Jim Crow

Jim Crow was not a person, yet affected the lives of millions of people. Named after a popular 19th-century minstrel song that stereotyped African Americans, "Jim Crow" came to personify the system of government-sanctioned racial oppression and segregation in the United States. After the passing of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments blacks were granted the same rights as whites people, however after 1877, and the election of Rutherford B. Hayes the southern and border states began restricting the rights of blacks. The supreme court helped undermine the constitution with the ruling of the case Plessy vs. Ferguson which made the Jim Crow Laws legitimate. Jim Crow was the name of a racial caste system which operated primarily but not exclusively in southern and border states between 1877 and the mid-1960's. Under the Jim Crow Laws black people were relegated to the status of second class citizens.

In my personal opinion of the four structures of oppression, a culture of fear, sharecropping, segregation, and disenfranchisement, that formed the basis for the "Jim Crow" system; I believe the most important structure would have to be segregation.

Under segregation many laws were enforced such laws include: not drinking out of the same water fountain as whites, not eating in the same restaurants as whites, not allowing white nurses to help out or assist in operating on blacks, all train stations and buses should have separate waiting areas, spaces, and ticket booths, white and black couples pretty much could not be in existence, and if anyone white person befriended a black person they would be punished in some way.

Segregation was a major part of the Jim Crow Laws, I mean everything came into place with the laws I previously stated. I mean by making it so that blacks and whites could not associate with one another is what controlled everything. The other functions played a part as well but, the outcome of the Jim Crow laws would not have been as significant. Of course I was not born through into all this, but just the thought of having to think about what establishment I was walking in to, and which water fountain I would drink out of gives me chills. These laws helped shape a atmosphere where blacks along with some whites were indeed afraid. Separating American people was a well thought out idea to the whites in charge back then . For a group of people to sit around and say," Hey we