The South After the Civil War (1880-1920)

Overview

This module covers roughly the time period between 1880 and 1920, extending thematically from Reconstruction into the Jim Crow era.
The South exhibited a split personality, torn between modernization and clinging to the past.

The Idea of a "New South"

Henry Grady: Editor of the Atlanta Constitution and promoter of the "New South."
- Advocated for moving beyond slavery's legacy.
- Focused on improving race relations and diversifying the economy.
- Aimed for industrialization, railroad construction, and integration with the rest of the nation.
The South was simultaneously trying to revert to the antebellum period through segregation, sharecropping, lynching, and disenfranchisement.
These conflicting directions created a society that seemed out of time and at war with itself.

Southern Exceptionalism

The South is often perceived as exceptionally racist compared to other regions.
It has been romanticized through the Lost Cause as a unique place with both positive and negative aspects.
The South is a place harkening back to a time of genteel masters and mistresses, of of a kind of slower way of life, a place where everyone knows their place, very kind of traditional kind of gone with the wind vision of the South.
However, racial issues were present throughout the U.S., not just in the South.
- White settlers displacing indigenous Americans, Chinese immigrants, and Hispaniels in the West.
- Integration problems with new immigrants in the Northeast.
- Racism was widespread, and Jim Crow was just one piece of a larger puzzle.
The scramble for Africa by European powers coincided with the imposition of new racial regimes in the U.S.
The focus questions are
- Was the South exceptional and its racism?
- What was the New South?
- Why did segregation develop in the post Civil War South, and what concerns was it designed to address?
- How did the black community attempt to deal with racial violence at the heart of segregation?

End of Reconstruction and Rise of Redeemer Governments

Reconstruction formally ended in 1877 with the removal of federal troops from the South.
The Democratic Party established political control, leading to "redeemer governments."
These governments aimed to redeem the South from black Republican rule.

Changes in the Southern Elite

The new elite after Reconstruction consisted of leaders in textiles, industry, and media, rather than the planter class.
These elites promoted the idea of a New South, but were highly race-conscious.
They paved the way for a new racial order based on segregation and white supremacy due to the federal government's abandonment of black civil rights.

Limited Industrialization

The South industrialized to some extent, with railroad construction booming.
New industries like lumber and textiles emerged; textiles became the majority of the nation's textiles become produced in the South by 1900.
Coal and steel plants centered around Birmingham, Alabama, made it a commercial center.
Tobacco became a major industry with finished tobacco products.
Still, only about 6% of Southerners were engaged in non-farming activities by 1900.
70% of farmers were sharecroppers, indicating persistent poverty and low literacy rates.

Economic Transformations and Anxiety

Economic changes created anxiety among the old planter class and small white farmers.
Railroads brought different populations into contact, leading to tension and anxiety.
Segregation emerged as a response to these anxieties.

Economic Motivations

The South's economy was devastated by the civil war. Farms were destroyed.
Post-Civil War South had to develop a diversified economy.
Northerners invested in the South, promoting market-oriented and capitalist values.
This included building infrastructure like banks and railroads.

Henry Grady and the New South

Grady symbolized the embrace of a New South.
Grady believed that industrialization was the solution to the problems that plagued the South.
Grady's message inspired Southerners and convinced Northerners to invest in southern enterprises.
The South offered a business-friendly environment with low taxes, cheap labor, ample water power, proximity to cotton supplies, and the absence of unions (laissez faire).
Poor Southern whites, displaced from their land, often filled labor roles.
African Americans were generally excluded from industrial jobs.

Economic Disparities

Industrialization primarily benefited the new southern elite, investors, and industrialists, and a few southern whites.
Most poor Southern whites and African Americans remained in poverty, low-paying jobs, or sharecropping.
The South lagged behind the North in economic development by 1900.
Per capita incomes remained stagnant.
Most Southern industry was small-scale and employed low-skilled labor, including child laborers.
Redeemer governments reversed Reconstruction-era investments in public schools and hospitals.
Infant mortality in the South exceeded the national rate.
Public education spending was slashed, leading to high illiteracy.
High school graduation rates were about a third of those in the Midwest.

The Atlanta Exposition

The 1895 Atlanta Exposition showcased the South and its new products.
The promotional poster highlighted the production of steel and finished tobacco.
The image of Liberty rising above the vestiges of the Civil War symbolized the idea of moving beyond past conflicts.

