. It was another beginning. Jim Crow rules in transportation remained a fixture, and black women continued to fight it as they had since the 1850s. Jim Crow had at least been quelled in interstate transport. In Mitchell v. United States (1941), the Supreme Court decided that the Interstate Commerce Act (ICC) of 1887, in outlawing any common carrier's subjecting “any particular person…to any undue or unreasonable prejudice or disadvantage in any respect whatsoever,” had outlawed racial discrimination on interstate common carriers. The Court reiterated its ruling in Henderson v. United States (1950), holding that the ICC ban on segregation included dining cars. In Morgan v. Virginia (1946), the Court returned with a twist to Josephine DeCuir's 1875 case and denied state power to require Jim Crow separation of whites and blacks on interstate carriers.

Montgomery Bus Boycott

Intrastate carriers such as that in Plessy v. Ferguson remained solidly segregated in the South, so black women localized their efforts. The Baton Rouge bus boycott in 1953 showed their solidarity and organizational resilience. The boycott was called after forty-two-year-old Rosa McCauley Parks followed Mary E. Miles—who in 1867 had refused the conductor's directive to sit toward the rear of a Philadelphia streetcar. On 1 December 1955, Parks refused to yield her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, municipal bus. After she was arrested for her refusal, the local NAACP secretary and black women and men launched a bus boycott from 5 December 1955 to 20 December 1956. Black ridership on the municipal buses fell from 70 percent to zero. Economics alone appeared to demand the end of Jim Crow. Finally, in Gayle v. Browder (1956), the U.S. Supreme Court settled the issue by ruling that “statutes and ordinances requiring segregation of the white and colored races on the motor buses of a common carrier of passengers in the City of Montgomery…violate the Constitution of the United States.”

Jim Crow increasingly appeared dead, at least as a creature of law. The continuing civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s strove to bury it. Black women continued to operate in the forefront. Autherine Lucy in 1956 broke the Jim Crow barrier at the University of Alabama, as did Charlayne Hunter at the University of Georgia in 1961. Ella Baker, Dorothy Height, Constance Baker Motley, Pauli Murray, and Jo Ann Robinson and thousands of others pushed forward the federal law that formally ended Jim Crow: the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It outlawed race and sex discrimination.

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