GOVERNMENT GAVE US JIM CROW LAWS AND GOVERNMENT ABOLISHED JIM CROW LAWS, BLESSED BE THE NAME OF THE GOVERNMENT.

IN OUR DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC
PEOPLE GET
THE
KIND OF GOVERNMENT
THEY CHOOSE
FOR THEMSELVES


The name Jim Crow is often used to describe the segregation laws, rules, and customs which arose after Reconstruction ended in 1877 and continued until the mid-1960s. How did the name become associated with these "Black Codes" which took away many of the rights which had been granted to Blacks through the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments?
"Come listen all you galls and boys,
I'm going to sing a little song,
My name is Jim Crow.
Weel about and turn about and do jis so,
Eb'ry time I weel about I jump Jim Crow."

These words are from the song, "Jim Crow," as it appeared in sheet music written by Thomas Dartmouth "Daddy" Rice. Rice, a struggling "actor" (he did short solo skits between play scenes) at the Park Theater in New York, happened upon a Black person singing the above song -- some accounts say it was an old Black slave who walked with difficulty, others say it was a ragged Black stable boy. Whether modeled on an old man or a young boy we will never know, however, it is clear that in 1828 Rice appeared on stage as "Jim Crow" -- an exaggerated, highly stereotypical Black character.

Rice, a White man, was one of the first performers to wear blackface makeup -- his skin was darkened with burnt cork. His Jim Crow song-and-dance routine was an astounding success that took him from Louisville to Cincinnati to Pittsburg to Philadelphia and finally to New York in 1832. He then performed to great acclaim in London and Dublin. By then "Jim Crow" was a stock character in minstrel shows, along with counterparts Jim Dandy and Zip Coon. Rice's subsequent blackface characters were Sambos, Coons, and Dandies. White audiences were receptive to the portrayals of Blacks as singing, dancing, grinning fools.

By 1838, the term "Jim Crow" was being used as a collective racial epithet for Blacks, not as offensive as nigger, but as offensive as coon or darkie. Obviously, the popularity of minstrel shows aided the spread of Jim Crow as a racial slur. This use of the term did not last past a half century. By the end of the 19th Century, the words Jim Crow were less likely to be used to derisively describe Blacks; instead, the phrase Jim Crow was being used to describe laws and customs which oppressed Blacks.

© Dr. David Pilgrim, Professor of Sociology
Ferris State University
Sept., 2000

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SOMETHING TO PONDER during Black History Month: In the long dark night that followed Reconstruction, what was the engine that drove Jim Crow? Did segregationist laws codify the existing social practice, or was it the laws themselves that segregated the South?

Many people might intuitively assume that Southern racism had led to entrenched public segregation long before Southern legislatures made it mandatory. Not so. Separate facilities for blacks and whites were not routine in the South until the early 20^th century. Racism there surely was, but as C. Vann Woodward observed in The Strange Career of Jim Crow, his influential history of post-Civil War segregation, the idea of formally separating the races in places of public accommodation initially struck many white Southerners as daft. In 1898, the editor of South Carolina's oldest and most conservative newspaper, the Charleston News and Courier, responded to a proposal for segregated railroad cars with what was meant to be scathing ridicule:

"If we must have Jim Crow cars on the railroads, there should be Jim Crow . . . passenger boats," he wrote. "Moreover, there should be Jim Crow waiting saloons at all stations, and Jim Crow eating houses. . . . There should be Jim Crow sections of the jury box, and a separate Jim Crow dock and witness stand in every court -- and a JimCrow Bible for colored witnesses to kiss."

Tragically, what the Charleston editor intended as mockery would soon become reality across the South -- "down to and including the Jim Crow Bible," as Woodward noted. But it wasn't an overwhelming grassroots demand for segregation that institutionalized Jim Crow. It was government, often riding roughshod over the objection of private-sector entrepreneurs.

Durham, North Carolina, 1940: Passengers wait in a segregated bus station

Far from craving the authority to relegate blacks to the back of buses and streetcars, for example, the owners of municipal transportation systems actively resisted segregation. They did so not out of some lofty commitment to racial equality or integration, but for economic reasons: Segregation hurt their bottom line. For one thing, it drove up their expenses by requiring them -- as the manager of Houston's streetcar company complained to city councilors in 1904 -- "to haul around a good deal of empty space that is assigned to the colored people and not available to both races." In many cities, segregation also provoked black passengers to boycott the streetcars, cutting sharply into the companies' revenue.

In a notable study published in the Journal of Economic History in 1986, economist Jennifer Roback showed that in one Southern city after another, private transit companies tried to scuttle segregation laws or simply chose to ignore them.

In Jacksonville, Fla., a 1901 ordinance requiring black passengers to be segregated went unenforced until 1905, when the state legislature mandated segregation statewide. The new statute "was passed by the Legislature much against the will of the streetcar companies," reported the Florida Times-Union. So well-known was the companies' hostility to the law that when a group of black citizens mounted a court challenge to overturn it, their attorney felt compelled to deny being "in cahoots with the railroad lines in Jacksonville."

In Alabama, the Mobile Light and Railroad Company reacted to a Jim Crow ordinance by flatly refusing to enforce it. "Whites would not obey the law and were continually . . . refusing to sit where they were told," the company's manager told a reporter in 1902. In Memphis, the transit company defiantly pleaded guilty to violating a Tennessee segregation statute, explaining that it believed the law to be "against the wishes of the majority of its patrons." In Savannah, the local black paper noted that streetcar officials "are not anxious to carry into effect the unjust laws . . . requiring separate cars for the races," since it would put them "to extra trouble and expense."

Eventually, of course, the government got its way, as companies surrendered to pressure from city hall and the statehouse. In a victory of government regulation over the free market, Jim Crow took hold across the South, where it would cruelly hold sway for the next 60 years.

Many Americans know that it took strong government action in the 1950s and 1960s to end segregation and bring civil rights to the South. Fewer realize that it was government action that established segregation in the first place. Today, when the power of the state is being aggrandized as never before, the history of Jim Crow offers a cautionary reminder: When the political class overrides the private sector, what ensues is not necessarily an improvement. It may even be a national disgrace.

The enemies of Jim Crow

by Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
February 15, 2009

http://www.jeffjacoby.com/4093/the-enemies-of-jim-crow

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(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)

Barack Hussein Obama aka Barry Soetoro
is not eligible to be President of the United States
because he is not a Natural Born Citizen
as required by Article Two, Section One, Clause Five
of the United States Constitution
because he was not born of TWO PARENTS
BOTH OF WHOM WERE UNITED STATES CITIZENS
at the time of his birth. His father was a citizen
of Kenya/Great Britain.
Check it out:

http://www.TheObamaFile.com/ObamaNaturalBorn.htm