Jim Crow Laws

G2, Oktay, Levy, Yuasa, Feng

01/06/2015

Food and the African American Canon

Professor Opie

Paper Abstract

“Eating Jim Crow”

Jim Crow, name of a famous song written to amuse the white public, was no longer a name since 1880s when segregation laws were adopted and enforced by various states. It became a legislative policy whose mere existence indicated disrespect, hostility and segregation toward African Americans by white community and government, which took place less than 20 years after the triumph of Civil War and emancipation of the enslaved people. While the exact origin of the term “Jim Crow” is unknown, “Daddy Rice,” a nineteenth-century blackface performer, introduced the song and dance “Jump Jim Crow” in 1828 in a minstrel show. It became a common adjective by 1838.

Although blackface musical acts appeared as early as the 1790s, minstrel shows, with their crude parody of African American life, gained popularity in the 1840s. Jim Crow was not a single federal law, but a series of state, local, and county statutes, as well as unwritten codes of conduct, that evolved into a restrictive, punitive system of widespread segregation, created in the North and later concentrated in the American South. The fear of African Americans’ voting/land rights and rising political power evoked dramatic actions.

Ku Klux Klan was formed and innocent African Americans were beaten up by extremists. In order to “protect” black people and stop aggravation of violence, many states imposed legal sanctions on consorting with other races. All of the laws passed to force segregation and advocate discrimination between 1880s and 1960s are together called Jim Crow. From public transportation to health care, and from intermarriage to restaurants, Jim Crow affects every aspect of African Americans life.

This paper will clearly show the chronology of the Jim Crow laws from beginning to end, what the laws meant for the African Americans and how they overcame the laws....