To build the UNC training set, the UNC team defined Jim Crow using the government’s 1949 brief in Henderson vs US (1949), which framed Jim Crow laws as creating conditions that “strengthen and enhance” racial discrimination. An important factor in UNC’s process for classifying laws as Jim Crow was intent to discriminate according to race. Even if racist intent or race-based language was not present in the text of the law, as in the case of UNC’s extrinsic category, laws passed within a context of intended racism, such as courthouse funding that included money to build a Confederate monument, qualified as Jim Crow under UNC criteria.  

A goal of the UVA team was to expand on the UNC definition of extrinsic Jim Crow laws and include “facially race neutral” laws. These laws may not have been passed with the sole or explicit intent to discriminate, and their language was race neutral. In practice and implementation, however, they operated with discriminatory prejudice towards non-white Virginians. For example, discretion given to municipal officers in jury roll selection led to predominantly all-white juries. The Virginia Commission to Examine Racial Equity in Virginia Law summarized this dynamic in their 2019 interim report: “Virginia discriminated against its poor citizens as well as its citizens of color. In some instances, the Acts identified the target population as ‘poor’ or ‘colored.’ In others, the language was facially race neutral but de facto anti-black, certainly in its implementation. In all instances, the consequence was the deprivation of due process and the infliction of cruel and unusual punishment.”1 We incorporated the facially-race neutral laws that the Commission identified into our training set, and the Commission’s criteria for identifying racially discriminatory prejudice in state laws guided our own criteria for identifying Jim Crow legislation.   

We adopted the following criteria to classify session law sentences as Jim Crow: 

• Laws passed with the explicit intent to discriminate against non-white Virginians |LS|UNC explicit category|RS| 

• Laws passed within a context of intended racism even though they lack explicit racist language, such as courthouse funding that included money to build a Confederate monument. |LS|UNC implicit and extrinsic category|RS| 

• Laws passed with race-neutral language and without explicit intent to discriminate, but whose implementation operated with discriminatory prejudice towards non-white Virginians. |LS|UVA facially race neutral laws|RS| 

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  Interim Report from The Commission to Examine Racial Equity in Virginia Law, November 2019, 14. https://www.law.virginia.edu/system/files/news/2022/2019-report.pdf