Origins of Jim Crow

Jim Crow was the name of a minstrel character portrayed by Thomas Dartmouth "Daddy" Rice. Rice was a struggling actor in New York. Conflicting accounts describe Rice coming across either an "old Black slave who walked with difficulty" or a "ragged Black stable boy" who were singing this song:


"Come listen all you galls and boys,
I'm going to sing a little song,
My name is Jim Crow.
Weel about and turn about and do jis so,
Eb'ry time I weel about I jump Jim Crow."


In 1828 Rice performed as stage as the character Jim Crow, "an exaggerated, highly stereotypical Black character." Rice darkened his skin with burnt cork and performed song and dance routines throughout the U.S. and England and Ireland. Jim Crow became a "stock character" in minstrel shows along with other characters like Jim Dandy and Zip Coon.


The term "Jim Crow" eventually became an offensive label for back people. But, by the end of the 19th century, the term became synonymous with the state and local laws enacted to oppress Blacks from 1876 to 1965.


The following is a collection of images depicting the character Jim Crow. Notice the character's the upturned left foot. This is evidence of the character's distinctive dance step called "rocking de heel," supposedly inspired by an old black man who limped while he tended horses.

Jim Crow songbook, published 1839, Ithaca, New York




The following is an excerpt taken from a PBS website on blackface minstrelsy where Dale Cockrell comments on the performances of Thomas D. Rice:


"In probably the summer of 1830, Thomas Dartmouth Rice, who was called "Daddy" Rice, a sort of minor character actor out of New York City, was in Louisville, Kentucky. And he had the idea of dressing in shabby attire, which he may or may not have borrowed from an African American that he met in the streets of Louisville, and going on stage, and it was the kind of entr'acte between parts of a play, he got on stage and did this extraordinary and extravagant dance to this tune called "Jim Crow." And the tune featured not only an extraordinary dance but an extraordinary moment of elevation in which his body kind of exploded off the stage, turned around, wheeled around and jumped Jim Crow, with the exclamation on the "jump." And T. D. Rice, in that moment of exploding off the stage, took us into a completely new realm of popular culture where white audiences (and Thomas Dartmouth Rice is himself a white actor who put on blackface to pretend to be that African-American on the street of Louisville), and in that moment, whites in the audience as well as white actors appropriated an aspect of African-American culture and changed the face of popular culture."