Jim Crow laws were state and local laws that enforced
racial segregation in the
Southern United States. Enacted by white
Democratic-dominated state legislatures in the late 19th century after the
Reconstruction period, these laws continued to be enforced until 1965. They mandated racial segregation in all public facilities in the states of the former
Confederate States of America, starting in the 1870s and 1880s, and upheld by the United States Supreme Court's "
separate but equal" doctrine for
African Americans.
Public education had essentially been segregated since its establishment in most of the South after the
Civil War. This principle was extended to public facilities and transportation, including segregated cars on interstate trains and, later, buses. Facilities for African Americans were consistently inferior and underfunded compared to those which were then available to
white Americans; sometimes they did not exist at all. This body of law institutionalized a number of economic, educational, and social disadvantages. Segregation by law existed mainly in the Southern states, while
Northern segregation was generally a matter of fact—patterns of housing segregation enforced by private covenants, bank lending practices, and job discrimination, including discriminatory labor union practices. "
Jim Crow" was a pejorative expression referring to a minstrel song called "
Jump Jim Crow" by a performer appearing in
blackface.
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Jim Crow laws—sometimes, as in
Florida, part of state constitutions—mandated the segregation of public schools, public places, and public transportation, and the segregation of restrooms, restaurants, and drinking fountains for whites and blacks.
The U.S. military was already segregated. President
Woodrow Wilson, a Southerner, initiated segregation of federal workplaces at the request of southern Cabinet members in 1913.
These Jim Crow laws revived principles of the 1865 and 1866
Black Codes, which had previously restricted the
civil rights and
civil liberties of African Americans. Segregation of public (state-sponsored) schools was declared unconstitutional by the
Supreme Court of the United States in 1954 in
Brown v. Board of Education. In some states it took years to implement this decision. Generally, the remaining Jim Crow laws were overruled by the
Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the
Voting Rights Act of 1965, but years of action and court challenges have been needed to unravel the many means of institutional discrimination.