Blacks and Whites were not supposed to eat together. If they did eat
together, Whites were to be served first, and some sort of partition was to
be placed between them.
Under no circumstance was a Black male to offer to light the cigarette
of a White female -- that gesture implied intimacy.
Blacks were not allowed to show public affection toward one another in
public, especially kissing, because it offended Whites.
Jim Crow etiquette prescribed that Blacks were introduced to Whites,
never Whites to Blacks. For example: "Mr. Peters (the White person), this is
Charlie (the Black person), that I spoke to you about."
Whites did not use courtesy titles of respect when referring to Blacks,
for example, Mr., Mrs., Miss., Sir, or Ma'am. Instead, Blacks were called by
their first names. Blacks had to use courtesy titles when referring to
Whites, and were not allowed to call them by their first names.
If a Black person rode in a car driven by a White person, the Black
person sat in the back seat, or the back of a truck.
White motorists had the right-of-way at all intersections.
Stetson Kennedy, the author of Jim Crow Guide, offered these simple
rules that Blacks were supposed to observe in conversing with Whites:
- Never assert or even intimate that a White person is lying.
- Never impute dishonorable intentions to a White person.
- Never suggest that a White person is from an inferior class.
- Never lay claim to, or overly demonstrate, superior knowledge or
intelligence.
- Never curse a White person.
- Never laugh derisively at a White person.
- Never comment upon the appearance of a White female.
Jim Crow etiquette operated in conjunction with Jim Crow laws (black codes).
When most people think of Jim Crow they think of laws (not the Jim Crow
etiquette) which excluded Blacks from public transport and facilities, juries,
jobs, and neighborhoods. The passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to
the Constitution had granted Blacks the same legal protections as Whites.
However, after 1877, and the election of Republican Rutherford B. Hayes,
southern and border states began restricting the liberties of Blacks.
Unfortunately for Blacks, the Supreme Court helped undermine the Constitutional
protections of Blacks with the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) case, which
legitimized Jim Crow laws and the Jim Crow way of life.
In 1890, Louisiana passed the "Separate Car Law," which purported to aid
passenger comfort by creating "equal but separate" cars for Blacks and Whites.
This was a ruse. No public accommodations, including railway travel, provided
Blacks with equal facilities. The Louisiana law made it illegal for Blacks to
sit in coach seats reserved for Whites, and Whites could not sit in seats
reserved for Blacks. In 1891, a group of Blacks decided to test the Jim Crow
law. They had Homer A. Plessy, who was seven-eights White and one-eighth Black
(therefore, Black), sit in the White-only railroad coach. He was arrested.
Plessy's lawyer argued that Louisiana did not have the right to label one
citizen as White and another Black for the purposes of restricting their rights
and privileges. In Plessy, the Supreme Court stated that so long as state
governments provided legal process and legal freedoms for Blacks, equal to those
of Whites, they could maintain separate institutions to facilitate these rights.
The Court, by a 7-2 vote, upheld the Louisiana law, declaring that racial
separation did not necessarily mean an abrogation of equality. In practice,
Plessy represented the legitimization of two societies: one White, and
advantaged; the other, Black, disadvantaged and despised.
Blacks were denied the right to vote by grandfather clauses (laws that
restricted the right to vote to people whose ancestors had voted before the
Civil War), poll taxes (fees charged to poor Blacks), white primaries (only
Democrats could vote, only Whites could be Democrats), and literacy tests ("Name
all the Vice Presidents and Supreme Court Justices throughout America's
history"). Plessy sent this message to southern and border states:
Discrimination against Blacks is acceptable.
Jim Crow states passed statutes severely regulating social interactions between
the races. Jim Crow signs were placed above water fountains, door entrances and
exits, and in front of public facilities. There were separate hospitals for
Blacks and Whites, separate prisons, separate public and private schools,
separate churches, separate cemeteries, separate public restrooms, and separate
public accommodations. In most instances, the Black facilities were grossly
inferior -- generally, older, less-well-kept. In other cases, there were no
Black facilities -- no Colored public restroom, no public beach, no place to sit
or eat. Plessy gave Jim Crow states a legal way to ignore their constitutional
obligations to their Black citizens.
Jim Crow laws touched every aspect of everyday life. For example, in 1935,
Oklahoma prohibited Blacks and Whites from boating together. Boating implied
social equality. In 1905, Georgia established separate parks for Blacks and
Whites. In 1930, Birmingham, Alabama, made it illegal for Blacks and Whites to
play checkers or dominoes together. Here are some of the typical Jim Crow laws,
as compiled by the Martin Luther King, Jr., National Historic Site Interpretive
Staff:
- Barbers. No colored barber shall serve as a barber (to) white
girls or women (Georgia).
Blind Wards. The board of trustees shall...maintain a separate
building...on separate ground for the admission, care, instruction, and
support of all blind persons of the colored or black race (Louisiana).
Burial. The officer in charge shall not bury, or allow to be
buried, any colored persons upon ground set apart or used for the burial of
white persons (Georgia).
