Jim Crow South

Abstract

The period after the end of Reconstruction (conventionally dated from the political compromise of 1877, though in fact it occurred over a number of years) is often called that of “Jim Crow,” after a nineteenth-century black-face vaudeville character: it is marked by the systematic exclusion of Blacks from the political and much of the economic gains that they had made in the previous decade. For our purposes, it includes most notably the formal exclusion of Black children, by law and public policy, from the schools attended by White children. Of course, they had already been excluded from those schools by common practice, but legally imposed segregation had a different moral significance. As the Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), would point out in quoting approvingly the finding of a lower court in the same case, “Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law; for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group.” This chapter and the next are concerned with how the matter-of-fact separate schooling of Black pupils that had developed became translated into official policies that they should and must be schooled apart.