The Utterly Original Bill Traylor

There are still people, including children, working in Southern tobacco fields. The past isn’t even past, as Faulkner put it. Recently, public health researchers have called attention to the poison seeping into the bodies of the children in tobacco fields, who are now mostly Mexican and Central American.

They would come to be called Jim Crow laws. It is unknown precisely who Jim Crow was or if someone by that name actually existed. There are several stories as to the term’s origins. It came into public use in the 1830s after Thomas Dartmouth Rice, a New York–born itinerant white actor, popularized a song-and-dance routine called “the Jim Crow” in m

Walker’s memory remained vivid among abolitionists well into the mid-nineteenth century, only to fade after the Civil War. But meanwhile, he had struck a strong blow against the notion that whiteness, throughout history, deserved to be judged positively.29