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It occurred to me recently that I have no idea why Jim Crow laws existed.
I know from life experience that white flight isn't the result of racist white people wanting to avoid being near people who look different from them, but rather, reasonable people wanting to avoid black crime. I could extrapolate from this that the point of Jim Crow laws was to keep black criminals away, but that makes no sense. Black people had been enslaved for their entire time in the new world, so they didn't have the opportunity to become a criminal underclass. White people would not yet have any basis for the claim that black people are dangerous to be around, would they?
It's very hard to believe this question has been asked sincerely, but you're also getting a lot of questionable answers. White southerners were very often racists, in the classical sense of believing in their inherent racial superiority. But you're right that simple racism is probably not sufficient to support Jim Crow laws all on its own.
If you know anything about the history of the Civil War, though, you know that after the Civil War, the South was Occupied Territory. All the newly-freed slaves formed an enormous voting bloc, and they all voted Republican. This was a huge opportunity for carpet baggers from the North to break into federal politics, which were substantially dominated by a New England elite. If the Southern states were to have anything approaching self rule ever again, it was extremely important to disenfranchise the Republican-captured black electorate. And so: Jim Crow.
Once you've got the practical foundation of "we need to disenfranchise black Republicans" in place, then the rest of the stuff--anti-miscegenation, segregation, etc.--follows pretty naturally from the prevailing (racist!) worldview of the politically powerful whites in the "Reconstructed" South. But the New Deal starts bringing black voters over to the Democratic Party, and segregation becomes a regional issue rather than a party issue for much of the 20th century. After that, it was just a matter of institutional inertia.
Of course, people in the past didn't know many of the things we know now, but that doesn't mean they were stupid. The idea of a racially diverse nation had never really been tried; nationality and race were (and in most places still are) indistinguishable concepts. Native Americans are to this day allowed to (encouraged to!) live in racially segregated communities, and presumably some well-meaning individuals saw parallels there as well. So I don't mean to suggest that there were no plausible arguments (beyond racism) for Jim Crow laws. I just think that, in purely political terms, the desire of Southerners to cast off, if not the yoke of the Union, at least the yoke of the Republicans, is quite sufficient to explain their desire to disenfranchise black voters by whatever means necessary.
Isn't it also the case that blacks lost their majority of the population in many southern states when many of them migrated to the north?
In some cases--but substantial migration doesn't appear to have happened immediately, and not every state was majority black. South Carolina was 57% black at the outbreak of the Civil War, and is 27% black today. Mississippi has similar numbers. Georgia was about 44% black at the outbreak of the Civil War, and is today about 30% black. Florida was also 44% black in 1860, but is just 17% black today.
Today the states with the highest absolute number of black residents are Texas, Florida, Georgia, New York, and California; four of those five are also in the top four most populous states (Georgia is #8 on that metric). The so-called First Great Migration of black Americans north and west is commonly held to have begun some 45 years after the end of the Civil War; I guess if you really wanted to know the precise year when South Carolina or Mississippi became more white than black, you'd have to do a deep dive into the census numbers.
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Thank you so much! This explanation makes the most sense to me. It is very thorough and I'm going to use it as a guide for further research.
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“The idea of a racially diverse nation had never really been tried”
Well, maybe! "What's a race" obviously matters a lot in deciding the question. Rome was pretty diverse overall but also mostly, and most of the time, segregated by dint of geography and language--Roman citizens had freedom of movement, vassals less so. Irish migration to Britain versus British migration to Ireland is something I don't have any priors concerning, and I know even less of Russia.
The apparent willingness of the Spanish and (to a lesser extent) Portugese to "go native" is also interesting, but Mexico becomes a country in the same approximate era as the Civil War itself, and I would tend to characterize the Mexican people as more a mixed people than a diverse people. This may be the idea that was working in the background of my thought process, there. Humans have been migrating, and mixing, forever. But "mix" or "exterminate" seem to have been the default historical options, followed eventually by "colonize," which ends up being a confusing combination of the two. "Mixing" with blacks was often explicitly not the goal of even the white, progressive abolitionists who spearheaded the North's anti-slavery efforts.
In a way, this plants the seeds for contemporary ideas about race--is the ultimate outcome for the United States to be a slightly-whiter-and-blacker version of the aboriginal/European mixed heritage that dominates South and Central America? Or is it to become a collection of pseudo- or actual-ethnostates, from the Navajo and Apache and Cherokee reservations, to Black and Christian nationalist microstates, and so forth?
Well, that's pretty far afield, but the point is that maybe it is a little too strong... but still I think something new was being tried, there, even if I have failed to characterize it perfectly, and that whatever it was, it continues to have unique consequences today.
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