Jump Jim Crow Research Papers

Have you ever thought about the origin of the name Jim Crow? According to a National Geographic article, there was this white man named Thomas Dartmouth Rice who made up the name. He was really into theater and he did this bit where he painted his face black. He would do a song and dance that he claimed was inspired by a slave he saw. The act was called “Jump, Jim Crow”. Jim Crow laws would soon be known to demean African American people by setting them at a lower status than white people were held. These blacks would have to endure a lot of hardship to get to the place they are today. The life of an average colored person during the 1930s when the Jim Crow laws were present was filled with limited opportunities for education, segregated …show more content…
Rules would be made against blacks and blacks seemed to always be separated from whites as if they had some kind of plague or were contagious. Rules made usually didn’t mean to make life easier on African Americans and sometimes weren’t even official rules. An author, Jarrold Packard, writes, “Blacks sitting in “their” section could be made to move if the white section became filled to capacity and more “white” seats were required. Needless to say, the opposite - approaching white seats to meet needs of an overfilled black section - never happened” (Packard 88). There was no compromise when it came to the needs of black people. There could be almost no one in the white section of a train, and the blacks still could not sit there. Packard also wrote, “And whenever the rules changed, such change inevitably occurred to the white passenger’s comfort” (Packard 89). Black people were never meant to be comforted. White people would make the rules not even thinking about a black person’s needs and it was very obvious like mentioned in the passage. When it came down to looking back into the 1930s, you could pretty much spot segregation in anything. Packard wrote, “In fact, the entire fair would be segregated, with blacks unwelcome in any of the pavilions except their own Negro Building. None of the refreshment vendors would be permitted to sell food to any African American visitor or even so much as provide a black with a drink of water” (Packard 82). Life back then was so segregated that it leaked into treatment at the fair. Black people only had one pavilion that they could go into and couldn’t even get service from a vendor. They weren’t really wanted in places of fun. Buildings like libraries even had segregation. Packard made this seen when he states, “White libraries were as often as not closed entirely