Where did Jim Crow laws come from?

During the Reconstruction period of 1865â€"1877 federal law provided civil rights protection in the South for "freedmen" â€" the African Americans who had formerly been slaves. In the 1870s, white Democrats gradually returned to power in southern states, sometimes as a result of elections in which paramilitary groups intimidated opponents, attacking blacks or preventing them from voting. Gubernatorial elections were close and disputed in Louisiana for years, with extreme violence unleashed during the campaign. In 1877 a national compromise to gain southern support in the presidential election resulted in the last of the federal troops being withdrawn from the South. White Democrats had taken back power in every Southern state. The white, Democratic Party Redeemer government that followed the troop withdrawal legislated Jim Crow laws segregating black people from the state's white population.

     Blacks were still elected to local offices in the 1880s, but the establishment Democrats were passing laws to make voter registration and elections more restrictive, with the result that participation by most blacks and many poor whites began to decrease. Starting with Mississippi in 1890, through 1910 the former Confederate states passed new constitutions or amendments that effectively disfranchised most blacks and tens of thousands of poor whites through a combination of poll taxes, literacy and comprehension tests, and residency and record-keeping requirements. Grandfather clauses temporarily permitted some illiterate whites to vote. Voter turnout dropped drastically through the South as a result of such measures.

     Denied the ability to vote, blacks and poor whites could not serve on juries or in local office. They could not influence the state legislatures, and, predictably, their interests were overlooked. While public schools had been established by Reconstruction legislatures, those for black children were consistently underfunded, even within the strained finances of the South. The decreasing price of cotton kept the agricultural economy at a low.

     In some cases Progressive measures to reduce election fraud acted against black and poor white voters who were illiterate. While the separation of African Americans from the general population was becoming legalized and formalized in the Progressive Era (1890sâ€"1920s), it was also becoming customary. Even in cases in which Jim Crow laws did not expressly forbid black people to participate, for instance, in sports or recreation or church services, the laws shaped a segregated culture.

     In the Jim Crow context, the presidential election of 1912 was steeply slanted against the interests of Black Americans. Most blacks were still in the South, where they had been effectively disfranchised, so they could not vote at all. While poll taxes and literacy requirements banned many Americans from voting, these stipulations frequently had loopholes that exempted White Americans from meeting the requirements. In Oklahoma, for instance, anyone qualified to vote before 1866, or related to someone qualified to vote before 1866, was exempted from the literacy requirement; the only Americans who could vote before that year were of course White Americans, such that all White Americans were effectively excluded from the literacy testing, whereas all Black Americans were effectively singled out by the law.

     Woodrow Wilson, a southern Democrat and the first southern-born president of the postwar period, appointed southerners to his cabinet. Some quickly began to press for segregated work places, although Washington, DC and federal offices had been integrated since after the Civil War. In 1913, for instance, the Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdooâ€"an appointee of the Presidentâ€"was heard to express his consternation at black and white women working together in one government office: "I feel sure that this must go against the grain of the white women. Is there any reason why the white women should not have only white women working across from them on the machines?"

     President Woodrow Wilson introduced segregation in Federal offices, despite much protest. Mr. Wilson appointed Southern politicians who were segregationists, because of his firm belief that racial segregation was in the best interest of Black Americans and White Americans alike.