Continuing on shoe shining as it relates to Jim Crow laws. Here is is termed “bootblacks” which was the word used in the days of Jim Crow:

A History of Jim Crow In Oklahoma City

1. THE GENERAL BACKGROUND.

This group is general and brief but it sets the issues and tone of things to come. The prevailing attitude of whites around statehood was that the black race was mentally inferior to the whites. The president of the 1906-07 Constitutional Convention, Alfalfa Bill Murray, was reported to have exclaimed during the convention that blacks would always remain bootblacks, barbers, and farmers. Even more graphic were the words of the Daily Oklahoman’s Editor, Roy E. Stafford, in 1907, as he lobbied for the adoption of Jim Crow laws in the 1st Oklahoma legislative session after statehood. The full text of his article will be shown below, but, for now, here’s a preview:

It was never intended by the Almighty that the races should be placed upon social equality and the foolish ideas that are being placed in the black man’s head to the contrary, by designing politicians, bode no good to either race. For the negro is an infant, figuratively, in intellect. His understand of things is easily influenced. He is but so much putty in the hands of greater intelligence and he believes what he is told to believe. His mind is as much a slave to dictations of his superiors as his body was a slave to masters who owned it before the war.