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So the other day I was staring at an empty whiskey bottle, like you do, and I noticed it said "Dr. James Crow's Old Crow." "James Crow" is awfully close to "Jim Crow"—does Old Crow have some horrible racist past we didn't know about? —Like Hemingway, Minus the Talent
I can certainly understand your concern, Like. After all, bourbon comes to us from (a) the South and (b) the past, which are two places one tends to find lots of horribly racist crap.
Moreover, Portland seems to have adopted Old Crow as its rotgut of choice—I've been known to take a shot or two* myself. Finding out it wore blackface in college would be devastating, like finding out PBR was donating all its profits to the Trump 2020 campaign.
Luckily, it appears the James Crow/Jim Crow connection is just a coincidence, so we can turn our drunken speculations to other topics, like whether Jeff Sessions was the redneck who shoots Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda at the end of Easy Rider, or whether Wang Chung is, like, the guy, or the whole band?
The James Crow of whiskey fame was born in Scotland in 1789, or maybe 1779, and trained as a chemist and physician. He emigrated in 1822 to the U.S., where he's credited with bringing scientific rigor (i.e., measuring things and writing stuff down) to the sour mash process of making whiskey.
Eventually, the consistency of Crow's product became well enough known that his employers named a whiskey after him, even though he never owned his own distillery.
The other Jim Crow, meanwhile, was a blackface character created by Thomas "Daddy" (swear to God) Rice, the "father of American minstrelsy." Rice toured the nation—and Europe!—as this racist caricature, making lots of racist money off his fellow racists, because the 1840s were pretty fucked up.
Rice died in 1860, but the character lived on in public memory, lending its name to the well-known regime of race laws in the South. Had this happened in a different era, they might have been called Amos 'n' Andy laws, because it turns out the 1940s were pretty fucked up too, but that's another story.
*…every day for the past 10 years. —Ed.