Knowing Their Space: Signs of Jim Crow in the Segregated South

”Jim Crow” was a character portrayed by the black-face minstrel, Thomas “Daddy” Rice, whose stage performances in the 1830s and 1840s typified many whites’ view of African-Americans throughout the nineteenth century. Jim Crow segregationist signs, believed to have been named for this character, are emblematic of southern white leaders’ unrelenting effort to enforce African-American subservience after slavery was outlawed.2 Spread across a vast region of the southern United States, these visual communications systems confirmed the re-marginalization of African Americans in the aftermath of the Civil War and subsequent Reconstruction. Four generations of Southern blacks endured Jim Crow laws; only now, some 50 years after the height of the Civil Rights Movement, are scholars beginning to examine the ubiquitous signage that kept this system of oppression in place.3 Although these Jim Crow signs have