Developments in the South & Jim Crow

The South After Civil War (1880-1920)

This module covers roughly the time period between 1880 and 1920, it is thematically an extension of Reconstruction.
Issues raised during Reconstruction are also implicated in Jim Crow.
The South has a split personality: On one hand, you have the idea of a "New South" and on the other hand, the South desperately tries to return to the antebellum era.

The Idea of a "New South"

Figureheads like Henry Grady (editor of the Atlanta Constitution) promoted the idea of a New South that had moved beyond slavery and the Civil War.
This New South would improve race relations, diversify its economy, industrialize, build railroads and integrate with the rest of the nation.

Contradictory Realities

However, a South was also trying to go back to the antebellum period by instituting segregation, sharecropping, lynching and disenfranchisement of African Americans.
This created a society that seemed out of time, out of place, and at war with itself that hated and loved itself.

Southern Exceptionalism

The South's race problems and racial history have led it to become a place of national folklore.
The South is often considered exceptionally racist compared to the North, West, and Midwest.
It has been romanticized through the Lost Cause, portraying it as different from the rest of America in ways that are both good and bad.
A romantic vision of genteel masters, mistresses, a slower way of life, and where everyone knows their place.

Racism Beyond the South

The making of a new racial regime in the U.S. was happening all over the place, not just in the South.
Out West, white settlers confronted, conquered, and displaced indigenous Americans, Chinese immigrants, and Hispaniels.
In the Northeast, there were problems integrating new waves of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe.
Racism was widespread, and Jim Crow in the South was just one piece of a larger puzzle.

Global Context

The scramble for Africa by European powers coincided with the imposition of this new racial regime in the U.S.
This leads to the question of whether the South is deserving of its reputation as being exceptional when it comes to race.

Focus Questions

Was the South exceptional in its racism?
What was the New South, and what were the visions of its boosters like Henry Grady?
Was the idea of the New South actually born out in reality?
Why did segregation develop in the post-Civil War South, and what concerns was it designed to address?
What role did popular culture play in the establishment of Jim Crow?
How did the black community attempt to deal with racial violence at the heart of segregation?

The End of Reconstruction & the Rise of Redeemer Governments

Reconstruction formally ended in 1877 with the removal of the last federal troops from the South.
The Democratic Party establishes political hegemony and control by removing the last vestiges of Republican control in the South.
These were so-called redeemer governments that redeemed the South from black republican rule.

The New Southern Elite

The new southern elite after Reconstruction was not primarily drawn from the planter class.
It was composed of new leaders in textiles, industry, and media who tended to be the biggest boosters of the idea of a New South.
This new elite was not color blind and paved the way for a new racial order based upon segregation and white supremacy.

Restriction of Rights

With the Republican Party out of the South and the federal government no longer safeguarding black civil rights, new political developments occurred.
This included the restriction of African American political participation and their social rights.

Industrialization in the South

The South industrialized to a degree that would have been improbable before the war.
Railroad construction boomed, and there was a rise of powerful industries like the lumber industry.
Textiles became the majority of the nation's textile production by 1900, and there were some coal and steel plants, particularly centered around Birmingham, Alabama.
Tobacco was another major industry, with the South becoming the main area for creating finished tobacco products.

Limitations of Industrialization

Still, only about 6% of Southerners by 1900 were engaged in activities unrelated to farming or sharecropping, and 70% of farmers were sharecroppers.
The region remained desperately poor, with literacy rates much lower than the rest of the country, and was overwhelmingly rural.

Social Anxieties

Economic transformations created anxiety among the old southern planter class and small white farmers who were pushed off their land.
Railroads brought African Americans and southern whites into contact in ways that had never been done before, leading to tension and anxiety.
These anxieties were necessary for segregation to be imposed and take root.

Economic Transformation

The South's economy was devastated by the Civil War, destroying farms and eliminating slavery.
The New South had to develop a more diversified economy out of necessity.
Northerners invested in the South, trying to make it more like the North with a diversified economy.

