1877: Jim Crow
Big Idea
After Reconstruction, African Americans shifted from resisting enslavement in the institution of slavery to resisting a new racial caste system referred to as “Jim Crow.”
End of Reconstruction
Advances for Black families ended when the Federal Government withdrew its support for Reconstruction in 1876. When the federal government withdrew its support of Reconstruction in 1876, the period of post-civil war growth for Black people ended. Local and state laws were quickly passed that racially segregated Black men, women, and children from much of White life in the South.
Listen
Listen to a podcast from Seizing Freedom with historian Deborah Willis as she describes how photographs from the era help tell the untold story of African Americans during the post-Civil War period.
Sharecropping
Sharecropping became the new means of enslavement in the South. As the South reeled from the loss of the Civil War and sought to rebuild its economic base, sharecropping became the dominant system of labor that replaced the old slave-based plantation structure. Sharecropping agreements divided old plantations into smaller units of land, which were then leased to poor white and Black farmers with nearly half of the land being leased to African American families. These families worked the land (usually 30 to 50 acres) in return for a portion of the crop share. As Edward Royce (1988) wrote,
Freed people remained dependent on planters, because of the latter’s virtual monopoly of land, and planters remained dependent on their former slaves, because of the latter’s virtual monopoly of labor. Each tried, unsuccessful, to break the monopoly possessed by the other. (Royce, 1988, p. 2-4; 181)
“[B]etween 1890 and 1910, Jim Crow laws created an elaborately divided world, such that the domain of resources and power was inhabited by whites, and the domain of deprivation and powerlessness was inhabited by blacks.”
Jim Crow
Sign for the "colored" waiting room
At a bus station in Durham, North Carolina, May 1940.
Image Source: Wikipedia
A racial caste system, referred to as “Jim Crow,” replaced slavery as the new form of control in the South. Known as “Jim Crow,” these laws, regulations, and social requirements relegated Blacks to second-class citizens (Hoelscher, 2003, p. 659; Woodward, 1955). A racial caste system replaced slavery as the new form of control in the South. Mindy Thompson Fullilove (2016) describes Jim Crow in the following way: “between 1890 and 1910, Jim Crow laws created an elaborately divided world, such that the domain of resources and power was inhabited by whites, and the domain of deprivation and powerlessness was inhabited by blacks” (pp. 22-23).
“[W]rongs are not much now written in laws which all may see – but the hidden practices of people who have not yet, abandoned the idea of Mastery and dominion over their fellow man.”
Black Agency
Even in the midst of such deprivation, African Americans continued to assert their rights and push back against the Jim Crow-ism that sought to control their lives in the American South.
Their success kept Jim Crow in check. Geographer Steven Hoelscher (2003) notes “its [Jim Crow] power was never monolithic or complete; Jim Crow constantly had to remake itself in response to African-American (and occasionally white) defiance and resistance” (p. 660).
Your Turn
Are there ways that Jim Crow attitudes still appear in society? How are they displayed?
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Listen to an oral history interview of a man who grew up under the sharecropping system in the South. (Library of Congress).
Explore The African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenshipfrom the Library of Congress.
Watch the PBS documentary “Slavery by Another Name.”
Visit the website project “A Red Record,” which traces the history of lynching in the American South.
Visit the website for the Jim Crow Museum.
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Lesson planfrom Learning for Justice related to African American experience after the Civil War. (Middle and high school grades)
Documentary film - An Outrage - on lynchings in the American South from Learning for Justice. (9-12 grades)
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Item description
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Burnham, M. A. (2022). By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners. W.W. Norton.
Jaynes, G.D. (1989). Branches Without Roots: Genesis of the Black Working Class in the American South, 1862-1882. Oxford University Press.
Logan, R. W. (1954). The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir 1877–1901. Dial Press.
Moses, W. J. (1988). The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850-1925. Oxford University Press.
Thaggart, M. (2022). Riding Jane Crow: African American Women on the American Railroad. University of Illinois Press.
Woodward, C. V. (1955). The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Oxford University Press.