Jim Crow Laws

Workshop Information

On Saturday, February 11 TAH NC participants will meet in the Madeline Suite on UNCW's Campus from 8am to 2pm. Dr. Liz Hines will be presenting " Jim Crow Laws." She will be covering information from the two books that grant participants have read: The Strange Career of Jim Crow and Ballots and Fence Rails.

Please e-mail Cara Ward at cara_ward@pender.k12.nc.us if you have questions about the workshop.

Agenda, Parking, Directions

• Agenda: Coming Soon!
• Parking: Park in Lot FF  
• Directions: http://uncw.edu/ba/directions_ madeline.htm

• Colored Rule in a Reconstructed (?) State," political cartoon from Harper's Weekly by Thomas Nast, March 14, 1874. - This political cartoon depicts a scene from the South Carolina State Legislature in which black men argue before Lady Columbia. In this image, Thomas Nast's criticizes the corrupt South Carolina Legislature by laying blame on "Colored Rule," or black men in the legislature. During this time, South Carolina was the only state legislature in which blacks held a majority of the seats. To use this image in the classroom ask students to: 1) Compare the depiction of the white and black men; 2) Describe Lady Columbia's role in the image; 3) Describe how this image provides context for the end of Reconstruction, and the political tensions between blacks and whites in the 1870s; 4) Describe how this image and its text help set the stage for Jim Crow Laws. For more information about this image see http://blackhistory.harpweek.com/7Illustrations/ Reconstruction/ColoredRuleBI.htm.
  
  

• Jim Crow in America - Primary Visual Resource Set
  This Web site is maintained by the Library of Congress and provides primary visual resources related to Jim Crow in America. A teacher's guide is also provided which outlines ways that teachers can use these Jim Crow visual resources in their classroom to engage students in discussion.
  • Primary Visual Resources
  • Teacher's Guidefor Jim Crow in America Visual Resources
  • More Visual Resource Tools and Guides for Teachers and Students


• Jim Crow Jubilee Lithograph - from the Library of Congress. This image was inlcuded as the 1847 sheet music cover illustration for "A Collection of Negro Melodies as Sung by A. F. Winnemore & His Band of Serenaders. Arranged for the Piano Forte by Augustus Clapp." The sheet music was written for minstrel shows. According to Dictionary.com a minstrel show is " a popular stage entertainment featuring comic dialogue, song, and dance in highly conventionalized patterns, performed by a troupe of actors, traditionally comprising two end men and a chorus in blackface and an interlocutor: developed in the U.S. in the early and mid-19th century." In other words, minstrel shows were musical and theatrical productions performed by whites who painted their faces black so that they looked like African American slaves. These shows were meant to entertain white audiences by making fun of black slaves, and the songs and dances that black slaves performed as part of their entertainment and religious traditions. This image depicts African Americans as worry-free and slap-happy people. However, the lives of freedmen and slaves were far from such a reality. The image also depicts the racist stereotypes of blacks by whites in the nineteenth century. This image is important as it contextualizes the early interpretation of "Jim Crow" in the mid-1800s. That is, "Jim Crow" was first used to describe the happy-go-lucky caricature of African Americans and the minstrels show genre that made fun of African Americans. The term "Jim Crow" gained popularity and was used after Reconstruction in the 1880s, 1890s, and early 1900s to refer to the segregation laws in the South which mandated that whites and blacks be separated in public spaces. See also http://www.pbs.org/wnet/ historyofus/web07/segment6.html
  
  

• Jubilee Singers - For more information about African American Jubilee singers see http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/singers/.
  While the above music sheet and illustration were used by whites to satirize African American Jubilee Singers, this website provides information about actual African American Jubilee Singers after the Civil War. The website describes a group of ex-slaves that traveled the United States and Europe to perform concerts to raise money for their school, Fisk University, in Tennessee. The music detailed the groups religous expereinces and their lives as slaves.
  • "Jubilee Singers" film
  • Listen to Jubilee Songs
  • Read an excerpt from Andrew Ward's "Dark Midnight When I Rise"
  • Timeline
  •  Jubilee Singers: Frederick J. Loudin, Maggie Porter, Thomas Rutling, Ella Sheppard, George Leonard White
  • Fisk University


• "At the bus station in Durham, North Carolina," photograph by Jack Delano in May 1940 from the Library of Congress. This image shows a sign that reads, "COLORED WAITING ROOM." Below the sign an African American man and woman wait for the bus in the designated area. This image shows the reality of Jim Crow Laws, or segregation laws, in North Carolina well into the twentieth century.
  
  


• The History of Jim Crow - www.jimcrowhistory.org/home.htm
  This site provides student and teacher resources for exploring Jim Crow Laws and segregation from the 1870s through the 1950s. This website was orginally created for the PBS series, "The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow."
  • Jim Crow First Hand Narratives
  • Lesson Plans
  • Jim Crow Gateway - More online sources
  • Image Gallery
  • Jim Crow and Literature
  • Jim Crow Inside the South
  • Jim Crow History Resources

• African American World - www.pbs.org/wnet/aaworld/
  Explore the history of African Americans from the Jim Crow era to the Civil Rights Movement. This website is maintained by PBS in partnership with NPR.
  • Timeline of the Jim Crow era with links to descriptions of important people, places, and events.

• Behind The Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow Era - http://cds.aas.duke.edu/btv/index.html
  Behind the Veil is an archive at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University that documents African American experiences during the Jim Crow Era. The website provides an in-depth overview of the project, as well as teacher resources and primary online documents.
  • Project Overview
  • Educator Resources
  • Excerpts of Narrative Accounts of African Americans who lived through the Jim Crow era from the book "Remembering Jim Crow"
  • Oral Interviews - A selection of 100 oral interviews that chronicle the lives of African Americans who lived during the Jim Crow era. From the Duke University Libraries' Digital Collections web site.