Capitalist Values

It's not just building new textile plants or new coal and steel plants. It's also building a whole new a whole new infrastructure, banks, railroads, and the celebration of a lot of kind of capitalist values like thrift, hard work, independence, individualism.

Henry Grady

Henry Grady symbolized the embrace of a New South, believing that industrialization was the solution to the problems that plagued the South.
His message inspired Southerners to take a chance in new industries and convinced Northerners to invest in southern enterprises.

Business-Friendly Environment

Northerners were enticed by the South's business-friendly environment, which included states' rights, laissez-faire policies (low taxes, cheap labor, ample water power, proximity to cotton supplies, and the absence of unions).

Labor Dynamics

Most of the labor in these new industries was done by poor Southern whites who were driven off of their land due to the collapse of cotton prices between 1870 and 1900.
African Americans were excluded from these new industrial jobs in all but the most menial and dangerous work.

Limited Benefits

The South's diversifying economy primarily benefited the new southern elite (investors and industrialists) and a select few southern whites.
Both poor Southern whites and African Americans remained mired in poverty, low-paying jobs, or sharecropping.

Economic Backwardness

Despite improvements, the South lagged far behind the North in most measures of economic development by 1900.
Per capita incomes remained stagnant, and most Southern industry was small scale and focused, employing low-skilled labor and a growing number of child laborers.

Social Indicators

Redeemer governments reversed Reconstruction-era investments in public schools and hospitals.
Infant mortality in the South far exceeded the national rate, public education spending was slashed, and the South led the nation in illiteracy.
High school graduation rates in the South were about a third of those in the Midwest.

The Atlanta Exposition (1895)

Boosters of the New South tried to put the past behind them and become more like the North.
The Atlanta Exposition in 1895 showcased the South and its new products to the rest of the world.

Sharecropping

Sharecropping remained the dominant economic mode for most southerners (both whites and blacks) well into the twentieth century.
In 1900, 70% of the South's farmers were sharecroppers, meaning they did not own land and were tenants vulnerable to economic ruin.

Social Dynamics

Whites and blacks worked closely together in the South, unlike the highly segregated North.
Long before the formal imposition of Jim Crow in the South. Northern cities are extremely segregated.
Northern cities, Northern workforces are very segregated. A lot of northerners never see an African American in their life. That's not the case in the South.
The difference between whites and blacks started to dwindle, causing poor Southern whites to question the Civil War and the end of slavery.

Black Middle Class

A black middle class developed in the 1870s and 1880s, consisting of educated African Americans who became pillars of black communities.
The presence of a prosperous black middle class alongside a growing number of desperately poor whites meant that the question arose of how to reestablish the pre-Civil War racial hierarchy.

Racial Anxieties

Southern elites used these racial anxieties to get poor Southern whites back into the Democratic Party fold.
Even though these poor Southern whites voted for Reconstruction governments in the South in the 1870s, their continued economic desperation the effectiveness of kind of southern elite propaganda, this u you know, using this old race issue to divide for whites and blacks is really successful.
It is important to reemphasize that Sharcropping had some positives, especially for African Americans.

Independence

Sharecropping allowed for a significant degree of independence, with people having their own cabins and dwellings.
There were also churches and schools to serve the needs of these sharecroppers.

The Fear of Similarity

Segregation and Jim Crow arose out of a fear that things were becoming too similar between the races, not a fear of racial difference.
It was a way to establish difference by recreating it and was rooted in the fear that whites and blacks might start living together, which is called miscegenation $(m \text{ I s c e g e n a t I o n})$ .

Maintaining White Supremacy

Redeemer governments realized that the existence of prosperous, enfranchised, and educated African Americans fundamentally called white supremacy into question.
They also realized that if they could successfully stoke racial animosities between poor whites and poor blacks, they could protect their privileged status.

