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Informational TextJim Crow: Shorthand for Separationby Rick Edmonds“Jim Crow” the term, like Jim Crow the practice, settled in over a long period of time. By the 1950s, Jim Crow was the colloquialism whites and blacks routinely used for the complex system of laws and customs separating the races in the South. Hardly anyone felt a particular need to define it or explore its origins.The term appears to date back at least to the eighteenth century, though there is no evidence that it refers to an individual. Rather it was mildly derogatory slang for a black everyman (Crow, as in black like a crow). A popular American minstrel song of the 1820s made sport of a stereotypic Jim Crows. “Jump Jim Crow” was a sort of jig. By the mid-1800s, a segregated rail car might be called the “Jim Crow.” As segregation laws were put into place—first in Tinnessee, then throughout the South—after Reconstruction, such diverse things as separate public facilities and laws restricting voting rights became known collectively as Jim Crow.A bit like “political correctness” in recent years, the term was particularly popular with opponents of the practice. It was a staple of NAACP conversations of the ’30s and ’40s. Ralph Bunche once said he would turn down an appointment as ambassador to Liberia because he “wouldn’t take a Jim Crow job.” A skit at Morehouse College during Martin Luther King’s student days portrayed a dramatic “burial” of Jim Crow. And . . . at the eventful Republican National Convention in 1964 in San Francisco, picketers outside the hall chanted, “Jim Crow (clap, clap) must go.” . . .From material in American Heritage Dictionary, Safire’s Political Dictionary, and From Slavery to Freedom. ................
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