Jim Crow Images

A familiar relic of the Jim Crow era.

The original "Jim Crow" figure was a white minstrel actor who exaggerated black behavior to entertain audiences.

A "colored" water jug situated between Jim Crow bathrooms in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma (1939).

A dart game featuring a caricature of a black child (c. 1900).

Convict laborers working on the construction of the Texas State Capitol, c. 1885.

In Newport News, Virginia, a prison chain gang repairs city streets (1901).

A man ascends a stairwell leading to the "colored" seating area in a Jim Crow movie theater in Natchez, Mississippi (c. 1930).

The Rex Theater, a movie house in Leland, Mississippi (1939).

Inside Clune's Broadway Theater in Los Angeles, a 775-seat movie house and the site of the premiere screening of The Birth of a Nation.

A headline from the Cleveland Advocate, 25 September 1915.

The Morris Brown College baseball team, a Jim Crow ball club from Atlanta, Georgia (1900).

Bennie Simmons, soaked in oil before being set on fire in Anadarko, Oklahoma (1913).

Anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells-Barnett (c. 1897).

Protesters picket a screening of The Birth of a Nation at the Republic Theater in New York City (1947).

From 1936 to 1938, the New York branch of the NAACP displayed this flag to remind the public of the brutal crimes occurring in South.

Booker T. Washington standing speaking before a black audience in Lakeland, Florida (c. 1900).

Historian, writer, and Civil Rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois.

A family of southern migrants headed north to Chicago, c. 1919.

Jack Johnson, the first African-American Heavyweight Champion of the World.