It shall be unlawful for a negro and white person to play together or in company with each other in any game of cards or dice, dominoes or checkers.
–Birmingham, Alabama, 1930.
“Jim Crow” laws systematically codified separation by race in the American South. Although it had begun some years before and persisted for some time afterwards, the life span of “Jim Crow” is legally bounded by two landmark Supreme Court cases. At one end, the 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson established the doctrine of “separate but equal,” after a black man attempted to sit in a whites-only railway car. At the other end, the 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, declared that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,” a pivotal decision in the struggle for racial desegregation in the United States.
(Note: The titles of the photographs below are transcribed from the original captions the agency applied to the photos in the 1930s and 1940s.)