Status Updates From The Strange Career of Jim Crow

“The south’s adoption of extreme racism [segregation] was due not so much to a conversion as it was to a relaxation of the opposition.” The restraining forces of Northern liberal opinion, southern conservative elites, and southern radical progressives were weakened and discredited, yielding the field.

1) Antebellum Slavery entailed considerable interracial association
2) Jim Crow laws and legal segregation pioneered in the northern free states
3) Reconstruction and anomalous period of interracial contact with traditional hierarchies disrupted

“[Slavery] made separation of the races for the most part impracticable… The system imposed its own type of interracial contact, unwelcome as it might be on both sides.”