State laws formerly pervasive throughout the South requiring public facilities and accommodations such as restaurants, swimming polls, restrooms, movie theaters, schools, water fountains, parks, and trains to be segregated by race. A method of control and subjugation of African Americans used after the end of slavery, eventually ruled unconstitutional, and now replaced by mass incarceration. Here is a list of official areas of segregation by state.
Sentence
“Jim Crow” was a derisive slang term for a black man. It came to mean any state law passed in the South that established different rules for blacks and whites. Jim Crow laws were based on the theory of white supremacy and were a reaction to Reconstruction. In the depression-racked 1890s, racism appealed to whites who feared losing their jobs to blacks. Politicians abused blacks to win the votes of poor white “crackers.”
