Who was Jim Crow?

Feb. 17, 2023

The original Jim Crow was an actor named Thomas D. Rice.

Or rather, "the Jim Crow persona is a theater character — developed and popularized by ... Rice (1808–1860) — and a racist depiction of African-Americans and of their culture. [According to Wikipedia] Rice based the character on a folk trickster named Jim Crow that had long been popular among black slaves. Rice also adapted and popularized a traditional slave song called 'Jump Jim Crow' (1828).

"The character conventionally dresses in rags and wears a battered hat and torn shoes. Rice applied blackface makeup made of burnt cork to his face and hands and impersonated a very nimble and irreverently witty African-American field-hand who sang, "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." (Source.)

I’m not going to describe the Jim Crow character in greater detail. But there are plenty of descriptions and illustrations in the linked articles. For anyone who grew up in the mid-20th Century, they'll evoke too many of the stereotypes we saw in "Gone With the Wind," and in Saturday afternoon replays of "The Little Colonel."

Rice's "Jim Crow" charactor was ... a factor in the growing popularity of minstrel shows — a phenomenon that began in the 1830s and continuing well into the 1950s.

Even now, white people in blackface continue to pop into view, sometimes through ill-advised attempts at humor, and sometimes through deliberate acts of racism. Because it's impossible to separate the name "Jim Crow" from minstrel shows and blackface, I've included related links below.

The Jim Crow character became so popular that a majority of Americans recognized the name and what it stood for.

The words "Jim Crow" encapsulated all the worst stereotypes about Black people.

By 1838, "the term 'Jim Crow' was being used as a collective racial epithet for blacks, {not as offensive as N*****}, but similar to coon or darkie. The popularity of minstrel shows clearly aided the spread of Jim Crow as a racial slur. This use of the term only lasted half a century."

"After the Civil War, southern states passed laws that discriminated against African Americans who had just been released from slavery; and as early as the 1890s, these laws had gained a nickname. In 1899, North Carolina’s Goldsboro Daily Argus published an article subtitled 'How ‘Capt. Tilley’ of the A. & N.C. Road Enforces the Jim Crow Law.'" (Source)

"[B]y the time of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was twenty years later in 1852, one character refers to another as Jim Crow. (In a strange full-circle, Rice later played Uncle Tom in blackface stage adaptations of the novel, which often reversed the book’s abolitionist message.)"

"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."

"From the late 1870s until the triumphs of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and ’60s, regimented racial segregation" ... was "legally sanctioned by the U.S. Supreme Court (Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896) and codified by so-called Jim Crow laws." (See also Plessy v. Ferguson.)

Despite Wikipedia's assertion, there's no consensus on where Rice got the inspiration for his character. Nor is there a consensus on how the name "Jim Crow" became attached to repressive laws or the era in which they were imposed.

But given Jim Crow's popularity as an over-the-top stereotype, it was probably inevitable that ultimately, the name would attach itself to a collection of laws limiting Black Americans' ability to succeed — or even to freely conduct their day-to-day activities.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

• Who was Jim Crow?, a page of the Jim Crow Museum. (More information about Thomas Rice and minstrel shows).

• The Origins of Jim Crow, a page of the Jim Crow Museum. (Topics: "The Original Jim Crow {Who was Jim Crow?}," "Jim Crow and Segregation {What was Jim Crow?}," "Father of Minstrelsy," "Blackening Up," "Popularity of Minstrel Shows" "An American Caste System," "Everyday Segregation," "Segregated Water Fountains," and "Segregation Was Pervasive.")

• Jim Crow laws, a History.com page, updated Jan. 14, 2025. (Topics: “Black Codes,” “Ku Klux Klan,” “Jim Crow Laws Expand,” “Ida B. Wells,” “Charlotte Hawkins Brown,” “Isaiah Montgomery,” “Jim Crow Laws in the 20th Century,” “Jim Crow in the North,” and “When Did Jim Crow Laws End?”)

• Homer Plessy and Jim Crow and Jim Crow law, United States (1877-1954), two Encyclopedia Britannica entries by Melvin I. Urofsky, updated Dec. 4, 2024.

• Black codes, a History.com page, posted Jun. 1, 2010, updated Mar. 29, 2023. (Black codes were restrictive laws designed to limit the freedom of African Americans and ensure their availability as a cheap labor force after slavery was abolished during the Civil War. Though the Union victory had given some 4 million enslaved people their freedom, the question of freed Black people's status in the postwar South was still very much unresolved. Under black codes, many states required Black people to sign yearly labor contracts; if they refused, they risked being arrested, fined and forced into unpaid labor. Outrage over black codes helped undermine support for President Andrew Johnson and the Republican Party.)

• Blackface: The Birth of An American Stereotype, a page of The National Museum of African American History and Culture website. (“By distorting the features and culture of African Americans—including their looks, language, dance, deportment, and character—white Americans were able to codify whiteness across class and geopolitical lines as its antithesis.”)

• Blackface: A cultural history of a racist art form, uploaded Oct 28, 2018, to the CBS Sunday Morning channel on YouTube. (Following a controversy over “Megyn Kelley's remarks in which she questioned why wearing blackface on Halloween was offensive, ‘Sunday Morning’ contributor and WCBS anchor Maurice DuBois looks at the long and complex history of white {and even black} performers painting their faces black. For more than 100 years, minstrel shows were a popular form of entertainment on stage and film, reducing an entire race of people to stereotypes.”)

• TCM Original Production: Blackface and Hollywood - African American Film History - Documentary, uploaded Jan. 27, 2020, to the Turner Classic Movies channel on YouTube. (“Since the dawn of cinema and until the mid-20th century, the minstrel show-based practice of donning blackface to portray characters of African descent has been a staple in Hollywood. Our colleagues explain blackface’s harmful history and how its usage has been damaging for Black representation.”)

• Jim Crow and America's Racism Explained, uploaded Jan. 16, 2016, to the Hip Hughes channel on YouTube. (This 18-minute video begins with an explanation of how the original Jim Crow got his name. Subsequent topics include the history of Black codes, a short discussion about loitering, an overview of Reconstruction and the elimination of Black Codes, and Plessy v. Ferguson.)

• 6 myths about the history of Black people in America, by Jessica Machado and Karen Turner, Vox, Feb. 18, 2020. (“Six historians weigh in on the biggest misconceptions about Black history, including the Tuskegee experiment and enslaved people’s finances.” See "Myth 4: That Black people in early Jim Crow America didn’t fight back.")
  Note: The article refers to the Red Summer of 1919. For more information, go here.

• Who was Jim Crow?, by Becky Little, National Geographic, Aug. 6, 2015. (Fifty years ago, the Voting Rights Act targeted the laws and practices of Jim Crow. Here’s where the name came from.”)

• "Here Lies Jim Crow" (1944). (“Pallbearers with a casket walking in front of a sign reading ‘Here Lies Jim Crow,’ during the Parade for Victory, sponsored by the Detroit branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1944.“)
  Note: Originally, I linked to the Library of Congress version, but accessing it has become complicated. So, while I don’t like to include items for sale, this one is at least easier to see.

• The 1963 "burial", photo. (“Participants in the August 28, 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom symbolically bury Jim Crow at the Lincoln Memorial. For more information and related images see www.flickr.com/gp/washington_area_spark/XP92VS.”)