Jim Crow Laws

Jim Crow law in U.S. History, any of the laws that enforced racial segregation in the South between the end of the formal Reconstruction period in 1877 and the beginning of a strong civil rights movement in the 1950's. Jim Crow was the name of a minstrel routine preformed beginning in 1828 by its author, Thomas Dartmouth. The term came to be a derogatory epithet for blacks and a designation for their segregated life.