Jim Crow laws were state and local laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States.[1] All were enacted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by white Democratic-dominated state legislatures to disenfranchise and remove political and economic gains made by blacks during the Reconstruction period.[2] The Jim Crow laws were enforced until 1965.[3]
In practice, Jim Crow laws mandated racial segregation in all public facilities in the states of the former Confederate States of America and in some other, beginning in the 1870s. Jim Crow laws were upheld in 1896 in the case of Plessy vs. Ferguson, in which the U.S. Supreme Court laid out its "separate but equal" legal doctrine for facilities for African Americans. Moreover, public education had essentially been segregated since its establishment in most of the South after the Civil War in 1861–65.
The legal principle of "separate but equal" racial segregation was extended to public facilities and transportation, including the coaches of interstate trains and buses. Facilities for African Americans were consistently inferior and underfunded compared to the facilities for white Americans; sometimes, there were no facilities for them.[4][5] As a body of law, Jim Crow institutionalized economic, educational, and social disadvantages for African Americans living in the South.[4][5][6]
Jim Crow laws and Jim Crow state constitutional provisions mandated the segregation of public schools, public places, and public transportation, and the segregation of restrooms, restaurants, and drinking fountains for whites and blacks. The U.S. military was already segregated. President Woodrow Wilson, a Southern Democrat, initiated the segregation of federal workplaces in 1913.[7]
