Week of Dec. 24-30
December 24
1881—The Edgefield Exodus begins. More than 5,000 Blacks, driven in part by a wave of White violence and economic exploitation, begin leaving Edgefield County, S.C., and resettled in Arkansas. The movement was also encouraged by people like Pap Singleton who believed Southern Blacks could enjoy a better life if they moved to the Midwest. It is also believed that some Whites also encouraged the exodus in a bid to reduce South Carolina’s Black population, which was a majority in the state in the 1870s and 1880s.
1881—With the Reconstruction period over and federal troops withdrawn from the former slave states, Whites began to reassert their authority with a host of segregationist and anti-Black laws. On this day, Tennessee led the way to modern segregation with a “Jim Crow” railroad car statute. Basically, “Jim Crow” meant segregation. Virtually all the other Southern states soon did the same, passing laws designed to segregate or keep Blacks and White separated. How the name “Jim Crow” came to represent segregation is unclear. It is believed to have originated from a White minstrel show performer of the 1830s named Thomas “Daddy” Rice who stole the phrase from a slave who did a song and dance using the words “Jim Crow” as a criticism of his slave master. Regardless, many of the Jim Crow laws enacted in the 1880s remained in force until the successes of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.
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