Entry · catalog no. 1148
Jim Crow
/ /dʒɪm ˈkroʊ/ /JIM kroh
noun · Northern stages first; the system it named was concentrated in the American South · 1830s
✓ Verified
1.
The body of state and local law, custom, and violence that separated Black people from white people and stripped Black citizens of the vote, fair courts, schools, work, and public accommodation.
“My grandmother could not try on a hat in a downtown store. That was Jim Crow, plain as day.”
2.
A degrading blackface stage character, and by extension a slur for a Black man, from which the name of the system was taken.
“Rice put on burnt cork and called the thing Jim Crow, and the name outlived the act by a century.”
Origin & Attribution
The name comes from a white performer. Thomas Dartmouth Rice began performing a blackface song-and-dance he called Jump Jim Crow in 1828, and by 1838 white Americans were using the name as a blanket epithet for Black people. By the early 1840s abolitionist papers in New England were calling segregated railroad cars Jim Crow cars, which means the phrase named Northern segregation before it ever named Southern law. Black Southerners inherited the word and turned it into the working name for the entire system they lived under, from the fall of Reconstruction through the civil rights acts of the 1960s. Two common assumptions are wrong: there was no historical man named Jim Crow, and the term did not begin in the postbellum South.
1828
Thomas D. Rice debuts the blackface Jump Jim Crow routine; it becomes a national hit within a few years
1896
Plessy v. Ferguson gives separate but equal constitutional cover and Jim Crow hardens into law across the South
1955
C. Vann Woodward publishes The Strange Career of Jim Crow, the book that fixed the term in American historical writing
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide / diaspora
Northern stages first; the system it named was concentrated in the American South · 1830s
Spoken by
Coined by white minstrel performers and taken up by the white press; used most heavily by Black Americans, especially in the South, as the name for the conditions they lived under
$JIMCROThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Historical198 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
92/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1828
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@auntiereg
Atlanta, GA
@deltasoul
Memphis, TN
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Citations & Sources
■
C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, New York: Oxford University Press, 1955
book
■
Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537, decided 1896
court decision
■
Emmett J. Scott, Negro Migration During the War, New York: Oxford University Press for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1920
book
■
+ Cite a sourceJim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, Ferris State University, Who Was Jim Crow? and The Origins of Jim Crow
museum reference
See also