Rome, Georgia. September 1943. Esther Bubley, photographer. "A sign at the Greyhound bus station." Sign: "Colored Waiting Room."
Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division.

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Rome, Georgia. September 1943. Esther Bubley, photographer. "A sign at the Greyhound bus station." Sign: "Colored Waiting Room."
Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division.

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Jim Crow Laws

Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, & Kentucky

Alabama

Health Care

No person or corporation shall require any white female nurse to nurse in wards or rooms in hospitals, either public or private, in which negro men are placed.

Transportation

All passenger stations in this state operated by any motor transportation company shall have separate waiting rooms or space and separate ticket windows for the white and colored races.

The conductor of each passenger train is authorized and required to assign each passenger to the car or the division of the car, when it is divided by a partition, designated for the race to which such passenger belongs.

Public Facilities

It shall be unlawful to conduct a restaurant or other place for the serving of food in the city, at which white and colored people are served in the same room, unless such white and colored persons are effectually separated by a solid partition extending from the floor upward to a distance of seven feet or higher, and unless a separate entrance from the street is provided for each compartment.

It shall be unlawful for a negro and white person to play together or in company with each other at any game of pool or billiards.

Every employer of white or negro males shall provide for such white or negro males reasonably accessible and separate toilet facilities.

Arizona

Marriage

The marriage of a person of Caucasian blood with a Negro, Mongolian, Malay, or Hindu shall be null and void.

Florida

Marriage/Cohabitation

All marriages between a white person and a negro, or between a white person and a person of negro descent to the fourth generation inclusive, are hereby forever prohibited.

Any negro man and white woman, or any white man and negro woman, who are not married to each other, who shall habitually live in and occupy in the nighttime the same room shall each be punished by imprisonment not exceeding twelve 12 months, or by fine not exceeding five hundred dollars.

Education

The schools for white children and the schools for negro children shall be conducted separately.

Georgia

Health Care

The Board of Control shall see that proper and distinct apartments are arranged for said patients, so that in no case shall Negroes and white persons be together.

Marriage

It shall be unlawful for a white person to marry anyone except a white person. Any marriage in violation of this section shall be void.

Public Facilities

No colored barber shall serve as a barber [to] white women or girls.

The officer in charge shall not bury, or allow to be buried, any colored persons upon ground set apart or used for the burial of white persons.

All persons licensed to conduct a restaurant, shall serve either white people exclusively or colored people exclusively and shall not sell to the two races within the same room or serve the two races anywhere under the same license.

It shall be unlawful for any amateur white baseball team to play baseball on any vacant lot or baseball diamond within two blocks of a playground devoted to the Negro race, and it shall be unlawful for any amateur colored baseball team to play baseball in any vacant lot or baseball diamond within two blocks of any playground devoted to the white race.

It shall be unlawful for colored people to frequent any park owned or maintained by the city for the benefit, use and enjoyment of white persons...and unlawful for any white person to frequent any park owned or maintained by the city for the use and benefit of colored persons.

All persons licensed to conduct the business of selling beer or wine...shall serve either white people exclusively or colored people exclusively and shall not sell to the two races within the same room at any time. Jim Crow laws were laws that restricted the freedom of African Americans from the 1880s to the 1960s. Here are sample laws enacted in various states.

Kentucky

Reform Schools

The children of white and colored races committed to the houses of reform shall be kept entirely separate from each other.