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What the white South lost on the battlefields of the Civil War and during Reconstruction, it would largely retake in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In what has been called the Nadir of African American history, a new generation of black southerners shared with the survivors of enslavement a sharply proscribed and deteriorating position in a South bent on commanding black lives and black labor by any means necessary. The most intense years were between 1890 and the first Great Migration in the 19103, but the seeds had been planted in the forcible overthrow of Reconstruction in the 18703, and the Age of Jim Crow would span more than half a century.
The term "Jim Crow," as a way of characterizing black people, had its origins in minstrelsy in the early nineteenth century. Thomas "Daddy" Rice, a white minstrel, popularized the term. Using burnt cork to blacken his face, attired in the ill-fitting, tattered garment of a beggar, and grinning broadly, Rice imitated the dancing, singing, and demeanor generally ascribed to Negro character. Calling it "Jump Jim Crow," he based the number on a routine he had seen performed in 1828 by an elderly and crippled Louisville stableman belonging to a Mr. Crow. "Weel about, and turn about/And do jis so;/Eb'ry time I weel about,/! jump Jim Crow" (i). The public responded with enthusiasm to Rice's caricature of black life. By the 18305, minstrelsy had become one of the most popular forms of mass entertainment, "Jim Crow" had entered the American vocabulary, and many whites, North and South, came away from minstrel shows reinforced in their distorted images of black life, character, and aspirations. How a dance created by a black stableman and imitated by a white man for the amusement of white audiences would become synonymous with a system designed by whites to segregate the races is less clear. Abolitionist newspapers employed the term in the 18403 to describe separate railroad cars for blacks and whites in the North. But by the 18903, "Jim Crow" took on additional force and meaning to denote the subordination and separation of black people in the South, much of it codified and much of it still enforced by custom, habit, and violence.
Fifty years after the...