8 October 2020
Jim Crow is best known today as the system of racial segregation that operated in the southern United States from the 1880s to the 1960s. It’s an odd term that originally comes from the title of a blackface minstrel song, and, probably to the surprise of many people, the earliest Jim Crow laws predate the U.S. Civil War and were in put in place in Massachusetts, far from the slave-holding south.
The song Jim Crow was adapted from one sung by Black slaves by the white, blackface performer Thomas D. Rice. The song is about a Black slave who kills another man and escapes, and it ends with a vision of a Black man being president of the United States. The song was enormously popular in the 1830s and had the Billboard rankings of hit songs existed back then it would have topped the charts for many consecutive weeks. While the earliest references to the song are from 1828, the earliest sheet music and lyrics that I have found are from 1832:
Attenshun all de Univarse,
My kingdom’s rite weel,
Tan by to jump “Jim Crow”
Pon de toe and heel.
Weel about and turn about and do jis so,
eb’ry time I weel about I jump Jim Crow.
I was born in ole Werginy
A long time ago,
Wen unkel Sam made de Inemy
Jump Jim Crow.
Weel about &c.
But one day I hit a man,
His name I forgot;
An I left noting of him
But a little greese spot
Weel about &c.
De constable cum arter me
Here what I had to sey,
But I wanted eksercize,
An so I run away
Weel about &c.
[...]
When Jim Crow is President
Of dis Unitid State
He’l drink mintjewlips
An swing pon a gate.
Weel about &c.
Den go ahed wite fokes
Dont be slow,
Hop ober dubble trubble
Jump Jim Crow.
Weel about &c.
So neber mine de wether,
Or how de wind do blow,
For in spite of wind and wether
Will I jump Jim Crow.
Weel about &c.
There have been many variations on these lyrics, and it became a staple of the minstrel circuit, performed by many others, not just Rice.
Here is an advertisement that appeared in the Columbian Centinel, a Boston newspaper, on 12 February 1834. It’s far from the earliest reference to a performance of the song, but it succinctly captures the racism and racial stereotypes at work in blackface minstrel performances:
A CARD
G.W. PHILLIMORE informs the citizens of Boston, that his BENEFIT will take place on THURSDAY EVENING next, 13th inst., on which occasion he ventures to solicit their patronage.
The performances will commence with a favorite drama.—After which
THE WARREN JIM CROW’S
Farewell of the Boston Audience,
when “de N[——]” will discuss, in Lyric style, his observations, classed under the following heads.—
Politicals, Capitolicals,
Classicals, Theatricals,
Intellecuals, Operaticals,
“An all de res ob de CAL’s in de hall “UNION.”
Nunquam Dormio
“So ‘go ahead’ you city folks,
You nebber hab ben slow,
To paternize de N[——].
So I weel about.”
(I have bowdlerized the n-word, which is spelled out in the original.)
Very quickly the “wheel about and turn about” lyric gave birth to a political sense of Jim Crow, that of what we would today call a flip-flopper or referring to someone who switched party allegiances, a turncoat. This sense appears in a letter to a Hagerstown, Maryland newspaper, published on 14 August 1828, although written sometime before that date as the editors note that they did not have space for it until mid August. The letter is in support of Andrew Jackson’s candidacy over John Quincy Adams in that year’s presidential election:
The “Jim Crow” poet and “nauseating” letter writer has the effrontery to state that Jackson is the Republican candidate, when it is notorious that the most violent federalists, such as the Hartford Convention men, Timothy Pickering, &c. &c. are his warmest supporters.
The letter is in response to one supporting Adams that was published in a Baltimore newspaper on 11 July 1828. In addition to the flip-flopping sense, the association of “spring up” in this first letter with “jump Jim Crow” may have helped inspire the use of “Jim Crow” in the second:
Let the Jacksonians in the South fear the bloody standard of revolt as soon as they please, and that moment they will have more to dread from bayonets that will spring up from their cotton and rice field within, than those that must be pointed to the breasts from without!
