The featured image is of a 1944 mock-funeral for Jim Crow in Detroit. Jim Crow remained in force throughout the South, but the pillars of American apartheid were crumbling. It legally endured until Lyndon Johnson pushed through the Civil Rights and Voting Rights bills. It then collapsed in the South, but it didn’t end white supremacy, it drove it undercover. Racism is our country’s original sin, so it couldn’t be erased that easily. In 2025, Jim Crow is making an unwelcome comeback.
Who or what was the original Jim Crow?
“Thomas Dartmouth Rice, a white man, was born in New York City in 1808. He devoted himself to the theater in his twenties, and in the early 1830s, he began performing the act that would make him famous: he painted his face black and did a song and dance he claimed were inspired by a slave he saw. The act was called “Jump, Jim Crow” (or “Jumping Jim Crow”).
SNIP
After the Civil War, southern states passed laws that discriminated against newly freed African Americans; and as early as the 1890s, these laws had gained a nickname. In 1899, North Carolina’s Goldsboro Daily Argus published an article subtitled “How ‘Capt. Tilley’ of the A. & N.C. Road Enforces the Jim Crow Law.”
SNIP
However it happened, the new meaning stuck. Blackface minstrelsy’s popularity faded (but never died) and T.D. Rice is barely remembered. Most people today don’t know his name. But everybody knows Jim Crow.”
Jim Crow’s political comeback has taken many forms:
Pete Hegseth has turned the Pentagon’s web site into a shrine for Jim Crow by erasing prominent Black generals from history. He’s also fired some supposedly “woke” general officers, all of whom happen to be Black. Hegseth is a Christian nationalist, which is a polite term for white supremacist.
DOGE’s attack on the civil service is an attack on the Black middle class. Government jobs, both civilian and military, have been a way for African Americans to become middle class. Elon Musk grew up in South Africa. His family were ardent supporters of the apartheid regime. He brought those Afrikaner values to DOGE.
This post was inspired by an appalling story out of the University of Florida law school:
“Preston Damsky is a law student at the University of Florida. He is also a white nationalist and antisemite. Last fall, he took a seminar taught by a federal judge on “originalism,” the legal theory favored by many conservatives that seeks to interpret the Constitution based on its meaning when it was adopted.
In his capstone paper for the class, Mr. Damsky argued that the framers had intended for the phrase “We the People,” in the Constitution’s preamble, to refer exclusively to white people. From there, he argued for the removal of voting rights protections for nonwhites, and for the issuance of shoot-to-kill orders against “criminal infiltrators at the border.”
Turning over the country to “a nonwhite majority,” Mr. Damsky wrote, would constitute a “terrible crime.” White people, he warned, “cannot be expected to meekly swallow this demographic assault on their sovereignty.”
At the end of the semester, Mr. Damsky, 29, was given the “book award,” which designated him as the best student in the class. According to the syllabus, the capstone counted the most toward final grades.
The Trump-nominated judge who taught the class, John L. Badalamenti, declined to comment for this article, and does not appear to have publicly discussed why he chose Mr. Damsky for the award.”
Anyone surprised the judge in question is a Trump nominee? I thought not.
The Insult Comedian’s instinctive and visceral racism has led to the appointment of many judges who jump for Jim Crow. They may call themselves originalists or Christian nationalists, but they’re really white supremacists committed to a creeping comeback of Jim Crow.
Legal Jim Crow has been dead for sixty years, but Sam the Sham and the Federalist Society Pharaohs are aching to roll back Civil Rights laws in the name of color-blindness. Jim Crow by any other name is still Jim Crow.
This is the second time this week that I’ve riffed on the title of a famous work of history in a post title. We’ve moved from The March of Folly by Barbara Tuchman to The Strange Career Of Jim Crow by C Vann Woodward.
Professor Woodward was a white Southerner who took flak from all concerned over his 1955 book. It remains, however, a classic explication of a dark time in our history. Unfortunately, political Jim Crow is back, and legal Jim Crow beckons to MAGA maggots like a racist siren.
I couldn’t find a version of Jump Jim Crow without racist imagery, so the last word goes to Rufus Thomas: