Transcript: Who Was Jim Crow?

SONG: First on de heel tap, den on the toe Every time I wheel about I jump Jim Crow

Wheel about, and turn about en do jus so.

And every time I wheel about, I jump Jim Crow....

Dressed in a patched and ragged coat, broken-down shoes and tattered straw hat, his face blackened, a black-mop wig on his head, he shuffles across the stage, singing as he moves. As he continues, the narrator resumes.

Narrator: In 1836, Jim Crow was born.

Narrator: He begins his strange career as a malicious minstrel caricature of a black man created by a white man to amuse white audiences. Jim Crow would come to symbolize one of the most tragic eras of race relations in American History. A time deeply-rooted in promise and contradiction. 1865. Four million Americans, slaves simply because they were born black were now free. But in a little over a decade that promise was gone, replaced by a rigid system of laws designed to keep blacks from experiencing any of their newly achieved rights. It would be known as the era of Jim Crow. The American form of racial apartheid.