When Reconstruction ended, white Americans felt free to truly express their racism. Because, you know, they'd kept it all so subtle during the 1860s and '70s. 

The grandfather to Jim Crow laws, the Black Codes were in effect during those decades, and they prevented freed Blacks from enjoying any of the benefits of freedom, like owning land or making money. After 1876 and lasting until about 1965 (seriously), Jim Crow laws were then put in place to segregate Blacks from whites, and also just to generally make things really, really hard for non-whites. 

These laws were a little gross. Okay, a lot gross. And just completely reprehensible.

So, who or what exactly was Jim Crow, you ask, and why did he get a series of laws named after him? Well, Jim Crow was a fictional character that was used in American popular culture to parody and dehumanize African Americans.

Jim Crow comes from a form of entertainment called "minstrelsy." You know how people are always complaining about how "lowbrow" teen comedies and TV shows have become? Well, popular entertainment in the good ol' days was way, waaaaaay more stupid. Minstrelsy was probably the most stupid form of entertainment possible.

Minstrel sketches were parody sketches about African-American life performed by white actors in black makeup called "blackface." They had lots of recurring characters, all of which were more racist than pizza is delicious. (That's a lot of racism.) 

The most well-known character was Jim Crow, a sexualized and sexually-aggressive dancing man. This stereotype was applied to all Black men by white racists, and it became a racial slur.

Even worse, the stereotypes of Jim Crow as aggressively sexual and weak-willed were used to justify all sorts of ridiculous nonsense, like segregation and anti-interracial-marriage laws (called "anti-miscegenation laws," ugh). 

"Jim Crow laws" became an apt name for all these crazy laws. The term conveyed both the extreme racial prejudice inherent in them and the ridiculous premises they were based on. 

But despite being named after a farcical figure, these laws were not funny, and they were a big deal in the South from the end of Reconstruction to the 1960s.

The story of the Jim Crow era is much more than a mere tale of white violence and Black subjugation. Descriptions of disenfranchisement, anti-Black laws and codes, and lynching statistics illuminate only one side of this complex tale. For nearly a century, African Americans—Black leaders as well as average men and women—resisted, rationalized, undermined, accommodated to, migrated from, and tested the limits of a system created to control every aspect of their lives.

A phrase that historians like to use is "the banality of evil." That's because oppression isn't usually something done by a mustache-twirling mad scientist villain. It's done through thousands of small acts of bullying by average, everyday people. 

You know those kids who go around calling other kids "fat" and giving wedgies? Well, some of those kids don't ever learn any better. Some grow up and are still bullies, and some of those bullies become politicians. And that's how we end up with a society like the United States under Jim Crow.

Chances are when you hear the term "Jim Crow," you imagine a sign declaring "Whites Only" hanging in front of a water fountain. If you've taken any basic American history course, you also picture this conspicuous marker of segregation somewhere in the rural South during the first half of the 20th century, maybe in a small town tucked inside the Mississippi River Delta or in a county of Alabama, the state officially known as the "Heart of Dixie."

This placard, with its poignant warning to Black Americans, has come to represent a troubling era of Southern bigotry, one in which skin color defined a person's access to places of business and recreation, restrooms, amusement parks, bowling alleys, swimming pools, beaches, schools, libraries, hospitals, and even cemeteries.

But racial segregation is only part of the story and explains just one aspect of the power whites wielded in order to control the lives of Black Americans. That declarative phrase—"Whites Only"—can't adequately communicate the implicit boundaries and unspoken social codes and customs in place during the Jim Crow era, nor can it suggest exactly how treacherous this world was for Black Southerners. 

A single gesture, movement, expression, or question could be perceived as a violation of Jim Crow boundaries. Black men and women who demonstrated too much aspiration, confidence, or success became targets of harassment, assault, arson, and murder. And from the late-19th century through the 1950s, most of the nation outside the South ignored or even condoned these crimes.

Maybe we can look even deeper than this, beyond the evidence of the power wielded by white Southerners.

• What should African-Americans have done in response to the restrictions, injustice, harassment, and violence they faced during the Jim Crow era?
• What could they have done?
• What did they do?

The obvious answer to each of these questions is "resist."

But resistance can be combative or nonviolent, or a single heroic action or a mass revolution. It can be political: a vote or a demonstration against the ruling administration. It can be an economic form of insurrection: a refusal to accept poor working conditions or a demand for fair wages. It can be intellectual: a poem, essay, song, lecture, speech, or book. Resistance can be the work of one brave man or woman or it can be organized and conducted by valiant leaders.

It's true that during the Jim Crow era—roughly a century—resistance took each of these forms. However, many—in fact, most—of the ways in which Black Southerners defied the Jim Crow system looked nothing like the sort of resistance that we're most familiar with today. Their rebellion wasn't always explicit or recognizable, and was often marked by small, personal, day-to-day choices. At times, it even came in the form of accommodation and deference. 

And not all acts were deliberately defiant. In fact, many Black Southerners employed these techniques not to undermine the system, but simply to ensure a future for themselves and their families.

In a nutshell, the word "racism" isn't enough to explain nearly a century of segregation and terror. The effects that this period of segregation, Black disenfranchisement, and bloodshed had—and still have—on the nation as a whole, are paramount.

Realtalk, this is grim history, the kind that's difficult to stomach if not impossible to comprehend. Tough stuff, yes, but it's essential for us to truly appreciate the tremendous stakes of the Civil Rights Movement and perhaps more importantly, to demystify America's recent past in order to better evaluate how much has changed and whether obstacles to racial equality still remain.