Black-History.com is in its founding phase. Join the founding subscriber list →
Glossary · Turn of the Century

Jim Crow

The system of laws and customs that enforced racial segregation and Black disfranchisement, chiefly in the South, from the late 1800s to the 1960s.

Jim Crow names the system of racial segregation and subordination that governed much of American life, above all in the Southern and border states, from the end of Reconstruction in 1877 to the mid-1960s. The name came from the minstrel stage. In the 1830s the white entertainer Thomas Dartmouth Rice performed a blackface song-and-dance routine as a character he called Jim Crow, a caricature of an enslaved man. The name became a slur for Black people, and by the end of the nineteenth century it had come to stand for the laws and customs that oppressed them.

Jim Crow laws required separate hospitals, schools, prisons, cemeteries, railroad cars, streetcars, and water fountains. The facilities provided for Black people, where they existed at all, were older, smaller, and poorly maintained. In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Supreme Court upheld a Louisiana railroad segregation law and gave the doctrine of “separate but equal” constitutional cover for nearly sixty years.

Segregation was bound up with disfranchisement, economic dependence, and terror. Southern states used poll taxes, literacy tests, and intimidation to strip Black citizens of the vote; after Reconstruction the number of Black members of Congress dwindled until, by 1900, George Henry White of North Carolina was the only one. Sharecropping and convict leasing held many Black Southerners in near-bondage, and lynching enforced the order by violence.

Black Americans resisted throughout. Ida B. Wells exposed lynching; W. E. B. Du Bois helped found the NAACP, whose lawyers, led by Thurgood Marshall, won Brown v. Board of Education in 1954; and the arrest of Rosa Parks in 1955 launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 dismantled the legal structure of Jim Crow, though its effects endured.

See also: Plessy v. Ferguson, Poll Tax, Literacy Test, Lynching, Brown v. Board of Education, Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965, Great Migration

Sources

  1. Jim Crow Museum, Ferris State University, “The Origins of Jim Crow.” Link
  2. Library of Congress, With an Even Hand: Brown v. Board at Fifty, “What does the term ‘Jim Crow’ mean?” Link
  3. National Archives, “Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).” Link
  4. U.S. House of Representatives, History, Art & Archives, “Toward a ‘Temporary Farewell’: Anti-Lynching Legislation.” Link
  5. The White House, “Remarks by President Biden at Signing of H.R. 55, the Emmett Till Antilynching Act,” 29 March 2022. Link

Related on Black-History.com

Cite this page
MLA
“Jim Crow.” Black-History.com, 30 Sept. 2026, https://black-history.com/glossary/jim-crow/.
APA
Black-History.com Editors. (2026, September 30). Jim Crow. Black-History.com. https://black-history.com/glossary/jim-crow/
Chicago
Black-History.com Editors. “Jim Crow.” Black-History.com. September 30, 2026. https://black-history.com/glossary/jim-crow/.
Editorial Note

By the Black-History.com editors. Last reviewed 30 September 2026. To suggest a primary source or a correction, write to editors@black-history.com or use our corrections form.

← Full glossary