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Maryland Historical Society

The term "Jim Crow" originated in the 1830s, probably in minstrel shows, but it soon became an epithet for "Negro." Maryland first enacted so-called "Jim Crow" legislation requiring railroads and steamboats to separate the races in 1904. Although the impulse to subordinate African Americans had its roots in slavery and laws affecting free blacks prior to the Fourteenth Amendment, those laws not only separated the races but prohibited blacks from engaging in activities such as voting, testifying, owning certain properties, or engaging in certain occupations. The Fourteenth Amendment was designed to end such laws. Prior to 1904 in Maryland, the racially segregated seating that prevailed in transportation, theatres, hotels and restaurants was imposed by the owners and customers of businesses, not by the state.

African American plaintiffs in the nineteenth century sought better treatment by turning to the common law, the traditional unwritten law applied by courts, because the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution did not apply to private acts of discrimination. Carriers had a common law obligation to carry all passengers who paid the fare and did not misbehave. Plaintiffs in Maryland and other states won on the grounds that the transport companies denied them equal treatment. Courts said that the carriers' common law obligation could be met by "separate but equal" treatment, but found no equality in the specific cases. Losing defendants, like the Baltimore City Passenger Railway, often found it cheaper to integrate their operations.

In Plessy v. Ferguson, the United States Supreme Court transformed the segregation permitted by the common law into a constitutional principle, holding that state laws could require separation of the races just as private companies had done. This 1896 decision opened the door for states to require segregation. Although transport companies, African-Americans, and Republicans in Maryland combined to defeat one attempt to adopt a railroad segregation law patterned after Virginia's, they could not defeat the law a second time.

Maryland adopted a law in 1904 that required steam-powered railroads to have segregated cars, treating a partition within a car as sufficient to constitute separate cars. The law contained limited exceptions for express trains that did not stop in the state, parlor or sleeping cars, railway personnel, nurses, and officers escorting prisoners. Another law adopted that year required separation of the races in the sitting, sleeping, and eating apartments on steamboats. Some vessels complied by assigning the races to different sides of the vessel.

The following year, the Court of Appeals of Maryland held that the Jim Crow law could not be applied to interstate passengers. The court did indicate, however, that the law could be applied to intrastate passengers and the opinion suggested that railways might want to segregate interstate passengers on their own.

The legislature, with laws stricter than those of Virginia, extended segregation legislation in 1908 to require separate sleeping cabins and separate toilets on steamships. Another statute applied to electric railways operating more than twenty miles beyond an incorporated town (the twenty-mile rule exempted municipal transit in Baltimore from the requirement). Since many such railways had only one car, the statute provided for designation of separate seats.

Jim Crow laws also passed at the local level. For example, Baltimore city enacted a series of ordinances requiring segregation in housing that the courts later struck down between 1910 and 1918. Segregationists responded with restrictive covenants in property sales.

More commonly, officials would impose segregation, whether in courthouses or public recreational areas, by custom and tradition, without a specific mandate in the statutory law.

Multiple forces such as judicial decisions in related areas, escalating pressure from civil rights groups, and the influence of Republican governor Theodore McKeldin, led Maryland lawmakers to repeal the state's Jim Crow laws in 1951. Over the years following the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, segregation eventually ended in Maryland's public facilities

Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. New York: Oxford University Press, 1957.