Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey brain Stuff. Lauren Vogelbaum here. Today's episode speaks frankly but non graphically about racial violence. For the better part of a century, American people of color lived under the burden of what are now known as Jim Crow Laws. This racist system of segregation, mainly of black people from white people, affected virtually every sector of American life and reached far beyond the South, where it was best known and most
harshly practiced. Jim Crow Laws and the deep wounds that they inflicted on American society are not relegated to the past tense. Their legacy is still felt in many ways today. We spoke with Stephen Barry, a professor of American culture at the University of Michigan and the author of the Jim Crow Routine, Everyday Performances of Race, civil Rights, and Segregation in Mississippi. He said Jim Crow was about so
much more than laws. It really was an all encompass system that involved political practices, economic practices, social practices, cultural practices. Some of that was about legal things, but some of it wasn't. One of the challenges why Jim Crow often seems like it's in the past. People tend to think that, oh, it was a few laws, and we got rid of segregation laws and we got the Voting Rights Act, so that must have taken care of it. It didn't. These
laws weren't named after a real life person. Jim Crow was a fictional character in a minstrel show representation of a black man and exaggerated, stereotyped and racist representation, played by a white man on stage in black face in the early eighteen hundreds. This character was a hit with many audiences, and by ninety eight the term Jim Crow had become a racial epithet. Estates began passing laws to restrict the rights of slaves freed at the end of the Civil War. The laws came to be known as
Jim Crow laws. The Emancipation Proclamation of eighteen sixty three freed all slaves from states that had ceded from the Union, and in the following years three amendments to the U. S Constitution gave former slaves rights. Thirteenth in eighteen sixty five abolished slavery, the fourteenth in eighteen sixty eight guaranteed equal protection to all citizens, and the fifteenth in eighteen seventy guaranteed the right to vote regardless of race, color,
or previous condition of servitude. The South, coping with its loss in the Civil War and what it felt was punishment meeted out by the U S government, responded by enacting a series of laws over several years to severely restrict the rights that had been granted to black people. These laws were said to be enacted for many reasons, but the simplest explanation is this they aimed to maintain white people's claim to first class status in American society
and to keep black people a second class citizens. Here are a few early examples of these laws. In eighteen sixty six, the Tennessee legislature passed a bill requiring separate schools for black and white people. Between eighteen sixty six and nineteen fifty five, Tennessee passed twenty Jim Crow laws, including ones that outlawed misagenation and required segregation in public accommodations.
In eighteen seventy seven, the new constitution of the State of Georgia included requirements the primary schools be segregated, and it established a separate university for black people. It also instituted a poll tax, which disproportionately affected poor black people, effectively stripping them of the right to vote. Laws like these kept black people from voting and thereby from having a say in governance. It barred them from holding public office,
thus slanting the justice system against them. It restricted them socially, requiring Black people to use different phone booths, drinking fountains, restrooms, and so on. It's stymied them economically, and in all prohibited them from gaining equal footing with white citizens by themselves. The Jim Crow laws were devastating, but as Barry points out, the legal aspect of Jim Crow was only part of
the problem. Black people were also subjected to widespread violence and murder, implicitly condoned by much of white society and rarely prosecuted, that continued well into the twentieth century. The Ku Klux Klan, originally a club for Confederate veterans, was born in the aftermath of the Civil War and has terrorized black people for decades. In the Equal Justice Initiative released a report called Lynching in America, confronting the legacy
of racial terror. It documented in the period between eighteen seventy seven and nineteen fifty, almost four thousand lynchings. From that report quote racial terror. Lynching was a tool used to enforce Jim Crow laws and racial segregation, a tactic for maintaining racial control by victimizing the entire African American community, not merely punishment of an alleged perpetrator for a crime. Barry explained that the fears, frustrations, and injustices created by
these laws and this violence seeped into everyday life. He said, there's this tendency to think of both Jim Crow specifically and racism more broadly as being this overt form that looks like the KKK, that looks like a cross burning, that looks like dramatic acts of violence. Sometimes it is that, but often it's much more subtle. It's in the air
that we breathe and the water that we drink. Up until eight Jim Crow laws were limited to state and local regulations, but in a landmark case that year, the U. S. Supreme Court codified the laws nationally. In Plus e versus Ferguson, the court upheld the Louisiana Separate Car Act. Of this act, also known as the Louisiana Railways Accommodation Act required railways to quote provide equal but separate accommodations for white people
and people of color. Unsuccessful challenges to this law brought it to the Supreme Court in Plessy versus Ferguson, and in their decision, the Court held up the constitutionality of states segregation laws, which opened the door for even more restrictive Jim Crow laws in the coming years across the country.
These included one that passed in Arkansas in three stating that it was unlawful for white prisoners to be handcuffed or chained to black prisoners, and one from nineteen eleven in Nebraska which stated that marriages would be void if one person was white and one was one eighth or more black, Japanese or Chinese, and one from nineteen twenty six in Atlanta that stated the black barbers couldn't serve
white women or girls. In Californian ninety four, the state's constitution was amended to strip voting rights from anyone quote who shall not be able to read the Constitution in
the English language and write his name. Remember that under these laws, even basic schooling wasn't necessarily available to people of color and On top of all of this violence and lynchings, continued pockets of resistance to Jim Crow formed from time to time, Barry says, especially after Black soldiers returned home from World War One and World War Two and pressed for equal treatment, but the system of oppression
remained strong. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, a white mob and Blakely Georgia lynched William Little in nineteen nineteen for refusing to take off his uniform after returning home from World War One. Barry said African Americans always challenged the system. They always pushed back. Sometimes it came just in terms of teaching your children how you survive this system. Not only we want you to know these rules so that you're safe, but we also want you to know
that you're just pretending. The poet Lawrence Dunbar referred to this as we wear the mask. The idea was, you're wearing this mask and pretending to go through the rules, but you're learning that that's not who you really are, that you're not really inferior, even though you're following those
rules that are meant to tell you that. Three years after the end of World War Two, on July, President Harry s. Truman desegregated the military, which was perhaps one of the first real steps towards the downfall of Jim Crow Laws. It wasn't until nineteen fifty four Supreme Court decision in Brown versus the Board of Education, though, which ruled that separating school children on the basis of race was unconstitutional, thus overturning the idea of separate but equal
expressed in the Plessy decision about sixty years earlier. The Jim Crow Laws were dealt a fatal blow. Barry explained, World War Two was a huge turning point. People are always pushing back and fighting. There's this constant struggle, but it became more visible then, and you do get this mobilization in the mid nineteen fifties. The struggle to free black Americans from Jim Crow had more setbacks to come.
The Cold War was a hard time for anyone to question American values for fear of being branded a communist.
But the turbulent nineteen sixties, with the full throated protests of the Freedom Rides of nineteen sixty one and the passage of the Civil Rights Act in nineteen sixty eight, helped solidify the idea that Jim Crow laws were a thing of the past, and that segregation had no place in American society of the Gerald M. Packard in American Nightmare, The History of Jim Crow wrote that quote Jim Crow was a disease that once permeated every fissure and fold
of American society. Yet in the past few years voter suppression measures have been introduced by the hundreds. Black people in America today are incarcerated at a rate of more than five times that of white people, and as of investigative journalism by The Guardian found the black citizens and black men ages fifteen to thirty four years in particular, are disproportionately the victims of deadly forced by police officers.
Young black men made up just two percent of the population but accounted for fifteen percent of deaths perpetrated by the police. And we're nine times more likely to die in police instance than any other demographic. Jim Crow Laws may be dead, Jim Crow, though, is not. Today's episode was written by John Donovan and produced by Tyler Klang. For more on listen lots of other topics, visit how Stuff Works dot com. Brainstuff is a production of I
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