Sharecropping

Sharecropping remained the dominant economic mode for most southerners, both whites and blacks.
In 1900, 70% of the South's farmers were sharecroppers.
Sharecroppers were often one bad harvest away from economic ruin and exploitation.
The lines between whites and blacks began to dwindle for poor Southerners.
A black middle class emerged, leading to questions about the pre-Civil War racial hierarchy.

The Fear of Equality and Jim Crow

Segregation grew out of a fear that things were becoming too similar between the races, not from a fear of racial difference.
Jim Crow was a means of recreating difference.
There was a fear of miscegenation (whites and blacks together).
Elite southerners used racial animosities to protect their own status rather than share with poor whites and blacks.
Jim Crow laws were designed to segregate, disenfranchise, and inflict violence with horrible, horrible violence.
Segregation laws get their name from the Jim Crow character in minstrel shows. He was a northern African American who aspired to wealth and education, but failed due to biological inferiority. The Jim Crow character was popular in all parts of the country.

Nationwide Racial Regimes

New racial regimes were implemented across the U.S. at the same time as Jim Crow: Jim Crow is one piece of that.
- Hispaniels and Mexicans in the Southwest were segregated into barrios and dispossessed of their land.
- Native Americans were displaced.
- Chinese immigrants in California and Southern/Eastern Europeans in the Northeast faced discrimination.
These actions redefined white supremacy.

The Imposition and Enforcement of Segregation

Segregation was not natural; it had to be constantly reaffirmed and enforced.
It was intended to foment racial divisions by separating African Americans from everyday life.
Whites would perceive something was unnatural when they did see an African American.
Segregation was designed to reimpose difference in a society that was seen as being increasingly too similar

Supreme Court Decisions and Civil Rights

Northerners, Republicans, and the Supreme Court lost interest in protecting black civil rights after Reconstruction.
Hall v. DeCuir (1878): Declared a Louisiana law prohibiting discrimination on steamboats unconstitutional because the vessel was engaged in interstate commerce, which only Congress had the right to regulate. Meant that private companies who didn't cross state lines could discriminate.
1883 Civil Rights Act was ruled unconstitutional.
Plessy v. Ferguson: Separate but equal was formally enshrined into law. Enshrined that states could now discriminate alongside private companies and people.
Williams v. Mississippi (1898): Declared constitutional state efforts to regulate the voting polls as long as they did not explicitly discriminate on the basis of race.
- Poll taxes
- Literacy tests
- Grandfather clauses
By 1900, most Southern states had erected significant barriers to black voting through poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses.
In Louisiana, black voting drops from a 30,000 in 1896 to 1,300 by nineteen o four, a reduction of 99%.
Across the South, Black voting decreased between eighteen eighty and nineteen hundred by 62%.
In areas where blacks could form coalition governments with whites, such as Wilmington, North Carolina, violence was employed.
The Wilmington insurrection in 1898 involved the removal of a fusion government at gunpoint, the burning of black offices, and the installation of a white supremacist government.

Sustaining Segregation

Segregation was sustained by a new consumer culture that envisioned its audience as exclusively white.
Racial icons were used to solidify white supremacy in products like Goldust Powder (using racial icons). This indicated what black people looked like or acted like.
Aunt Jemima: Supposed to recall the mammy figure. Plays on nostalgia for a whitewashed version of slavery.
Black families could buy products that white families could not. Segregation and consumption do not always work.

Lynching as a Result of Fear

If African Americans were finding ways to thrive in the South despite political disenfranchisement, etc., then what can we do? That's the question that a lot of folks are asking. Lynching is the main response.
Lynching was a response to the fear of black prosperity and breaking the color line.
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.
Lynchings and clan violence was for intimidation to inscribe white supremacy onto the bodies of black victims, a kind of ritualistic violence with extra judicial vigilant acts.
The most common accusation against African Americans who were lynched was some kind of sexual aggression towards white women.

