HIST 10613 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Jim Crow Laws, W. E. B. Du Bois, John Studebaker
1/22 Jim Crow Era
Monday, January 22, 2018
11:02 AM
• Jim Crow was not a real person, he was a main character of minstrel shows
Minstrel Shows:
Performed in "black face"
• Racial topics & comedy
• Refers to social etiquette that was the "right" way to perform in society
Jim Crow Laws- laws of segregation
Tennessee's "Army and Navy" law (1879)- only permitted certain guns for use of African Americans,
these models were hard to acquire and hard to conceal
Jim Crow Social Etiquette:
• Black male could not offer to shake white males hand
• Blacks and whites were not supposed to eat together
• Black male cannot light a white woman's cigarette
• Any African American could be referred to as "boy"
Race Riots:
• White people instigated the violence
• Something that upset the status quo
• Tend to happen during summer months
• Often sparked by rumorsP
Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896):
• Plessy is 1/8 black
• He boards the train and they hire a detective to arrest him to "set himself up" so he could take it
to court
• The railroads position was asking why they have to carry extra cars (because of the necessary
white/black cars)
o Hurt the railroads efficiency
• In a supreme court decision, the majority rules
• Court rules "separate but equal" is constitutional
• Justice Henry B. Brown believes that legislation can never fix racial issues
• Justice John M. Harlan- looks at the facts of the case and constitution and claims that the
constitution is "colorblind" and that all citizens are equal before the law
Overcoming Jim Crow
Booker T. Washington
• Born a slave
• Established Tuskegee Institute
• "Cast down your bucket where you are" - work with what you have now
• Believes no law will change society but the people in it must prove their worth and change society
themselves
• Self Improvement: 1) Economic stability 2) Family Stability 3) being good law abiding citizens
• "No race that has anything to contribute is ostracized"
W.E.B Du Bois
• Born free, after the Civil War
• Harvard- educated PhD
• Helped found NAACP
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