Aims of Jim Crow Laws

Jim Crow laws were designed to:
- Segregate and separate the races.
- Reduce African Americans' political power (disenfranchisement).
- Violence.

Origin of the Term "Jim Crow"

Jim Crow laws got their name from a character in minstrel shows in the 1830s and 1840s.
Jim Crow was a northern African American who aspired to wealth and education, but his aspirations clashed with his racial inferiority.
Minstrelsy united northerners and southerners in a feeling of racial superiority.

National Racial Regimes

New racial regimes were being implemented across the U.S. at the same time that Jim Crow was being imposed in the South.
This included Hispanios and Mexicans in the Southwest, Native Americans, Chinese immigrants in California, and Southern and Eastern Europeans in the Northeast.
The aim was to redefine the contours of white supremacy across the country; Jim Crow was one piece of that effort.
Donald Glover the musician is seen at the beginning of his music video taking on this pose by shooting a hooded guitar player.

Reaffirming Segregation

The system of segregation was not easy to create and had to be constantly reaffirmed and enforced.
Segregation was intended to foment racial divisions by separating African Americans from as many aspects of everyday life as possible.
If African Americans could disappear from the white mind, when they were seen, it would arouse fear.

Legal Support for Segregation

After Reconstruction, Northerners, Republicans, and the Supreme Court lost interest in protecting black civil rights.
Supreme Court cases cut the legs out from underneath the Fourteenth Amendment.

Key Supreme Court Cases

Hall v. DeCuir (1878): Declared a Louisiana law that prohibited discrimination on steamboats unconstitutional because the vessel was engaged in interstate commerce, which only Congress had the right to regulate.
- Individuals and private companies who didn't do business across state lines could freely discriminate.
Civil Rights Cases (1883): the Supreme Court ruled the 1875 Civil Rights Act, which banned discrimination in public accommodations, unconstitutional.
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896): The doctrine of separate but equal was formally enshrined into law after Plessy deliberately violated Louisiana's laws to challenge them.
- Not only could private individuals and companies discriminate on the basis of race, but now state governments could too, as long as those institutions, those segregated institutions were equal, had equal accommodations, equal funding.
- However, black communities and institutions were chronically underfunded compared with their white counterparts.
Williams v. Mississippi (1898): Declared constitutional state efforts to restrict voting rolls, which meant that things like poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses were legal as long as they did not explicitly discriminate on the basis of race.

Disenfranchisement

By 1900, most Southern states had erected significant barriers to black voting through poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses.
When these things didn't work, outright violence and intimidation were often used.
Black voting dropped significantly, such as in Louisiana, where it decreased from 30,000 in 1896 to 1,300 by 1904, and across the South, Black voting decreased between eighteen eighty and nineteen hundred by 62%.

Wilmington Insurrection (1898)

In areas where blacks still voted in significant numbers, such as Wilmington, where blacks and whites had formed coalition governments, violence was employed.
The Wilmington insurrection in 1898 involved vigilante violence that removed the fusion government that had been elected and installed a white supremacist government.

Consumer Culture & Segregation

Segregation had to be imposed from above because it was unnatural but it has to be constantly reaffirmed.
Southerners and Northerners embraced segregation by consuming products that were predicated upon their racial superiority.
Segregation was sustained by a new consumer culture that envisioned its audience as exclusively white.

Examples in Advertising

Major products used racial icons to solidify white supremacy, such as Gold Dust Washing Powder and Aunt Jemima.
Aunt Jemima played on notions of racial otherness and a nostalgic, whitewashed version of slavery.
One of the ironies of a culture of consumption rooted in racism is that white and black people both bought these products, creating fear among whites.

Fear of Black Prosperity & Lynching

The segregation allows for a black middle class to flourish, to arise.
If African Americans were still thriving despite political disenfranchisement and sharecropping, Southern whites questioned how to put them back in their place.
Lynching was the main answer.
The height of lynchings took place during the eighteen nineties is an average of about a 87 per year in the South, which is about two or which is about a lynching every two days.

