Jim Crow laws

Laws designed to enforce racial segregation and deny black Americans their civil rights. These laws originated in the 1880s and were common in the southern USA until the 1960s. The US Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) legitimized these laws by affirming segregation under the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine. Jim Crow laws were eroded by US Supreme Court decisions during the 1950s and 60s such as Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 – a landmark ruling which declared that segregation in schools was unconstitutional – and civil-rights legislation such as the Civil Rights Act 1964 and Voting Rights Act 1965. (See also civil-rights movement and desegregation.)

Jim Crow laws existed to isolate and disenfranchise blacks. Legislation aimed to enforce segregation in public accommodations, schools, places of employment, restaurants, and theatres. Blacks were disenfranchised by obstacles such as a poll tax or grandfather clause, deliberately designed to exclude them. The grandfather clause was used by seven southern states between 1895 and 1910 to deny blacks the right to vote; it was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1915 as it violated the Fifteenth Amendment, which guaranteed equal voting rights.

Jim Crow was originally the name of a character in a minstrel song, and came to be used by white Americans as a derogatory term for a black person.