Spectacle Lynchings

Some lynchings involved modern media and methods of transportation. They were ritualistic and involved entire communities.
Newspapers and railroads helped facilitate participation.
Minorities were targeted for violating Jim Crow, including African Americans, Jews, and Hispanics.
It's also directed especially towards minorities who violate the spatial arrangement of segregation. African Americans were the primary targets, but also Jews and Hispanics.
Violence was directed and other symbols of black prosperity like churches, businesses or newspapers.
Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1921: Black migrants from the South had created a vibrant community in Tulsa (Black Wall Street). The violence that resulted in the case that some Tulsans responded to aggression by publicly brandishing weapons led to looting and wholesale destruction; Black Wall Street burned, leading to the death of hundreds of African Americans, never recovered. It was never acknowledged until President Biden declared it. I (Instructor) had previously incorrectly stated there were 300 deaths. There were 85
The uneasy southern life in the early twentieth century could result in torture and violence.
According to Miss W. H. Felton, lynching was an effort "to protect woman's dearest possession from the ravening human beasts."

Jesse Washington Lynching

A 14-year old was accused of sexual advances and was lynched to death.
The community would cut at him and throw things at him. People took off from work for this and participated. This image does not include that most of the perpetrators were brought to justice.

Abram Smith and the Lyrics to “Strange Fruit”

Abram Smith was lynched in Indiana, indicating the lynching was not solely confined to the South. Perpetrators were never caught.
This image motivated Abel Mirapol to write lyric to Strange Fruit, famously performed by Billie Holiday because of said violence.
The song reinforces the idea of Southern violence even though it took place in Indiana

Black Wall Street Lynching

A photo of Black Wall Street afterwards again showed the destruction that results after one such lynching, where residents would soon not move back.

The Lost Cause

Lynching are buttressed by a whole political industry that the new regime uses to re-rationalize a return to white role. The Lost Cause (Lost Cause cultural productions) is about establishing not just white supremacy but white identity in establishing whites together. A lot of folks liked them, like in the north, also the idea of Southern exceptionalism is made somewhat difficult due to Lost Cause cultural productions in the North, glamorizing the Ku Klux Klan (Birth of a Nation). The South had a culture that also had a lot of minstrel shows
The reasons for building the monuments. the erection of public statues and monuments to confederate generals, to confederate politicians, to average confederate soldiers throughout the South as Jim Crow is being codified into law to kind of to not only to not only memorialize the Confederacy and to memorialize the South, but also to kind of make public spaces coded as, you know, coded as implicitly white
And it's in these textbooks that Reconstruction was a horrific period for all southern history (Rewritten school textbooks to glorify slavery than saying it was about state's rights and tariffs). This and that that happy that confederacy was not a treasonous rebellion.

Lost Causes: Aftermath

By the 19 early 19 hundreds, you start also seeing Confederate and Union veterans kind of shaking hands at battlefields like Gettysburg, all with the idea that kind of the civil war and the issues that animated the war had been put to bed, that the that the problems that caused the war were no longer around an American society.
There were novels that also were a big part of all of this, the plantation novels that celebrated a good time with no conflict, as they say that slaves were not necessarily bad (Plantation Slave Fiction).
Everything in order to get that sentiment across had to be prefaced by a poem saying, The Conquered Standard", that the Confederacy was not something to be ashamed

Minstrel Shows

Minstrel Shows were really big variety shows: feature circus performers, musical numbers or plays, at the heart of which was like the idea of inferiority with stage actors who would put on a burnt cork to darken their faces.
Blackface has a long history in this country and continues to this datye.
Some African Americans would partake in Minstrelsy due to a want for fame and fortune, such as that that African American stage actor in Burt Williams and Walker.

Koon Songs

In the eighteen nineties, a new cultural shift arose in the form of Koon Songs, the moral degradation of African Americans, and often written BY African Americans (Ernest Hogan), and by the 1920s, had declined in popularity due to jazz and the blues

Black Community Response

And the black community never spoke in one voice on the imposition of Jim Crow since there was violence everywhere.
According to people such as Mrs. Ida Wells-Barnett, lynching was the nation's paramount sin and had her set off on an anti-lynching crusade because 2 of her friends had been lynched for establishing a supermarket that cut into the margins of a White Owned Grocery business.
Booker T. Washington grew a slave went to Freedmen's Bureau and the best way to tackle Jim Crowe was by focusing on their own Economic self sufficiency with him later on establishing the Tuskegee with the purpose to teach African Americans such pragmatical skills.
W.E.B du Bois stated for the best way for African Americans to tackle segregation or Jim crowe, they needed the political power and a talented tenth among African Americans who could act as leaders and fight Segregation legally with the help of other NAACP founders and allies as well as the Niagara Movement (NAACP that would tackle the court cases relating to the ending of Jim Crow. Segregation, in particular)
Again after learning all of this, Ida B Wells was inspired to say: "Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give".