The American Version of Apartheid
Like apartheid in South Africa, the segregation and disenfranchisement laws known as the Jim Crow laws affected every aspect of life of African Americans living in the American South from the 1890s until the 1960s when the Civil Rights Movement began reversing the system of laws that turned blacks into second-class citizens. The term Jim Crow is an insulting slang for a black man. “Jim Crow” originally referred to a character in an old song and was the name of a popular dance in the 1920s. Around 1928, Thomas Daddy Rice began dressing in old clothes, painted his face ...