Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey
Speaker 1: brain Stuff. Lauren Vogelbaum here. Today's episode speaks frankly but
Speaker 1: non graphically about racial violence. For the better part of
Speaker 1: a century, American people of color lived under the burden
Speaker 1: of what are now known as Jim Crow Laws. This
Speaker 1: racist system of segregation, mainly of black people from white people,
Speaker 1: affected virtually every sector of American life and reached far
Speaker 1: beyond the South, where it was best known and most
Speaker 1: harshly practiced. Jim Crow Laws and the deep wounds that
Speaker 1: they inflicted on American society are not relegated to the
Speaker 1: past tense. Their legacy is still felt in many ways today.
Speaker 1: We spoke with Stephen Barry, a professor of American culture
Speaker 1: at the University of Michigan and the author of the
Speaker 1: Jim Crow Routine, Everyday Performances of Race, civil Rights, and
Speaker 1: Segregation in Mississippi. He said Jim Crow was about so
Speaker 1: much more than laws. It really was an all encompass
Speaker 1: system that involved political practices, economic practices, social practices, cultural practices.
Speaker 1: Some of that was about legal things, but some of
Speaker 1: it wasn't. One of the challenges why Jim Crow often
Speaker 1: seems like it's in the past. People tend to think that, oh,
Speaker 1: it was a few laws, and we got rid of
Speaker 1: segregation laws and we got the Voting Rights Act, so
Speaker 1: that must have taken care of it. It didn't. These
Speaker 1: laws weren't named after a real life person. Jim Crow
Speaker 1: was a fictional character in a minstrel show representation of
Speaker 1: a black man and exaggerated, stereotyped and racist representation, played
Speaker 1: by a white man on stage in black face in
Speaker 1: the early eighteen hundreds. This character was a hit with
Speaker 1: many audiences, and by ninety eight the term Jim Crow
Speaker 1: had become a racial epithet. Estates began passing laws to
Speaker 1: restrict the rights of slaves freed at the end of
Speaker 1: the Civil War. The laws came to be known as
Speaker 1: Jim Crow laws. The Emancipation Proclamation of eighteen sixty three
Speaker 1: freed all slaves from states that had ceded from the Union,
Speaker 1: and in the following years three amendments to the U.
Speaker 1: S Constitution gave former slaves rights. Thirteenth in eighteen sixty
Speaker 1: five abolished slavery, the fourteenth in eighteen sixty eight guaranteed
Speaker 1: equal protection to all citizens, and the fifteenth in eighteen
Speaker 1: seventy guaranteed the right to vote regardless of race, color,
Speaker 1: or previous condition of servitude. The South, coping with its
Speaker 1: loss in the Civil War and what it felt was
Speaker 1: punishment meeted out by the U S government, responded by
Speaker 1: enacting a series of laws over several years to severely
Speaker 1: restrict the rights that had been granted to black people.
Speaker 1: These laws were said to be enacted for many reasons,
Speaker 1: but the simplest explanation is this they aimed to maintain
Speaker 1: white people's claim to first class status in American society
Speaker 1: and to keep black people a second class citizens. Here
Speaker 1: are a few early examples of these laws. In eighteen
Speaker 1: sixty six, the Tennessee legislature passed a bill requiring separate
Speaker 1: schools for black and white people. Between eighteen sixty six
Speaker 1: and nineteen fifty five, Tennessee passed twenty Jim Crow laws,
Speaker 1: including ones that outlawed misagenation and required segregation in public accommodations.
Speaker 1: In eighteen seventy seven, the new constitution of the State
Speaker 1: of Georgia included requirements the primary schools be segregated, and
Speaker 1: it established a separate university for black people. It also
Speaker 1: instituted a poll tax, which disproportionately affected poor black people,
Speaker 1: effectively stripping them of the right to vote. Laws like
Speaker 1: these kept black people from voting and thereby from having
Speaker 1: a say in governance. It barred them from holding public office,
Speaker 1: thus slanting the justice system against them. It restricted them socially,
Speaker 1: requiring Black people to use different phone booths, drinking fountains, restrooms,
Speaker 1: and so on. It's stymied them economically, and in all
Speaker 1: prohibited them from gaining equal footing with white citizens by themselves.
Speaker 1: The Jim Crow laws were devastating, but as Barry points out,
Speaker 1: the legal aspect of Jim Crow was only part of
Speaker 1: the problem. Black people were also subjected to widespread violence
Speaker 1: and murder, implicitly condoned by much of white society and
Speaker 1: rarely prosecuted, that continued well into the twentieth century. The
Speaker 1: Ku Klux Klan, originally a club for Confederate veterans, was
Speaker 1: born in the aftermath of the Civil War and has
Speaker 1: terrorized black people for decades. In the Equal Justice Initiative
Speaker 1: released a report called Lynching in America, confronting the legacy
Speaker 1: of racial terror. It documented in the period between eighteen
Speaker 1: seventy seven and nineteen fifty, almost four thousand lynchings. From
Speaker 1: that report quote racial terror. Lynching was a tool used
Speaker 1: to enforce Jim Crow laws and racial segregation, a tactic
Speaker 1: for maintaining racial control by victimizing the entire African American community,
Speaker 1: not merely punishment of an alleged perpetrator for a crime.
