Pruitt v. Gaston Co. Commissioners, 1886, 94 N. C. 709; Riggles v. City of Durham, 1886, 94 N. C. 800. Footnote 516: Art. X, sec. 7. CHAPTER IX SEPARATION OF RACES IN PUBLIC CONVEYANCES There is perhaps no phase of the American race problem which has been discussed so much within the last decade as the so-called “Jim Crow” laws, the statutes requiring separate accommodations for white and colored passengers in public conveyances. This arises largely from the fact that these legislative enactments are of general concern, while the other legal distinctions have directly affected only certain classes of each race. Laws prohibiting intermarriage, for instance, concern only those of marriageable age; suffrage restrictions apply only to males of voting age; and statutes requiring separate schools affect immediately only children and youths; but the laws requiring white and colored passengers to occupy separate seats, compartments, or coaches concern every man, woman, and child, who travels, the country over. They affect not only those living in the States where the laws are in force, but the entire traveling public. The white man or the Negro in Massachusetts may not care anything about the suffrage restrictions of South Carolina, but, if he travels through the South, he must experience the requirements of the “Jim Crow” laws. ORIGIN OF “JIM CROW” The phrase “Jim Crow” has become so inseparably affixed to the laws separating the races in public conveyances that two States, North Carolina and Maryland, have indexed the laws on that subject under “J” in some of their annual statutes. The earliest public use of the phrase appears to have been in 1835, when Thomas D. Rice, the first Negro minstrel, brought out in Washington a dramatic song and Negro dance called “Jim Crow.” The late actor, Joseph Jefferson, when only four years old, appeared in this dance.[517] In 1841 “Jim Crow” was first used in Massachusetts to apply to a railroad car set apart for the use of Negroes.[518] The phrase, then, has a somewhat more dignified origin than is ordinarily attributed to it by those who have considered it as only an opprobrious comparison of the color of the Negro with that of the crow. DEVELOPMENT OF LEGISLATION PRIOR TO 1875