Jim Crow Laws

The term Jim Crow became the face of the racial segregation in the United States that followed slavery. It is a term that includes both the laws authorizing segregation and the accompanying social customs and norms that arose as a result. For a century following the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, U.S. citizens of African ancestry were targeted by laws denying them the same rights as white citizens, enacted primarily in the former Confederate states of the south but facilitated by the federal government. The slow process of dismantling those Jim Crow laws began in earnest in the 1950s and culminated in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. As recently as the 2012 presidential election, however, remnants of Jim Crow were seen in the creation of voter identification laws that purported to combat voter fraud but were generally acknowledged to impact people of color disproportionately.

President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, ended slavery in the southern states. It did not apply to the north or to border states not officially “in rebellion” against the Union, but it still affected over 3 million people. However, the words didn't have impact as long as Confederate troops remained in control. In Texas, word of the Emancipation Proclamation did not arrive until June 19, 1865, when Union soldiers landed at Galveston, Texas (now celebrated as “Juneteenth”). Even then, it was not widely enforced. The Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution outlawed slavery in all states when it was adopted in December 1865, following the final surrender of Confederate forces. It was the first time that the Constitution had been amended in more than 60 years and was quickly followed by two more Reconstruction amendments.

Reconstruction was the process of returning the former Confederate states to the Union. Under the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, the Confederate states were required to accept the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution. The first section of the Fourteenth Amendment declared: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” This definition reinforced the one used in the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and nullified the Supreme Court's earlier ruling, in Dred Scott v. Sanford in 1857, that people of African descent brought into the United States as slaves and their descendants were not U.S. citizens. The ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 gave men of color the right [Page 1276]to vote. Congress then passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875, forbidding discrimination in restaurants, theaters, hotels, trains, and other public spaces.

Although federal legislation and constitutional amendments sought to equalize rights of citizenship for whites and nonwhites, moves at the state level were aimed at changing as little as possible the imbalance of power between the races. Laws known as the Black Codes had been passed immediately following the Civil War. They were based on the earlier slave codes that had given owners absolute power over enslaved people as property. Among other things, the slave codes had made illegal reading or writing by enslaved people (and teaching them to read or write), forbade enslaved people from planting certain kitchen garden crops or keeping farm animals, from owning or operating a boat, or from wearing clothes finer than “Negro cloth.”

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