Free At Last?

The Jim Crow Laws

Segregation in America from 1870-1950www.jimcrowhistory.org/home.htm

•The ‘Jim Crow’ figure was a fixture of the minstrel shows that toured the South.•A white man ‘blacked up’, sang and mimicked stereotypical black behaviour in the name of comedy e.g. laziness, stupidity.

Philadelphia, 1889: Removing an African American from a railway car.

•Lynching victim JP Ivy, a black timber cutter who was subsequently burned to death by a mob from Union and Lee Counties.

Rocky Ford, Mississippi September 1925

•Ivy was accused of an assault on a white girl, which he always denied.

•From their headquarters on Fifth Avenue, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People flew a flag to report lynchings until 1938, when it was threatened with eviction.

New York 1936

Black housing in Chattanooga, Tennessee 1899

Blacks and whites were either separated within the same cinema…

…or, as in Leland, Mississippi in 1939, they were completely segregated.

Segregated drinking fountains and bathrooms in Oklahoma

City,1939

“Each time the NAACP took a school district to court that called themselves ‘separate but equal,’ we proved through my photographs that the schools were certainly segregated, but not equal.”

R. C. Hickman

“You know, they didn’t have a heater like that in any white school.” NAACP, 1950

“In the late 1940s black people were not admitted to the public hospitals in Dallas. So the black doctors created their own hospital.”

R. C. Hickman

A State Fair parade, 1953. “There was one day set aside for blacks during the State Fair. They called it Negro Achievement Day.” R. C. Hickman

‘Jim Crow’ Etiquette

•A black male could not offer to shake hands with a white male because it suggested social equality. •Blacks were not allowed to show affection in

public.•Whites never called blacks ‘Mr’ or ‘Sir’ and used their first names instead. However, blacks had to use these titles when referring to whites, and were not allowed to use white first names.

•White motorists had right of way at all junctions.

•Blacks were introduced to whites, never the other way round e.g. “Mr. Peters, this is Charlie.”