The system of legal racial segregation and disenfranchisement that ruled the American South for nearly a century after Reconstruction, stamping 'white' and 'colored' onto schools, railcars, and drinking fountains, stripping the vote from millions of Black citizens through poll taxes and literacy tests, and enforcing itself through lynching, convict leasing, and the daily threat of violence — until the civil rights movement broke it with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Jim Crow was named after a clown. A white performer in the 1830s blacked his face, shuffled across the stage, and sang a mocking song about a slave named Jim Crow. The character was a joke. The system that took his name was not. For the better part of a century after the Civil War freed them, Black Americans across the South were sorted by law into a lower world — separate schools, separate hospitals, separate water fountains, all of them deliberately worse. They were stripped of the vote they had briefly won. And when any of them stepped past the line, the answer was often the rope. This was not the slow residue of slavery. It was a new order, built on purpose, defended in court, and enforced by terror.