Jim Crow laws

Jim Crow laws were state and local laws enforcing racial segregation in the Southern United States. Enacted after the Reconstruction period, these laws continued in force until 1965. They mandated de jure racial segregation in all public facilities in states of the former Confederate States of America, starting in 1890 with a "separate but equal" status for African Americans. Conditions for African Americans were consistently inferior and underfunded compared to those available to white Americans. This body of law institutionalized a number of economic, educational, and social disadvantages. De jure segregation mainly applied to the Southern states, while Northern segregation was generally de facto — patterns of housing segregation enforced by private covenants, bank lending practices, and job discrimination, including discriminatory labor union practices.

Jim Crow laws mandated the segregation of public schools, public places, and public transportation, and the segregation of restrooms, restaurants, and drinking fountains for whites and blacks. The U.S. military was also segregated, as were federal workplaces, initiated in 1913 under President Woodrow Wilson, the first Southern president elected since 1856. By requiring candidates to submit photos, his administration practiced racial discrimination in hiring.

Jim crow (tool)

A jim crow is a tool for bending rails, consisting of a U-shaped or V-shaped armature with a hefty screw rod in its axis. Deluxe models are outfitted with rollers for continuous bending.Terry Pratchett uses this term in his novel Raising Steam.

Practice

Railway rails are quite flexible and bend easily to radii of 400m or more. The jim crow is needed to bend rails to tighter radii, especially near the ends.

References

External links

James F. Crow

James Franklin Crow (January 18, 1916 – January 4, 2012) was Professor Emeritus of Genetics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a prominent population geneticist whose career spanned from the modern synthesis to the genomic era.

Some of his most significant peer-reviewed contributions were coauthored with Motoo Kimura, including those leading to the neutral theory of molecular evolution. He also wrote an influential introductory textbook on genetics and a more advanced one with Kimura. The list of his graduate and undergraduate students and postdocs includes Alexey Kondrashov, James Bull, Joe Felsenstein, Russell Lande, Dan Hartl, Takeo Maruyama, Terumi Mukai, Wen-Hsiung Li, Chung-I Wu, Charles Langley, and many others.

He was a president of both the Genetics Society of America and the American Society of Human Genetics. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, The American Philosophical Society, the World Academy of Art and Science, the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS).

Jim Crow (archetype)

Jim Crow is minstrel typecast and character created c. 1830 by a Caucasoid minstrel show performer of the United States known as Thomas D. Rice, who wore blackface while singing and dancing madly, thus creating this character. The character was in story Rice's emulation of a debatedly young or old negro male that Rice had seen in his travels through the Southern United States; Rice included singing this refrain at the end of the chorus:

"Weel about and turn about and do jis so, Eb'ry time I weel about I jump Jim Crow."

It is believed that a man named Mr. Crow owned this slave, and this is why the name Jim Crow took hold. Rice incorporated this routine into his trade, and by the 1850s, the Jim Crow character had become a standard in his industry throughout the early parts of the United States.

The Jim Crow laws took to the name of this character in the 1890s.

The term "Jim Crow" is also used in a disparaging or derogatory way to refer to people, largely African Americans, that act in a similar way to the original Jim Crow of the song; singing, dancing, and jumping; often wildly, and otherwise being foolish. This term has connotations of being uneducated, unproductive, or unprofessional.