Nature of Lynchings

Lynchings were extrajudicial vigilante acts, usually directed against someone who had violated the spatial arrangement of segregation of Jim Crow, someone who had violated the color barrier.
The most common accusation against African Americans who were lynched was that they had raped a white woman or had directed some kind of sexual aggression towards white women.

Spectacle Lynchings

Large ritualistic lynchings involved entire communities and took place across the South from 1890 to 1940 and the lynchings are a distinctly modern phenomena.
Spectacle lynchings were often advertised well ahead of time, and newspapers and railroads helped facilitate the movement of people to partake in these events.
These were a ritual enactment of violence against black bodies in order to reaffirm white supremacy.

Targets of Violence

African Americans were the primary victims of lynching, but Jews and Hispanics were also targeted due to racial violence and the imposition of a new racial regime going on across the country at this time.
Other forms of violence were directed at symbols of black prosperity, like churches, schools, and businesses.

The Burning of Black Wall Street (Tulsa, 1921)

Black migrants from the South had established a vibrant community in Tulsa, Oklahoma, by the early twentieth century.
In 1921, in response to perceived violations of the color line, there was an extended period of looting, burning, and destruction, leading to the deaths of 85 African Americans and the destruction of Black Wall Street.

Racism and Modernity

Segregation in the postwar South had a schizophrenic personality, wanting to become modern while simultaneously trying to recreate the conditions of antebellum society.
Grace Elizabeth Hale described the early twentieth century South as a world where people who went to church watched or participated in the torture of their neighbors.
Perpetrators of lynching were not just monsters but fathers, businessmen, and local pillars of the community, and law enforcement.

Perspectives on Lynching

Miss W.H. Felton, the first woman to serve in the United States Senate, explicitly linked lynching with protecting white womanhood suggesting, “lynch a thousand times a week if necessary.”
That it was to ensure that woman's dearest possession from the ravening human beasts. And by dearest possession, she means their chastity, their respectability

Examples of Lynchings

The lynching of Jesse Washington in Waco, Texas, in May 1916 involved the torture and burning of a 17 year old African American who had been accused of making sexual advances against a white woman. Washington, were he alive today, we would probably diagnose him with some kind of developmental disability, some kind of intellectual disability.
The citizens took off work to torture Washington. After he was dead, people cut pieces of his body off to conserve his souvenirs, genitals, fingers, toes.
The lynching of Abram Smith and Thomas Shipp in Marion, Indiana, in 1930 showed that lynching was not solely confined to the South and that perpetrators were rarely brought to justice.
This image inspired the song "Strange Fruit" which included the lyrics “Southern trees bear a strange fruit, blood on the leaves and blood at the root. Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.”

Lost Cause Ideology

Lynchings, Jim Crow laws was helped by a whole cultural industry that emerged in the eighteen nineties to not just explain the South's defeat in the war, but to rationalize the return of white rule.
The Lost Cause, which established white supremacy and white identity, was a really powerful cultural narrative.
Cultural productions were immensely popular in the North, such as minstrel shows, movies like Birth of a Nation, and Gone with the Wind.
Confederate and Union veterans shaking hands at battlefields, and statues and monuments to Confederate figures which were erected throughout the South during Jim Crow to make public spaces coded as implicitly white.

Lost Cause Narratives

These statues are designed to kind of put forth a sanitized vision of the Confederacy, rewrite school textbooks and the war was about states' rights and about tariffs and economic differences rather than slavery.
Also a myth that slaves were happy, that they were being educated into civilization, that that the confederacy was not a treasonous rebellion but a but a valiant defense, a martyr defend a martyr defensive home. all of these things are really appealing to southerners who are grappling with a very changed world. plantation novels, in statues, textbooks, minstrel shows, was a thing that was really used.