Buses. All passenger stations in this state operated by any motor
transportation company shall have separate waiting rooms or space and
separate ticket windows for the white and colored races (Alabama).
Child Custody. It shall be unlawful for any parent, relative, or
other white person in this State, having the control or custody of any white
child, by right of guardianship, natural or acquired, or otherwise, to
dispose of, give or surrender such white child permanently into the custody,
control, maintenance, or support, of a negro (South Carolina).
Education. The schools for white children and the schools for
negro children shall be conducted separately (Florida).
Libraries. The state librarian is directed to fit up and maintain
a separate place for the use of the colored people who may come to the
library for the purpose of reading books or periodicals (North Carolina).
Mental Hospitals. The Board of Control shall see that proper and
distinct apartments are arranged for said patients, so that in no case shall
Negroes and white persons be together (Georgia).
Militia. The white and colored militia shall be separately
enrolled, and shall never be compelled to serve in the same organization. No
organization of colored troops shall be permitted where white troops are
available and where whites are permitted to be organized, colored troops
shall be under the command of white officers (North Carolina).
Nurses. No person or corporation shall require any White female
nurse to nurse in wards or rooms in hospitals, either public or private, in
which negro men are placed (Alabama).
Prisons. The warden shall see that the white convicts shall have
separate apartments for both eating and sleeping from the negro convicts
(Mississippi).
Reform Schools. The children of white and colored races committed
to the houses of reform shall be kept entirely separate from each other
(Kentucky).
Teaching. Any instructor who shall teach in any school, college
or institution where members of the white and colored race are received and
enrolled as pupils for instruction shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor,
and upon conviction thereof, shall be fined... (Oklahoma).
Wine and Beer. All persons licensed to conduct the business of
selling beer or wine...shall serve either white people exclusively or
colored people exclusively and shall not sell to the two races within the
same room at any time (Georgia).
The Jim Crow laws and system of etiquette were undergirded by violence, real and
threatened. Blacks who violated Jim Crow norms, for example, drinking from the
White water fountain or trying to vote, risked their homes, their jobs, even
their lives. Whites could physically beat Blacks with impunity. Blacks had
little legal recourse against these assaults because the Jim Crow criminal
justice system was all-White: police, prosecutors, judges, juries, and prison
officials. Violence was instrumental for Jim Crow. It was a method of social
control. The most extreme forms of Jim Crow violence were lynchings.
Lynchings were public, often sadistic, murders carried out by mobs. Between
1882, when the first reliable data were collected, and 1968, when lynchings had
become rare, there were 4,730 known lynchings, including 3,440 Black men and
women. Most of the victims of Lynch-Law were hanged or shot, but some were
burned at the stake, castrated, beaten with clubs, or dismembered. In the
mid-1800s, Whites constituted the majority of victims (and perpetrators);
however, by the period of Radical Reconstruction, Blacks became the most
frequent lynching victims. This is an early indication that lynching was used as
an intimidation tool to keep Blacks, in this case the newly-freedmen, "in their
places." The great majority of lynchings occurred in southern and border states,
where the resentment against Blacks ran deepest. According to the social
economist Gunnar Myrdal: "The southern states account for nine-tenths of the
lynchings. More than two thirds of the remaining one-tenth occurred in the six
states which immediately border the South."
Many Whites claimed that although lynchings were distasteful, they were
necessary supplements to the criminal justice system because Blacks were prone
to violent crimes, especially the rapes of White women. Arthur Raper
investigated nearly a century of lynchings and concluded that approximately
one-third of all the victims were falsely accused.
Under Jim Crow any and all sexual interactions between Black men and White
women was illegal, illicit, socially repugnant, and within the Jim Crow
definition of rape. Although only 19.2 percent of the lynching victims between
1882 to 1951 were even accused of rape, Lynch law was often supported on the
popular belief that lynchings were necessary to protect White women from Black
rapists. Myrdal refutes this belief in this way: "There is much reason to
believe that this figure (19.2) has been inflated by the fact that a mob which
makes the accusation of rape is secure from any further investigation; by the
broad Southern definition of rape to include all sexual relations between Negro
men and white women; and by the psychopathic fears of white women in their
contacts with Negro men."
Most Blacks were lynched for demanding civil rights, violating Jim Crow
etiquette or laws, or in the aftermath of race riots.
Lynchings were most common in small and middle-sized towns where Blacks often
were economic competitors to the local Whites. These Whites resented any
economic and political gains made by Blacks. Lynchers were seldomly arrested,
and if arrested, rarely convicted. Raper estimated that "at least one-half of
the lynchings are carried out with police officers participating, and that in
nine-tenths of the others the officers either condone or wink at the mob
action." Lynching served many
purposes: it was cheap entertainment; it served as a rallying, uniting point for
Whites; it functioned as an ego-massage for low-income, low-status Whites; it
was a method of defending White domination and helped stop or retard the
fledgling social equality movement.
