1877-1965: Jim Crow Laws
As the South reeled from the loss of the Civil War and sought to rebuild its economic base, sharecropping became the dominant system of labor that replaced the old slave-based plantation structure. Sharecropping agreements divided old plantations into smaller units of land, which were then leased to African American families. These families worked the land (usually 30 to 50 acres) in return for a portion of the crop share. As Edward Royce (1988) noted
Freed people remained dependent on planters, because of the latter’s virtual monopoly of land, and planters remained dependent on their former slaves, because of the latter’s virtual monopoly of labor. Each tried, unsuccessful, to break the monopoly possessed by the other. (Royce, 1988, p. 2-4; 181)
Photograph of Jim Crow signs
Source: BETTMANN
When the federal government withdrew its support of Reconstruction in 1876, the period of post-civil war growth for free Black people ended. Local and state laws were quickly passed that racially segregated blacks from much of white life in the South. Known as “Jim Crow,” laws, regulations, and social requirements relegated Black men and women to second class citizens (Hoelscher, 2003, p. 659; Woodward, 1955). A racial caste system replaced slavery as the new form of control in the South. Mindy Thompson Fullilove (2016) described Jim Crow in the following way: “between 1890 and 1910, Jim Crow laws created an elaborately divided world, such that the domain of resources and power was inhabited by whites, and the domain of deprivation and powerlessness was inhabited by [B]lacks” (pp. 22-23).
Even in the midst of such deprivation, African Americans continued to assert their rights and push back against the Jim Crowism that sought to control their lives in the American South. Their success kept Jim Crow in check. Geographer Steven Hoelscher (2003) noted “its [Jim Crow] power was never monolithic or complete; Jim Crow constantly had to remake itself in response to African-American (and occasionally white) defiance and resistance” (p. 660).