The use of Jim Crow here also has a connotation of supporting abolition, as Adams was an abolitionist and Jackson a slaveowner. This connotation appears again in the following passage, where Jim Crow refers to Black people and is paired with amalgamationist, which is the opposite of a segregationist, one who believes and works for a harmonious union of the races in society. From the Claremont, New Hampshire National Eagle of 4 September 1835:
The Jim Crow amalgamationist of the N. H. Patriot, who sometimes grins and shows his teeth at us a little, has been for some weeks laboring to make it out that the Whigs and abolitionists are working together.
But soon people in New England would be using Jim Crow to label segregation, not amalgamation. From an account of a trip on a Massachusetts railroad by a presumably white man that appeared in the Newburyport, Massachusetts Watchtower on 31 August 1838:
But from the treatment I received from the rail road conductor, I consider myself defrauded and lynched, from the consideration that I paid full fare to the clerk of the boat who furnished me with a deck ticket. After arriving in Stonington, and the conductor of the car failing to extort fifty more cents from me, insisted that I should not have that car, saying you are a d——b ABOLITIONIST. He and three others forcibly ejected me from the car, and forced me into what they call the pauper (or Jim Crow) car.
It’s not apparent from the above that Jim Crow cars were reserved for Black people, but this is made clear a few months later in a 19 November 1838 lecture by Edward Quincy that tells the tale of a Black clergyman traveling to Boston:
“I told the man that I had paid full price for my ticket, but he told me, the ‘Jim Crow car’ was for such as I. I was obliged to take my place in that car, in the midst of a circle of the vilest and basest of the community, of a foreign community, who amused themselves during the journey with insulting a poor colored girl, who happened to be in the car. I do not care to expose myself and my family to such scenes.” If this white haired preacher had been a gentleman’s servant, he could have travelled to Boston in stately style, if he wished it.
And we have this from the abolitionist newspaper the Liberator of 1 October 1841:
We understand that Mr. Douglas, a respectable colored man, was forcibly taken from a car on the Eastern Rail Road at Newburyport on Wednesday last, and placed in the Jim Crow or Negro Car, by order of the conductor or superintendent. His clothes were considerably torn and his body injured. This was done for no other reason that this—his skin happened to be a few shades darker than that of the Anglo-Saxons.
When you think about it, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the first Jim Crow laws arose in the “free” North before the Civil War. Before emancipation, Whites in the South did not see segregation of the races as necessary. They maintained control over Blacks through the enforcement mechanisms of slavery, which did not exist in the North. And after emancipation and after Reconstruction had ended, the Whites in the South turned to the tactic that those in the North had used to maintain their position of social superiority, segregation.
And indeed, the first Jim Crow laws in the South appeared in 1892, after the end of reconstruction. The first was on Louisiana railways. Here is a 25 February 1892 account of R. F. Desdunes, a man of mixed race, arrested for sitting in a Whites-only car:
He was arrested, charged with violation of the Separate Car act and arraigned before the Second Recorder’s Court. The act, which was passed by the last legislature, prohibits blacks and whites from occupying the same cars, under severe penalties. It has been bitterly denounced by the colored people under the name of the “Jim Crow Car” law, and they have been agitating for its repeal, and raised a considerable amount to test its legality before the Court.
Despite the wording of the article, evidently Desdunes was either not prosecuted or did not appeal, as I can find no record of his case in Westlaw. But on 7 June 1892, a similar, more famous incident occurred in which Homer Plessy was arrested and convicted of violating the same law. On 19 December 1892, the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled in Plessy’s case that “separate but equal” facilities were constitutional, as reported the next day in the Elmira Gazette using the term Jim Crow:
NEW ORLEANS, Dec. 20.—The Supreme Court yesterday declared constitutional the law passed two years ago and known as the “Jim Crow” law, making it compulsory on railroads to provide separate cars for negroes.
Plessy appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, and that body ruled in 1896 that such Jim Crow laws were constitutional, paving the way for their implementation across the South.
Such laws stood as constitutional until the 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education overturned Plessy v. Ferguson, making “separate but equal” and Jim Crow laws unconstitutional. Still, it took more than a decade after that for the system of Jim Crow to be dismantled, and we are still living with its effects today.
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