Jim Crow Segregation: The Ignoble Achievement of the Fearful
In the sixty or so years it took to transition from a rural, agricultural, craft-based society into a national economy of machined, interchangeable parts, the people living through it saw the ends of their lives irreversibly altered from what they remembered from their youth. Some groups of people, like farmers, viewed this transformation ruefully and with suspicion. Other groups, like industrial workers, were born of the change and, through fits and starts, developed an identity within the framework of the American economy that differed drastically from workers in other parts of the newly industrialized world. Women, charged with enough power and independence to allow for their role as moral guardians of the family, stepped outside the homes to demand participation in a political process that increasingly impacted people's daily lives. Change also awaited southern African-Americans. They would see hard-won, incremental social and economic improvements of Reconstruction targeted and dismantled as the power structure in the South reacted to challenge and change. The period of Reconstruction included the experiment of representative government in South. The US military enforced free elections. Generally, those who won the state houses in the years prior to 1877 owed some of their success to black political will. Consequently, these leaders considered the needs of those recently emancipated. Then the military left and “Redeemeer” movements popped up all over the South, contending the state and local governments under Republican leadership were insufferably corrupt and needed redemption. Many, both within the rank-and-file and leadership ranks of the Redeemer movement, were committed Confederates. In a short time, these movements succeeded in taking back the political power under more traditional guidance. For a while, the leaders at state and local levels shared the attitude that some pretense of black political power did not actually hurt anyone and might help when outsiders came sniffing around with their questions. For a while, the white Democratic leadership accepted the voting of local black communities as long as they voted the right way (Democratic)1. Sometimes, blacks that worked to turn out the vote for the Democrats might earn a small position in local government. But then the Populists came rolling into town with their blasphemous arguments that class trumped race. Early initial success by the Populists in the South resulted in a toxic push back by the Democratic leadership. They courted poor whites with the notion of superiority (“I might not be a lot but at least I am not that”). To fully convince whites which team to root for, they rigged the game and, in the process, created a creepy, alternate-universe-America in the South. They erected a wall of separation between Southerners. Segregation ordinances outlining the near complete separation of blacks from everything except farm production and domestic service spread throughout the South with breath-taking rapidity after the Supreme Court chimed in with their totally wrong idea that segregation was a neutral exercise of legitimate police powers as long as the consequences of the law were equal in addition to separate.2 Public spaces were made public for whites only. Restaurants allowed whites to sit at tables and blacks to sit on the curb outside. Water fountains, community transportation, and movie theaters all demanded separation. Separate Bibles held the hand of African-Americans offering an oath in courthouses throughout the South. Blacks were not welcome at city parks, libraries, or schools white people attended even though their taxes contributed to building and maintenance of those same facilities. With their actions, they announced to everyone that blacks in the South were less than whites and should not presume any pretense of equality. Indeed, the rules subtly promoted the notion to whites some mysterious pollution contaminated blacks. The totality of the system they built is truly remarkable—the mechanisms of segregation supported the functions of the others on levels both practical and philosophical. Social customs between blacks and whites that were legacies of slavery increased in importance and expected observance. It was a big deal if blacks did not cross the street when whites were coming toward them on the same side of the street. “Boy” or “girl” were the accepted titles for African-Americans in conversations with whites, regardless of the age of anyone involved; “Sir” and “Madam” being acceptable for whites only (be it a five year old white kid and a black eighty year old). To be black and speak in a manner that demonstrated education to a white was an insult. Black shoppers had to wait for whites to be waited on even if they just walked in the door. The inequality pervaded most interactions between blacks and whites. This left blacks in a highly vulnerable position. If whites were always right, if local customs demanded that whites win every argument, that meant blacks were never right when they claimed that they had been exploited or abused by a cheating landlord, a drunk driver, or a sexual predator. Little maneuvering room remained for blacks who lived in the South and Southwest where this system of interaction gained official sanction. On paper, they still held the right to vote and should have, on paper, been able to change out their leaders for the “not horribly racist” version. Some major changes in voting rules, both official and unofficial, accompanied the emergence of cradle-to-grave segregation (had to, actually). The grandfather clause is the most well-known but the literacy test and the poll tax were more limiting for blacks. The literacy tests demanded that a person who wanted to vote be able to demonstrate an understanding of any part of the federal or state constitutions. The person who determined the validity of the subject’s interpretation was usually the voting registrar. At one point, a civil rights organization challenged the literacy test by sending in an African-American lawyer that had argued before the Supreme Court to take the literacy test. He failed. Blacks always failed. Whites who did not follow the rules failed, too. The poll tax also reduced the number of black voters. People used to have to pay a nominal fee to vote in elections. The problem was that the fee was only nominal if one was not a sharecropper and in generational debt to the landlord. If that obstacle could be overcome, there were still others. The tax was due when farmers were least likely to have any money; if they managed to pay, they got a tiny little receipt they had to keep track of for months. If they lost the paper, they were at the mercy of the memory of the registrar who tended to remember the payments of white voters but could be remarkably forgetful when it came to black