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How Jim Crow began: In the North, well before the Civil War
From the Magazine: How Jim Crow began: In the North, well before the Civil WarThe Jim Crow Car
The North, the South and the forgotten origins of racial separation
Story by Steve Luxenberg Illustrated by Christina Chung
FEBRUARY 20, 2019
On a late summer’s day in 1838, the Eastern Rail Road threw a celebration to announce itself to the world. At noon in East Boston, after an hour of hurrahs from several hundred investors, a swollen crowd jammed itself into three trains for the 13 1/2-mile ride to Salem, Mass. — where a festive dinner for 600 awaited at the railroad’s new depot. Separated by half a mile, the locomotives clattered along at a leisurely pace, allowing the passengers plenty of time to admire the many engineering marvels — overpasses, embankments, stone walls — that work crews had fashioned in the excavated cavities of rock and earth. Newspaper correspondents representing nearly every town along the route were on hand to chronicle the history-making moment.
The tail end of the opening-day procession trundled into Salem just ahead of an evening downpour. The disembarking passengers then joined a who’s who of the state’s business and political elites. Leading figures from the Whig and Democratic parties mingled with the presidents of the state’s other railway companies, who had come to salute the latest member of their growing club. ... To match the grand occasion, the Eastern’s ruddy-cheeked president, George Peabody, had prepared a speech brimming with ambition. The railroad would not be merely a means of transportation, Peabody boldly predicted. It would be a force for social change. Steam locomotion would bind together the sprawling United States and help “subdue local prejudices.” A rail-connected nation, east to west, north to south, would send “a whole people moving onward together in a career of unexampled prosperity, bearing in their front the standard of Equal Rights.”
Peabody would have said all that, but as the Boston Courier reported, “from the extreme size of the building, the noise produced by the popping of Champagne corks, etc., he could only make himself heard by a few persons.” Chagrined, he turned to Boston Daily Advertiser publisher Nathan Hale and requested that Hale arrange to print the speech in full, so that the people of Massachusetts might read and digest it at their leisure. Hale nodded his assent. ... The next day, though, when Peabody’s railroad officially threw open its doors to the paying public, the “standard of Equal Rights” was nowhere in sight. Instead, the Eastern’s white and black passengers found separate cars awaiting them.
Six weeks later, on October 12, 1838, an item appeared in the Salem Gazette, telling the story of two drunken white sailors, Benjamin King and John Smith, charged with damaging the Eastern Rail Road’s track in retaliation for their ejection from the 6 o’clock evening run to Salem. Soon after departure, before the conductor ordered their removal, the crew had halted the locomotive “and compelled Smith, who was the drunkest, to take his seat in the ‘refuse’ or ‘Jim Crow’ car, at the end of the train.”
In researching the story of separation — which was the 19th-century term, universally used in print and conversation — this was the earliest record I could find of the use of “Jim Crow” as a shorthand for discrimination in public accommodations. When it showed up in my digital digging, I was surprised. This was 1838, in the North, at the dawn of the railroad age. Not 1888, when Mississippi passed the first law in the South explicitly mandating “equal but separate accommodation for white and colored passengers” on trains operating within its borders, going beyond a Florida law enacted a year earlier. Not 1896, when the Supreme Court sanctioned Louisiana’s “equal but separate” railroad act in its infamous Plessy v. Ferguson ruling.
....
Steve Luxenberg is a Washington Post associate editor. This article is adapted from his new book, “Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America’s Journey From Slavery to Segregation,” published this month by W.W. Norton.
Correction: This article originally stated that, in 1838, the Eastern Rail Road passed through dynamited cavities of rock and earth. However, dynamite had not yet been invented in 1838.
Credits: Story by Steve Luxenberg. Designed by Christian Font. Illustrated by Christina Chung.
The North, the South and the forgotten origins of racial separation
Story by Steve Luxenberg Illustrated by Christina Chung
FEBRUARY 20, 2019
On a late summer’s day in 1838, the Eastern Rail Road threw a celebration to announce itself to the world. At noon in East Boston, after an hour of hurrahs from several hundred investors, a swollen crowd jammed itself into three trains for the 13 1/2-mile ride to Salem, Mass. — where a festive dinner for 600 awaited at the railroad’s new depot. Separated by half a mile, the locomotives clattered along at a leisurely pace, allowing the passengers plenty of time to admire the many engineering marvels — overpasses, embankments, stone walls — that work crews had fashioned in the excavated cavities of rock and earth. Newspaper correspondents representing nearly every town along the route were on hand to chronicle the history-making moment.
The tail end of the opening-day procession trundled into Salem just ahead of an evening downpour. The disembarking passengers then joined a who’s who of the state’s business and political elites. Leading figures from the Whig and Democratic parties mingled with the presidents of the state’s other railway companies, who had come to salute the latest member of their growing club. ... To match the grand occasion, the Eastern’s ruddy-cheeked president, George Peabody, had prepared a speech brimming with ambition. The railroad would not be merely a means of transportation, Peabody boldly predicted. It would be a force for social change. Steam locomotion would bind together the sprawling United States and help “subdue local prejudices.” A rail-connected nation, east to west, north to south, would send “a whole people moving onward together in a career of unexampled prosperity, bearing in their front the standard of Equal Rights.”
Peabody would have said all that, but as the Boston Courier reported, “from the extreme size of the building, the noise produced by the popping of Champagne corks, etc., he could only make himself heard by a few persons.” Chagrined, he turned to Boston Daily Advertiser publisher Nathan Hale and requested that Hale arrange to print the speech in full, so that the people of Massachusetts might read and digest it at their leisure. Hale nodded his assent. ... The next day, though, when Peabody’s railroad officially threw open its doors to the paying public, the “standard of Equal Rights” was nowhere in sight. Instead, the Eastern’s white and black passengers found separate cars awaiting them.
Six weeks later, on October 12, 1838, an item appeared in the Salem Gazette, telling the story of two drunken white sailors, Benjamin King and John Smith, charged with damaging the Eastern Rail Road’s track in retaliation for their ejection from the 6 o’clock evening run to Salem. Soon after departure, before the conductor ordered their removal, the crew had halted the locomotive “and compelled Smith, who was the drunkest, to take his seat in the ‘refuse’ or ‘Jim Crow’ car, at the end of the train.”
In researching the story of separation — which was the 19th-century term, universally used in print and conversation — this was the earliest record I could find of the use of “Jim Crow” as a shorthand for discrimination in public accommodations. When it showed up in my digital digging, I was surprised. This was 1838, in the North, at the dawn of the railroad age. Not 1888, when Mississippi passed the first law in the South explicitly mandating “equal but separate accommodation for white and colored passengers” on trains operating within its borders, going beyond a Florida law enacted a year earlier. Not 1896, when the Supreme Court sanctioned Louisiana’s “equal but separate” railroad act in its infamous Plessy v. Ferguson ruling.
....
Steve Luxenberg is a Washington Post associate editor. This article is adapted from his new book, “Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America’s Journey From Slavery to Segregation,” published this month by W.W. Norton.
Correction: This article originally stated that, in 1838, the Eastern Rail Road passed through dynamited cavities of rock and earth. However, dynamite had not yet been invented in 1838.
Credits: Story by Steve Luxenberg. Designed by Christian Font. Illustrated by Christina Chung.
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