Speaker 1: Barry explained that the fears, frustrations, and injustices created by
Speaker 1: these laws and this violence seeped into everyday life. He said,
Speaker 1: there's this tendency to think of both Jim Crow specifically
Speaker 1: and racism more broadly as being this overt form that
Speaker 1: looks like the KKK, that looks like a cross burning,
Speaker 1: that looks like dramatic acts of violence. Sometimes it is that,
Speaker 1: but often it's much more subtle. It's in the air
Speaker 1: that we breathe and the water that we drink. Up
Speaker 1: until eight Jim Crow laws were limited to state and
Speaker 1: local regulations, but in a landmark case that year, the U. S.
Speaker 1: Supreme Court codified the laws nationally. In Plus e versus Ferguson,
Speaker 1: the court upheld the Louisiana Separate Car Act. Of this act,
Speaker 1: also known as the Louisiana Railways Accommodation Act required railways
Speaker 1: to quote provide equal but separate accommodations for white people
Speaker 1: and people of color. Unsuccessful challenges to this law brought
Speaker 1: it to the Supreme Court in Plessy versus Ferguson, and
Speaker 1: in their decision, the Court held up the constitutionality of
Speaker 1: states segregation laws, which opened the door for even more
Speaker 1: restrictive Jim Crow laws in the coming years across the country.
Speaker 1: These included one that passed in Arkansas in three stating
Speaker 1: that it was unlawful for white prisoners to be handcuffed
Speaker 1: or chained to black prisoners, and one from nineteen eleven
Speaker 1: in Nebraska which stated that marriages would be void if
Speaker 1: one person was white and one was one eighth or
Speaker 1: more black, Japanese or Chinese, and one from nineteen twenty
Speaker 1: six in Atlanta that stated the black barbers couldn't serve
Speaker 1: white women or girls. In Californian ninety four, the state's
Speaker 1: constitution was amended to strip voting rights from anyone quote
Speaker 1: who shall not be able to read the Constitution in
Speaker 1: the English language and write his name. Remember that under
Speaker 1: these laws, even basic schooling wasn't necessarily available to people
Speaker 1: of color and On top of all of this violence
Speaker 1: and lynchings, continued pockets of resistance to Jim Crow formed
Speaker 1: from time to time, Barry says, especially after Black soldiers
Speaker 1: returned home from World War One and World War Two
Speaker 1: and pressed for equal treatment, but the system of oppression
Speaker 1: remained strong. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, a white
Speaker 1: mob and Blakely Georgia lynched William Little in nineteen nineteen
Speaker 1: for refusing to take off his uniform after returning home
Speaker 1: from World War One. Barry said African Americans always challenged
Speaker 1: the system. They always pushed back. Sometimes it came just
Speaker 1: in terms of teaching your children how you survive this system.
Speaker 1: Not only we want you to know these rules so
Speaker 1: that you're safe, but we also want you to know
Speaker 1: that you're just pretending. The poet Lawrence Dunbar referred to
Speaker 1: this as we wear the mask. The idea was, you're
Speaker 1: wearing this mask and pretending to go through the rules,
Speaker 1: but you're learning that that's not who you really are,
Speaker 1: that you're not really inferior, even though you're following those
Speaker 1: rules that are meant to tell you that. Three years
Speaker 1: after the end of World War Two, on July, President
Speaker 1: Harry s. Truman desegregated the military, which was perhaps one
Speaker 1: of the first real steps towards the downfall of Jim
Speaker 1: Crow Laws. It wasn't until nineteen fifty four Supreme Court
Speaker 1: decision in Brown versus the Board of Education, though, which
Speaker 1: ruled that separating school children on the basis of race
Speaker 1: was unconstitutional, thus overturning the idea of separate but equal
Speaker 1: expressed in the Plessy decision about sixty years earlier. The
Speaker 1: Jim Crow Laws were dealt a fatal blow. Barry explained,
Speaker 1: World War Two was a huge turning point. People are
Speaker 1: always pushing back and fighting. There's this constant struggle, but
Speaker 1: it became more visible then, and you do get this
Speaker 1: mobilization in the mid nineteen fifties. The struggle to free
Speaker 1: black Americans from Jim Crow had more setbacks to come.
Speaker 1: The Cold War was a hard time for anyone to
Speaker 1: question American values for fear of being branded a communist.
Speaker 1: But the turbulent nineteen sixties, with the full throated protests
Speaker 1: of the Freedom Rides of nineteen sixty one and the
Speaker 1: passage of the Civil Rights Act in nineteen sixty eight,
Speaker 1: helped solidify the idea that Jim Crow laws were a
Speaker 1: thing of the past, and that segregation had no place
Speaker 1: in American society of the Gerald M. Packard in American Nightmare,
Speaker 1: The History of Jim Crow wrote that quote Jim Crow
Speaker 1: was a disease that once permeated every fissure and fold
Speaker 1: of American society. Yet in the past few years voter
Speaker 1: suppression measures have been introduced by the hundreds. Black people
Speaker 1: in America today are incarcerated at a rate of more
Speaker 1: than five times that of white people, and as of
Speaker 1: investigative journalism by The Guardian found the black citizens and
Speaker 1: black men ages fifteen to thirty four years in particular,
Speaker 1: are disproportionately the victims of deadly forced by police officers.
Speaker 1: Young black men made up just two percent of the
Speaker 1: population but accounted for fifteen percent of deaths perpetrated by
Speaker 1: the police. And we're nine times more likely to die
Speaker 1: in police instance than any other demographic. Jim Crow Laws
Speaker 1: may be dead, Jim Crow, though, is not. Today's episode
Speaker 1: was written by John Donovan and produced by Tyler Klang.
Speaker 1: For more on listen lots of other topics, visit how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Brainstuff is a production of I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio. For more podcasts on my heart Radio, visit
Speaker 1: the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen
Speaker 1: to your favorite shows.