voters. The system of agricultural production that emerged after the end of slavery—sharecropping—buttressed the official mechanics of separation. The way sharecropping worked gave an impressive array of powers to the landowner and merchant (usually the same person) to head off any attempt to escape or protest these changes Farmers who objected to their treatment could be blacklisted, intimidated, or coerced. Allowed very few vocations outside of domestic work or agriculture, regular African-Americans in the South found this lack of economic opportunity fostered the reluctant acceptance of the status quo. Ultimately, the true enforcement for Jim Crow was the constant threat of horrific, random violence in various permutations. Blacks identified as economic competition or political agitators had to consider their chance for survival when considering their actions. One man was lynched because he opened a grocery store that competed with a local white establishment. Another man was killed because his dog attacked a white man's dog. Sometimes, their actions did not even matter if they became a target of violence. A southerner farmer had worked alongside his black hired hand for years and carved out a friendship. To thank him for his loyalty and service, the farmer willed the black man some land. The farmer's sons objected to this arrangement and set fire to the black man's house. The fire killed two of the man's young children. While multiple types of violence were employed to maintain this system of inequality, lynching became the defining form that supported Jim Crow. Lynching is the crowd-sourced torture and murder of an individual without access to trial or other trappings of due process. Increasingly, statistics indicate that lynching evolved as a very focused weapon to defend segregation. When the 1890s opened, some 200 people were lynched per year in the US. About a quarter to a third of those were whites; sometimes union organizers in the West or men accused of sex crimes. Ten years later, the number of those lynched per year had been reduced to about 100 a year but out of those victims, around 93% were black. Lynchings in the south were often predicated upon a charge of black-on-white violence, be it physical violence against a white man or sexual violence of a white woman. The cause of about one-third of the lynchings did not fall under either category which is a significant enough number to open up any interaction as a potential landmine. That component of total random attack did more to frighten the African American community than anything else contained in these pages. An element that came to define Southern lynching apart from public murders elsewhere included the embrace of its entertainment value. Thousands of people attended some lynchings, riding on special trains to accommodate the crowds, bringing kids, picnic baskets, and early cameras and recording devices to capture the memories of the day. Blacks in the south were confounded. At many levels, discussions about how to deal with this new world order were ongoing. Divergent approaches were proposed by major African-American leaders W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington. DuBois, born free in the North, the first African-American to graduate from Harvard with a doctorate, future intellectual behind the NAACP's philosophy on confronting injustice, told blacks they should not retreat from demanding their political rights. He also believed a way to free blacks from the economic domination of whites was to select promising blacks and use community resources to create a black professional class of doctors, bankers, and lawyers that would then return to their communities and uplift those who had once helped them (“The Talented Tenth”). Washington’s approach sought the same goals of political power and economic liberation but came at it from a completely opposite direction. Washington, a former slave, a Southerner, and the guiding force at the head of the influential Tuskegee Institute, argued blacks should keep their heads down for while; it was simply too dangerous to demand anything of whites in the South. He argued that blacks should be savvy about the type of work they chose. They needed to figure out what jobs were indispensable in the rural villages most blacks lived in and get the training necessary to fill those roles. Over time and, with a lot of sober restraint on the part of blacks in the meantime, whites would come to see blacks as non-threatening and more equal. Political power would be derived from the economic necessity of the work that blacks did. Regular folks in the South did not have a lot time for this debate that played out in the pages of national magazines and newspapers. They adapted in small, almost invisible ways. They minimized their exposure to whites. They bought their stuff in catalogs and supported whatever black business they could (and any sympathetic white business they could suss out, such as the white drugstore owner who, when learning he was required by law to seat only whites, removed all of the seats in his store so no one could sit down). Their most pressing concern was protecting their children from the indignities of institutional and pervasive racism. Black children who would be heading downtown were told to get a drink of water beforehand because they would not be using those undignified water fountains. Wherever possible, efforts to find reasons for pride and hope for the children were emphasized while the older family members of these children tried to equip the children with the survival instincts to deal with the harsh brutality of the Jim Crow south. Over time, the response of regular blacks in the South was to vote with their feet. Slowly, at first, faster when there existed both a push of Jim Crow and the pull of economic opportunity, southern blacks relocated to Northern cities. It worked like any other migration, with familial chains promoting certain choices in relocation and make the transition easier. This Great Migration laid the ground work for the emergence of black economic and political power outside of the south that was the first structural building block for the modern civil rights movement and the end of Jim Crow (seventy years later). 3 1No small amount of blood was spilled by blacks attempting to hold on to actual political power and the right to vote for Republicans. The Red Shirt Campaign in South Carolina is a great example. 2Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) 3 This discussion is heavily informed by the outstanding Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans tell about life in the segregated South. Senior eds., W.H. Chafe, Raymond Gavins, Robert Korstad; associate eds., Paul Ortiz . New York : New Press/Lyndhurst Books of the Center for Documentary Studies of Duke University, c2001. |
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