Jim Crow's Legal Machinery: Grandfather Clauses to 10-2 Jury Verdicts

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Jim Crow began as a minstrel character in the 1828 song Jump, Jim Crow, performed by a white actor in blackface, and became the name for a legal caste system built after the Compromise of 1877 withdrew federal troops from the South. Following Klan and Red Shirt terror, Redeemer legislatures used poll taxes, literacy tests and grandfather clauses written in race neutral language to get around the 15th Amendment. In Louisiana, registered Black voters fell from more than 130,000 in 1896 to 730 by 1910. Plessy v. Ferguson upheld separate but equal in 1896, and in 1913 Woodrow Wilson's administration segregated federal offices in Washington.

The episode traces how the system was dismantled: World War II veterans such as Isaac Woodard, blinded by a South Carolina police chief in 1946, Justice Frank Murphy's first use of the word racism in the Korematsu dissent, Truman's 1948 order ending military segregation, and the NAACP strategy of Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall leading to Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. It then turns to legacies, including Nazi lawyer Heinrich Krieger's study of American race law during the drafting of the Nuremberg Laws, Mississippi's 1890 felony disenfranchisement rules, Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, and the 2026 case Louisiana v. Callais on Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

• Brown relied on Kenneth and Mamie Clark's doll test to show the psychological harm of segregation.
• When insurers canceled policies on Montgomery boycott carpool cars, organizers secured coverage through Lloyd's of London during the 381 day boycott.
• The Heart of Atlanta Motel case upheld the Civil Rights Act under the Commerce Clause.
• Nazi officials rejected the American one drop rule as too harsh for their initial classification of Jewish identity.
• Louisiana allowed non-unanimous 10 to 2 jury convictions until 2018, and the Supreme Court ended the practice nationwide in 2020.