Did Jim Crow significantly change the lives of African-Americans?

Jim Crow also affected the lives of some African-Americans in a negative way.  When enslaved, blacks were protected by their owners due to their value.  The owner’s interest to “prevent his being overworked, underfed, insufficiently clothed, or abused, or neglected when sick” was paramount, “but as a free man, he was deprived of all the protection which had been given to him by his value as property; he was reduced to something like the condition of a stray dog.”  Trelease implies that the Jim Crow laws affected African-Americans substantially in that they were no longer protected by their owner, and their owner’s desire to protect what was his.  After liberation, finding food, shelter and clothing was the responsibility of the black man, and he received little help from the government in doing so.  What African-Americans really needed and wanted was land, something that they could own and farm in order to feed themselves, but obtaining said land was almost impossible, instead, former-slaves would work for their old masters for a small wage in order to provide for families.  The federal government “fought shy of land distribution” and only aid that Congress was prepared to give was the modification of the Homestead Act of 1862, which made 46 million acres of land available. However, “few Negroes benefited… for most of the land was poor quality.”  In this respect however, it is feasible to disagree with Trelease.  If most liberated slaves had to go back to their former owners to work their land, not much had changed, except they were now being paid to buy clothes and shelter rather than not being paid and given commodities.  In actual fact “Negro landownership would have enhanced the economic and social well-being of the entire section, but it smacked too much of equality and independence.  Some Negroes who did acquire farms of their own were driven off my mobs or the Ku Klux Klan.”  This shows that not much had changed for former slaves as they remained unable to own land, simply because it was so difficult and mobs made ownership very dangerous.

There was much opposition to Jim Crow in the form of boycotts, particularly of the streetcars.  These boycotts could last from a few weeks to two or three years.  This resulted in a few states temporarily suspending the Jim Crow ordinance.  The opposition shows that although some African-Americans enjoyed the Jim Crow period due to the ability to join fraternities and societies or make something of himself or herself as an entrepreneur, this was a very small minority.  Even those that joined societies were against the Jim Crow laws, such as the National Association for Colored Women, who sought to combat racism and segregation.  This shows African-Americans felt not much had changed, except for the fact they could now oppose racism and segregation freely.  In many circumstances of racism, for black people it was nothing new.  In the south, a former slave was yelled at on a streetcar.  She said, “I have been humiliated and insulted often,” this time it was simply against a different background.  It is plausible that the Jim Crow laws were a backlash against black liberation.  As C Vann Woodward argues, “Just as the Negro gained his emancipation and new rights through a falling out between white men, he now stood to lose his rights through the reconciliation of white men.”  It seems that during reconstruction, white men did not want to have to integrate with black men or let them have any rights such as the vote.  This is the reason that Nashville did open schools for African-Americans, simply because they did not want to share the existing schools for the white.  In this way, the “elements of fear, jealousy, proscription, hatred and fanaticism had long been present.”  Woodward here suggests that although a transformation had been made from exclusion to segregation, in reality hardly a change was felt.

White people sought to continue the policy of exclusion from the antebellum era.  Many states did not want to give black people the vote, particularly in the South where racism was perhaps heightened by black emancipation.  In the 1890s, Bourbons began to insist that black people should not have the vote, but the 15th amendment made this illegal.  Undeterred, some states introduced poll taxes, literacy tests and other measures to stop African-Americans from voting.  For example, in 1890, Mississippi changed the laws regarding the requirements for the elections.  Voters had to have been in residence in the state for a minimum of two years and one year in the respective district.  This particularly affected black tenant farmers who moved around a lot, meaning they had rarely been in the same state for two years.  Voters were also automatically disqualified if convicted of a crime and taxes had to be paid on the 1st February every year, this was particularly hard for former slaves, as only recently having been emancipated had no savings or a steady, reliable job.  Voters also had to be literate.  The percentage of African-Americans that were literate was, as one would expect, extremely small.  After the war 95 per cent were illiterate, in 1870 the number decreased to 81 per cent and decreased further to 64 per cent in 1890.  A result of these new requirements was that black people were almost completely disenfranchised, together with nearly all poor white people.  Many other states followed suit, meaning that although in theory in the post bellum period blacks gained the right to vote, this was not actually the case.  This means that Jim Crow simply took the vote away from black people, meaning no change occurred, as they could not vote when enslaved anyway.  This is shown by the fact that many African-Americans took action against the effective disenfranchisement, such as Ida B Wells who “used her fiery journalistic talent to criticise ‘Jim Crow’ laws and demand that blacks have their voting rights restored.”

Lynching became a fairly big problem after the inaction of the Jim Crow laws, and racial hatred was heightened after the much-publicised Plessy case.  Ida B Wells launched a lifelong campaign against lynching after three of her friends were attacked.  When comparing the decades 1889-1899 and 1899-1901 the proportion of lynching in the south rose from 82 per cent in the former decade compared with 92 per cent in the latter.  This shows that with the Jim Crow laws and as the effect of them settled, racial tension was heightened and once more blacks were often controlled by white men using violence.  There was little black people could do about lynching in response as “black civil rights were eroded… quickly… The Supreme Court’s decisions deprived blacks of the guarantee of equal treatment which the Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875 had sought to confer.”  For example, in the Civil Rights Cases of 1883, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which forbade racism in public, was deemed unconstitutional.  It was decisions such as this one that opened the way for public segregation and the Jim Crow laws, the first of which was introduced in Florida in 1887.  As Maldwyn Jones observes, “to some extent the Jim Crow codes simply gave legal sanction to prevailing practices, but they were more comprehensive and rigid, and more strictly enforced than anything that had gone before.”  In effect, the Jim Crow laws simply brought African-Americans back into a life of restriction, racism and degradation that they had experienced through slavery for almost two centuries before.

In conclusion, the Jim Crow laws and the racial hatred and restrictive laws that accompanied them meant that African-Americans were mostly without the vote, without land and without equality.  Although some changes were felt to a select few, for the vast majority, little had changed.  Even by 1910, only 10 per cent of African-American farmers owned their own land.  The Jim Crow laws heightened racism and increased lynching, so once more, white people showed their racial superiority through verbal and physical attacks against black people.  The only change that had a significant effect on the lives of the black people was the fact that after their emancipation, it was then possible to fight against segregation and racial discrimination, however, this was made as difficult and as dangerous as possible by white men who did not want to see the rise of black people in society.

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Bibliography

• Tindall and Shi, America: A Narrative History, (New York 2000)
• Allen W Trelease, White Terror: The KKK conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction, (US 1971)
• C Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, (New York 1955)
• Howard Rabinowitz, From Exclusion to Segregation: Race Relations 1865-1890, (American Historical Review)
• Maldwyn A Jones, The Limits of Liberty 1607-1992, (New York 1995)
• Leon F Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow, (New York 1998)
• James Tice Moore, Redeemers Reconsidered: Change and Continuity in the Democratic South 1870-1900 (Journal of Southern History)

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