Who Was Jim Crow?

We all know about Jim Crow laws, those repressive laws in the south that kept African Americans from all kinds of things, from sitting in the front of a bus, to going to the movies, to attending the school of their choice, to eating lunch where they wanted.  My friends and I were returning from the movies one Sunday, when we all wanted to know who Jim Crow was.  Was he a real person or a fictional character?

The origin of the name "Jim Crow" dates back to before the Civil war. In the early 1830s, the white actor Thomas Dartmouth “Daddy” Rice rose to stardom by performing minstrel routines as the fictional “Jim Crow,” a caricature of a clumsy, dimwitted black slave. Rice claimed to have first created the character after witnessing an elderly black man singing a tune called “Jump Jim Crow” in Louisville, Kentucky. He later appropriated the Jim Crow persona into a minstrel act where he wore blackface and performed jokes and songs in a stereotypical slave dialect. For example, “Jump Jim Crow” included the popular refrain, “Weel about and turn about and do ‘jis so, eb’ry time I weel about I jump Jim Crow.” Rice’s minstrel act was a huge hit among white audiences, and he later took it on tour around the United States and Great Britain. As the show’s popularity spread, “Jim Crow” became a widely used derogatory term for blacks.

So there you have it.  Jim Crow was NOT a real person, but a fictional character.  Why the repressive Jim Crow laws used the name of this fictional character, I do not know.