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Who or what was Jim Crow?
Jim Crow was the name given to the system of racial segregation in the US – predominantly in the South but holding influence all over the country – from the period immediately after the American Civil War (the end of the Reconstruction era) to the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
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With ‘separate but equal’ as the guiding doctrine, state and local laws restricted black rights. Black people were denied the vote; educational, economic and vocational opportunities; and basic human dignities. Yet Jim Crow was more than that: it was an all-pervasive way of life to keep African-American people as second-class citizens by sanctioning and normalising their oppression in a post-slavery world, and enforcing that with the constant threat of the law, intimidation, violence and death.