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After the defeat of the Civil War in the South, fundamental economic and political reforms followed. Slavery was abolished, and men of color were given the to vote. These significant changes paved the way for a radical transformation of extractive institutions of the southern states into inclusive ones to put the South on the path of economic prosperity. None of this happened; instead of Slavery, extractive institutions took another form, the so-called “Jim Crow laws.”
The nickname “Jim Crow” is a common designation of a poor black man, taken from a small song of the early XIX century, where a white actor with a soot-smeared face satirically portrayed a dark-skinned man. The song gave the name to a whole package of segregation laws adopted in the South after the Civil War and the Reconstruction period. The laws remained in force for almost a century until they were repealed during another wave of reforms associated with the civil rights movement of the mid-20th century (Logan and Temin 15). And all this time, the colored population was excluded from political life and subjected to various kinds of pressure. The plantation type of agriculture, based on the exploitation of cheap, poorly educated labor, has not gone away. The income level in the southern states continued to fall relative to the US average. The vicious circle of extractive institutions became stronger than many then could have imagined.
One of the consequences of the “Jim Crow laws” was the appearance of schools “only for colored people,” and, as one might expect, the level of education in them was worse. The state of Alabama rewrote its constitution in 1901 specifically for the sake of these schools. Disenfranchisement, vagrancy laws, particularly the “Black Code” of Alabama, and various Jim Crow laws turned the post-war South into a real kingdom of apartheid (Logan and Temin 23). The purpose of these laws and their enforcement practice was to control the colored population and labor force. Since the plantation elite continued to control the vast land fund and was still well organized, they built a new system of institutions in place of Slavery. Jim Crow laws have contributed to this in many ways, helping to tighten control over overproduction.
Jim Crow laws and many lynchings in the South were the main factors that led to the Great Migration in the first half of the 20th century. Because opportunities in the South were limited, African Americans moved in large numbers to cities in the northeast, Midwest, and west in search of a better life. The main blow to Jim Crow’s racial segregation system came in 1954 with the landmark Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, which declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional (Logan and Temin 34). It was hard for the citizens, and in 1968 their difficult situation finally ended when the United States officially legalized all American’s rights, regardless of race. The echoes of the Jim Crow laws hovered over America for several more decades until they became a thing of the past.
The era of Jim Crow laws did not positively impact the lives of the colored population of the United States. The manifestation of discrimination was still strong but did not entail mass demonstrations. The laws did not contribute to the inclusion of the colored population in the life of American society. The state only reinforced barriers and emphasized racial superiority. The attempt to create a state where the colored and white populations exist separately was unsuccessful and caused a public outcry.
Work Cited
Logan, Trevon, and Peter Temin. “Inclusive American Economic History: Containing Slaves, Freedmen, Jim Crow Laws, and the Great Migration.” Institute for New Economic Thinking Working Paper Series, vol. 1 no. 110, 2020, pp. 1-78.
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