The Strange Careers of Jim Crow and Donald Trump

As you may know, Jim Crow is a term that refers to the South’s segregationist history, roughly from the end of the Civil War to the mid-1960s. As I blogged some months ago, the term Jim Crow is explained in C. Vann. Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow. He speculates the term came from Tom Rice, an entertainer who mocked black people while performing in black face.

Here is new information I uncovered in my research. A New York Times interview in 1881 with 72 year-old actor relates the source of Rice’s demeaning blackface song-and-dance routine that became widely popular in the South. The actor described the early history of negro minstrelsy and a memorable show in Louisville of a slave who was “very much deformed, the right shoulder being drawn up high, the left leg stiff and crooked at the knee, giving him a painful but laughable limp.” The slave, who apparently took his last name from his owner, a man named Crow, sang a whimsical song and would give a little jump at the end of each verse.  See An Old Actor’s Memories, N.Y.TIMES (June 5, 1881).

Thus, Rice popularized the demeaning imagery of an addled black man who was also physically disabled. 

The first few lines of Rice's song-and-dance shed light on today’s stereotyping of black culture:

Come, listen all you gals and boys, Ise just from Tuckyhoe;

I'm goin, to sing a little song, My name's Jim Crow.

CHORUS [after every verse]

Weel about and turn about and do jis so,

Eb'ry time I weel about I jump Jim Crow.

I went down to the river, I didn't mean to stay;

But dere I see so many gals, I couldn't get away.

The imagery seems to feature the black man as ignorant, aimless, and oversexed.

Thinking back on last year’s campaign, I was struck by Donald Trump’s apparently effective linkage of Mexicans as rapists and his mockery of physical disability—to my mind, a modern echo of Jim Crow’s damaging and enduring mockery of black people. These crude attacks win over many millions of people. 

PHOTO CREDIT: By Edward Williams Clay - Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia: Home - pic, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=391950