Lest we forget.
That’s what came to my mind when I saw the Jim Crow signs in the glass case at the auction house. As I stood there looking at the signs outside the case, a white woman stood over me, waiting for her chance at a closer look.
Most of the folks who attend auctions are dealers looking for something worth selling. So I wondered if she was feeling what I was feeling. Was she seeing this artifact as more than just something to sell but an important reminder of our shared ugly history?
The signs were among a collection of so-called Black Americana collectibles. Interestingly, I had gotten a phone call from the auction house alerting me to this particular sale. The folks there know that I normally buy African-American-related items, but didn’t know that I buy very little Black Americana because most of it is horridly stereotypical.
Racial signs like these – lest we forget – remind us of a time when African Americans could not drink out of the same water fountain, use the same toilet, sit down at the same restaurant or even sit next to a white person on a bus, train or streetcar. These days, it seems, there’s a certain element in the population that would like to see those days return.
They will not.
Signs like these turn up at auction from time to time, and are reproductions. Here, the metal restroom and cardboard signs appeared to have some age and looked to be authentic. I wasn’t so sure about the black cast iron swimming pool sign.
These signs were the representation of Jim Crow laws legislated by local governments bent on reminding blacks to stay in their place. Even the term “Jim Crow” itself has a negative racial history. Governments were specific about what the signs would say and how they were to be displayed: In Tennessee, painted or printed signs were to be “displayed in a conspicuous place as follows, ‘This car for white people.’ … ‘This car for colored race.'” In Jacksonville, FL, in 1905, an ordinance required that the signs be no less than 2 inches high and imprinted with the words “White” and “Colored.”
Jim Crow laws grew out of so-called Black Codes from the 1860s that were designed to keep newly freed slaves as subservient as they were before. The codes limited where and when blacks could work and how much they were paid, eliminated their right to vote and determined where they could live and how they could travel.
Starting around the 1890s and into the 20th century, states began in earnest to codify segregation, armed with a nod from the U.S. Supreme Court in the Plessy vs. Ferguson case that “separate but equal” accommodations were not unconstitutional. It gave states the green light to do what they wished with segregation.
And then the nonsense began, most markedly in the South:
Schools, parks, libraries, drinking fountains, restrooms, buses, trains, hotels, restaurants, streetcars, theaters, hospitals, courthouses, cemeteries, public pools, phone booths, asylums, jails, and residential homes for the elderly and handicapped were segregated. The Jim Crow laws went even farther, stripping blacks of the right to vote through poll taxes, tests and intimidation.
Even textbooks were segregated, with school systems requiring separate books for black and white students. In New Orleans, prostitutes were segregated by race. In Atlanta, blacks and whites swore to tell the truth on separate Bibles in court. In Birmingham, AL, blacks and whites were forbidden to play cards, dice, dominoes or checkers together. Black and white prisoners could not be handcuffed or chained together.
Even blacks who traveled in their own cars and not on public transit still had to find accommodations that would accept and not humiliate them. This gave rise to such publications as the Negro Motorist Green-Book that listed restaurants, gas stations, nightclubs, private homes – primarily black-owned – where they could stop.
The inconvenience of Jim Crowism forced blacks to create their own businesses, and those sprouted in towns and cities across the country, creating meccas of commerce. The illegality of the practice also gave rise to African American activists and leaders who spoke out against the laws.
Even before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, AL, Ida B. Wells had refused to give up hers in a ladies car (for whites) on a train in 1884 and bit the hand of the conductor when he tried to forcibly move her. She would go on to become a journalist who used her newspaper to protest Jim Crow laws, as well as lynching.
The accommodations for blacks and whites were never equal, because the white populace saw blacks as inferior and not deserving of anything decent. In 1954, two black women traveling by train from Savannah, GA, to their home in East Orange, NJ, observed that their segregated car was dirty, and had no heat or water. Half of the car contained baggage. Two years later, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation on buses was unconstitutional in the Montgomery bus boycott case.
Blacks were beginning to assert their rights as a people. Through court suits, protests and other means, they watched as the Jim Crow laws fell, starting with the Brown vs. the Board of Education in 1954 outlawing school segregation and the Montgomery bus boycott. The Civil Rights Act outlawing segregation was enacted in 1964, followed by the Voting Rights Act in 1965 and the Fair Housing Act in 1968.
The racial signs may be long gone from public view, but they still stir passions. A few years ago, a white landlord attached one to the gate to her swimming pool and a black tenant objected. He filed a complaint with the local civil rights commission, which ruled the sign was a violation of civil rights laws. The woman maintained that the sign was merely decoration.
Those signs have never been and will never be just decoration. Decoration is an innocent picture you hang on the walls of your house. These signs were far from innocent.
Here are some photos of the signs and more from the Jim Crow years:
