Jim Crow Laws

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Concerning United States history, Jim Crow laws are any law that imposes racial segregation in the Southern states between the late 1870's, the end of the Reconstruction era, and the 1950's, the beginning of the civil rights movement. These discriminatory laws represented an official, systematic system of inequity that dominated the South. The name, "Jim Crow" came from minstrel shows, which were shows performed by whites people in blackface. This term eventually became an insulting term for African Americans and their segregated lives.
Beginning in the late 1870's Southern state legislatures were longer dominated by carpetbaggers, a Northerner who moved to the South after the Civil War, and freedmen, freed slaves. These legislatures began …show more content…
The two races worked alongside together, however, the slaves knew their place. Prior to the 1860's basic types of segregation existed in cities where the majority of freedmen lived, but it was not yet a systematic pattern. Free blacks in the North were labored under very rigid restrictions, such restrictions were even stricter than those present in the Southern states.
Some might expect the South to have formed a system of segregation promptly after the Civil War, however such a thing didn't happen. Some state legislatures did impose strict separation, yet only in specific areas of life; such as in MIDDLE. Prior to the war the South had had no actual formal system of public schools, post-civil war governments created such a system and those were often segregated on the grounds of race. Some states were not as segregated as other, in New Orleans schools weren't segregated until the late 1870's, and in North Carolina freedmen often sat on juried with …show more content…
Though the details of these laws differed somewhat most of the states requires equal accommodation for blacks and fines for passengers whom tried to sit in areas in which their race was excluded. For example, Texas required that all railroad trains have at least one car for people of color to sit in. Some of the states even imposed jail time for employees who didn't rightly enforce the laws. Five of the nine states provided extensive criminal fines or imprisonment for the passengers who sat in areas in which they were excluded. In July of 1890 Louisiana passed the Louisiana Separate Car Act in which railroads were required to provide, "equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races" as a means to, "promote the comfort of
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