The name comes from a racist minstrel character performed in blackface by the white entertainer Thomas Dartmouth Rice starting around 1830. By the 1890s, "Jim Crow" referred to segregation laws. After Reconstruction ended in 1877, Southern states passed laws separating Black and white people on trains, in schools, in hospitals and in cemeteries. The Supreme Court approved this in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896.
Jim Crow also stripped Black people of political power. Poll taxes, literacy tests, white primaries and grandfather clauses pushed Black voters off the rolls. Lynching and other terror enforced the system when laws did not.
Segregation was not only Southern. Northern and Western cities used redlining, restrictive covenants and sundown towns to the same effect. Legal Jim Crow ended in the 1960s, but scholars such as Michelle Alexander, in The New Jim Crow in 2010, argue that mass incarceration now produces similar exclusion.