![]() ![]() From the Theater to the Legislature 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. #Jim crow dumbo skin#To call someone “Jim Crow” wasn’t just to point out his or her skin color: It was to reduce that person to the kind of caricature that Rice performed on stage. (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.) Regardless of whether the term “Jim Crow” existed before Rice took it to the stage, his act helped popularize it as a derogatory term for African Americans. “So much so,” he says, “that by 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. “‘Jumping Jim Crow’ and just ‘Jim Crow’ generally sort of became shorthand-or one shorthand, anyway-for describing African Americans in this country,” Lott says. Jim Crow was a harmful caricature. The show exploited stereotyped speech, movement, and physical features attributed to Black people to mock them. It entertained, and miseducated, whites at the expense of Blacks, all for Rice's financial benefit. (Performing in blackface is highly offensive to this day.) Rice took his act on tour, even going as far as England and as his popularity grew, his stage name seeped into the culture. ![]() Rice’s routine was a hit in New York City, New York, one of many of places in the North where working-class whites could see blackface minstrelsy, which was quickly becoming a dominant form of theater and a leading source for popular music in the United States. “He would put on not only blackface makeup, but shabby dress that imitated in his mind-and white people’s minds of the time-the dress and aspect and demeanor of the southern enslaved black person,” says Eric Lott, author of Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, and professor of English and American Studies at the City University of New York Graduate Center. The act was called “Jump, Jim Crow” (or “Jumping Jim Crow”). He devoted himself to the theater in his 20s, and in the early 1830s, he began performing the act that would make him famous: He painted his face black and did a song and dance he claimed were inspired by an enslaved Black person he saw. “Jump, Jim Crow” Thomas Dartmouth Rice, a white man, was born in New York City in 1808. But the system’s namesake isn’t actually southern. Today, we still use the term “Jim Crow” to describe that system of segregation and discrimination in the South. The Voting Rights Act and its predecessor, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, fought racial discrimination laws in the South by banning legal segregation in public accommodations and outlawing the poll taxes and tests that were used to stop African Americans from voting. Johnson tried to bury Jim Crow by signing the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law. ![]() Racial discrimination existed throughout the United States in the 20th century, but it had a special name in the South- Jim Crow. In 1963, participants in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom symbolically buried him. In 1944, the Detroit, Michigan, chapter of the NAACP held a mock-funeral for him. ![]()
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