Appalling history of Postbellum Jim Crow laws
"Jim Crow is a racial slur, derived from the name of the minstrel character played by Thomas
D. Rice in the 1830s. A Jim Crow is also a type of manual railroad rail bender. It has been
referred to by this name in publications from 1870 to the present. The lease of ex-slave
prisoners to private industry immediately following the Civil War is known as the convict
lease system. Many of the first convict lease contracts were signed by railroad companies.
Plessy v. Ferguson contested an 1890 Louisiana law segregating black railroad passengers.
The Supreme Court upheld the law as constitutional. This created a precedent for laws
mandating racial segregation, later to be known as Jim Crow laws."
Prior to the Civil War, slaves were valued property, after the war Jim Crow laws made them subject to arrest, imprisonment and harsh working conditions in mines and in rebuilding the South's infrastructure.
http://www.contemporaryartdaily.com/2017/05/cameron-rowland-at-daniel-buchholz/