road.
             Slavery, that "peculiar institution" as its adherents euphemistically coined it, had a somewhat unexpected integrating effect on the races. In the south, whites and blacks lived and worked together in close proximity, often even intimately, in the case of domestic servants and midwives. Possessing complete legal and political control, southern whites could enjoy a comfort level in 1846 which their northern counterparts, residing in free states, could not. Jim Crow--laws and customs separating the races--was not a necessary presence in the south at that time. Consequently, we find the first instance of Jim Crow in Massachusetts, in 1841; "separate but equal" seating arrangements were made for white and black travellers in a railroad car
             Turning and wheeling and jumping just so, Thomas Dartmouth Rice--one of the white pioneers in comic representations of blacks--shuffled across the American stage in 1832, giving the country its first international hit song. But "Daddy" Rice did not invent Jim Crow; he observed him somewhere in Kentucky or Ohio, co-opting the image and dialect for himself and the entertainment of his audience. But who was Jim Crow? Unknown. It's thought that he was a slave from Cincinnati, Ohio; others say he was from Charleston, South Carolina. Another faction holds that Jim Crow derived from old man Crow, the slaveholder. A final group says that the Crow came from the simile, black as a crow. Whatever the case, by 1838, the term was wedged into the language as a synonym for Negro. Thus, "Jim Crow laws" meant Negro laws.
             But the coming of Jim Crow was by no means inevitable. There is much historical evidence suggesting that the American system of apartheid--Afrikaner for "apartness"--need not ever have come into existence; but it did, and by the 1890s, America was two nations: one white, one black, separate but unequal. What the Civil War had ultimately failed to do, segregation had accomplished admirably....