Jim Crow Essay

The Civil War and its resulting Amendments 13th through 15th to be enforced through the Reconstruction all failed to due resistance by the white majority. Ensuring the segregation of white and black Americans was how white America made its feelings known, and so while black Americans were now free, they were not free to access all public places and spaces, including schools, public transportation, entertainment venues, parks, fountains and beaches. If one looks up the history of Jim Crow, it will show that the term was first coined by a white entertainer named Thomas “Daddy’ Rice, who in his minstrel show, presumed to create a derogatory dance called the “Jump Jim Crow”, with an objective to ridicule and demean black people (Hine, Hine & Harrold, 2013, p. 348). What Jim Crow came represent was a separatist way of life, inclusive of laws, intuited rules regarding black and white relational etiquette, and swift retaliation of both the legal and vigilante sort.
Segregation was already in full swing even before laws were pursued, and put into effect. Jim Crow was more about how white saw blacks as inferior in every aspect of humanity, to the degree they believed it right to treat them as less than human. At best they could be servants, and at worst they …show more content…
Not only did it mean that blacks would only be remanded to the backs of trains, and buses, but of course business owners, hospitals and transportation companies would take it further and flat out refuse to serve them. Jim Crow laws like Plessy only served to encourage the worst treatment possible to a population that was supposed to be legally