Lynch mobs directed their hatred against one (sometimes several) victims. The
victim was an example of what happened to a Black man who tried to vote, or who
looked at a White woman, or who tried to get a White man's job. Unfortunately
for Blacks, sometimes the mob was not satisfied to murder a single or several
victims. Instead, in the spirit of pogroms, the mobs went into Black communities
and destroyed additional lives and property. Their immediate goal was to drive
out -- through death or expulsion -- all Blacks; the larger goal was to
maintain, at all costs, White supremacy. These pogrom-like actions are often
referred to as riots; however, Gunnar Myrdal was right when he described these
"riots" as "a terrorization or massacre...a mass lynching."7
Interestingly, these mass lynchings were primarily urban phenomena, whereas the
lynching of single victims was primarily a rural phenomena.
James Weldon Johnson, the famous Black writer, labeled 1919 as "The Red
Summer." It was red from racial tension; it was red from bloodletting. During
the summer of 1919, there were race riots in Chicago, Illinois; Knoxville and
Nashville, Tennessee; Charleston, South Carolina; Omaha, Nebraska; and two dozen
other cities. W.E.B. DuBois, the Black social scientist and civil rights
activist, wrote: "During that year seventy-seven Negroes were lynched, of whom
one was a woman and eleven were soldiers; of these, fourteen were publicly
burned, eleven of them being burned alive. That year there were race riots large
and small in twenty-six American cities including thirty-eight killed in a
Chicago riot of August; from twenty-five to fifty in Phillips County, Arkansas;
and six killed in Washington."
The riots of 1919 were not the first or last "mass lynchings" of Blacks, as
evidenced by the race riots in Wilmington, North Carolina (1898); Atlanta,
Georgia (1906); Springfield, Illinois (1908); East St. Louis, Illinois (1917);
Tulsa, Oklahoma (1921); and Detroit, Michigan (1943). Joseph Boskin, author of
Urban Racial Violence, claimed that the riots of the 1900s had the following
traits:
- In each of the race riots, with few exceptions, it was White people that
sparked the incident by attacking Black people.
In the majority of the riots, some extraordinary social condition
prevailed at the time of the riot: prewar social changes, wartime mobility,
post-war adjustment, or economic depression.
The majority of the riots occurred during the hot summer months.
Rumor played an extremely important role in causing many riots. Rumors
of some criminal activity by Blacks against Whites perpetuated the actions
of the White mobs.
The police force, more than any other institution, was invariably
involved as a precipitating cause or perpetuating factor in the riots. In
almost every one of the riots, the police sided with the attackers, either
by actually participating in, or by failing to quell the attack.
In almost every instance, the fighting occurred within the Black
community.
Boskin omitted the following: the mass media, especially newspapers often
published inflammatory articles about "Black criminals" immediately before the
riots; Blacks were not only killed, but their homes and businesses were looted,
and many who did not flee were left homeless; and, the goal of the White
rioters, as was true of White lynchers of single victims, was to instill fear
and terror into Blacks, thereby buttressing White domination. The Jim Crow
hierarchy could not work without violence being used against those on the bottom
rung. George Fredrickson, a historian, stated it this way: "Lynching
represented...a way of using fear and terror to check 'dangerous' tendencies in
a black community considered to be ineffectively regimented or supervised. As
such it constituted a confession that the regular institutions of a segregated
society provided an inadequate measure of day-to-day control."
Many Blacks resisted the indignities of Jim Crow, and, far too often, they
paid for their bravery with their lives.
Jim Crow was the name of the racial caste system which operated primarily, but
not exclusively in southern and border states, between 1877 and the mid-1960s.
Jim Crow was more than a series of rigid anti-Black laws. It was a way of life.
Under Jim Crow, African Americans were relegated to the status of second class
citizens. Jim Crow represented the legitimization of anti-Black racism. Many
Christian ministers and theologians taught that Whites were the Chosen people,
Blacks were cursed to be servants, and God supported racial segregation.
Craniologists, eugenicists, phrenologists, and Social Darwinists, at every
educational level, buttressed the belief that Blacks were innately
intellectually and culturally inferior to Whites. Pro-segregation politicians
gave eloquent speeches on the great danger of integration: the mongrelization of
the White race. Newspaper and magazine writers routinely referred to Blacks as
niggers, coons, and darkies; and worse, their articles reinforced anti-Black
stereotypes. Even children's games portrayed Blacks as inferior beings.
All major societal institutions reflected and supported the oppression of
Blacks.
The Jim Crow system was undergirded by the following beliefs or
rationalizations: Whites were superior to Blacks in all important ways,
including but not limited to intelligence, morality, and civilized behavior;
sexual relations between Blacks and Whites would produce a mongrel race which
would destroy America; treating Blacks as equals would encourage interracial
sexual unions; any activity which suggested social equality encouraged
interracial sexual relations; if necessary, violence must be used to keep Blacks
at the bottom of the racial hierarchy. The following Jim Crow etiquette norms
show how inclusive and pervasive these norms were: