The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws introduced in the Southern United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that enforced racial segregation. The term "Jim Crow" was a pejorative term for an African American. These laws mandated racial segregation in all public facilities in the states of the former Confederate States of America and in some others, beginning in the 1870s. Jim Crow laws were upheld in 1896 in the case of Plessy vs. Ferguson, in which the Supreme Court laid out its "separate but equal" legal doctrine concerning facilities for African Americans. In practice, however, public facilities for blacks were nearly always inferior to those for whites, when they existed at all. Jim Crow laws touched every aspect of everyday life, mandating segregation of schools, parks, libraries, drinking fountains, restrooms, buses, trains, and restaurants. There were separate hospitals for black people and white people, separate prisons, separate public and private schools, separate churches, separate cemeteries, separate public restrooms, and separate public accommodations. Jim Crow laws were enforced until 1965, when they were overturned by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Here are some examples of Jim Crow laws, as compiled by the Martin Luther King, Jr., National Historic Site Interpretive Staff:
- Blacks and whites could not be served food in the same room in a restaurant.
- Blacks and whites could not use the same public drinking fountain.
- Blacks and whites could not sit in the same row in a movie theater.
- Blacks and whites could not use the same entrance in a building.
- Blacks and whites could not use the same library.
- Blacks and whites could not attend the same school.
- Blacks and whites could not be buried in the same cemetery.
The Jim Crow laws were a formal, codified system of racial apartheid that dominated the American South for three quarters of a century beginning in the 1890s. The Jim Crow system was upheld by local government officials and reinforced by acts of terror perpetrated by vigilantes.
