Jim Crow segregation

C. Vann Woodward's short classic of Southern history, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, began as a series of lectures in 1954. The third revised edition discussed here updates the work for the years 1955-1973, a decisive period in African-American history which Woodward labels the Second Reconstruction.

Woodward's focus in Strange Career was to describe the historical emergence of the "Jim Crow" laws mandating separation of black Americans from whites, primarily in the states of the Old Confederacy. Those laws were largely enacted during the period 1890-1910, which put the legal (de jure) system of segregation in place.

A central feature of Woodward's argument is to emphasize that there was a transitional period during 1877-1890 during which the democratic state Reconstruction governments had been overthrown but the full-blown system of legal segregation had not yet been put into place. In making the point, Woodward was countering an important piece of pseudohistory that was part of the Lost Cause ideology:

My only purpose has been to indicate that things have not always been the same in the South. In a time when the Negroes formed a much larger proportion of the population than they did later, when slavery was a live memory in the minds of both races, and when the memory of the hardships and bitterness of Reconstruction was still fresh, the race policies accepted and pursued in the South were sometimes milder than they became later. The policies of proscription, segregation, and disfranchisement that are often described as the immutable 'folkways' of the South, impervious alike to legislative reform and armed intervention, are of a more recent origin. The effort to justify them as a consequence of Reconstruction and a necessity of the times is embarrassed by the fact that they did not originate in those times. And the belief that they are immutable and unchangeable is not supported by history. (my emphasis)

The large-scale disenfranchisement of African-American voters that came with the Jim Crow laws did not fall all at once when the Reconstruction governments were overthrow by the "Redeemer" movement using force, violence and fraud. Blacks were still able to vote in many places in the South. Woodward cites valid though largely anecdotal evidence that social separation of the races was not nearly so drastic as later mandated by segregation laws. Southern state legislatures and Congressional delegations continued to include some African-Americans during that period.

And during that interim period, there were various dissenting political movements "native" to the South which attempted to form popular alliances of black and white voters against wealthy white interests. These included Readjusters, Independents, Grangers and Greenbackers, all of which were predecessors to the briefly powerful Populist movement. And there were real efforts by some white politicians in those movements to form biracial coalitions.

More dubiously, Woodward argues that Southern conservatives, i.e., planters and businesspeople, represented a more tolerant attitude toward blacks than that held by most white workers and farmers, aka, rednecks. (Wealthy white conservatives were also known as Bourbons, though Woodward doesn't use that term in this book.) Here he seems to accept too much at face value the two-faced approach of leaders like Mississippi's L.Q.C. Lamar, who talked sweet moderation to white Yankees but incited his fellow Mississippi whites to militant, violent hostility to the rights of African-Americans. Woodward was not unique in that failing. John Kennedy also bought that pictures in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Profiles in Courage (1956), which included a sympathetic description of the old bigot and democracy-hating Lamar. Kennedy's experience with the real existing Mississippi of Ross Barnett during this Presidency made him realize he had failed to fully understand the scams of the Redeemers of the 19th century South.

Georgia Populist Tom Watson, at one time an anti-racist politician

One of the anecdotes which Woodward uses to show the more tolerant stance of the wealthy whites conservatives toward blacks than the racist "phobias and fanaticisms" of the rednecks involves the famous Georgia white Populist Tom Watson. Watson earlier in his career was a passionate advocate of black-white unit and even civil rights for blacks, but later he campaigned as a rabid racist. This story is from Watson's anti-racist period:

In the campaign of 1892 [in Georgia] a Negro Populist who had made sixty-three speeches for Watson was threatened with lynching and fled to him for protection. Two thousand armed white farmers, some of whom rode all night, responded to Watson's call for aid and remained on guard for two nights at his home to avert the threat of violence.

This brief account describes a threat or threats to a black Populist from anonymous sources, presumably white. In response, two thousand white farmers rushed to mount an armed demonstration in defense of the threatened African-American campaigner. And this is supposed to show that poor whites were more racist than wealthy whites? These were not 2,000 planters and bankers and railroad speculators and assorted other robber barons riding all night to mount an armed defense of the threatened black man.

Of course, there was no shortage of racism among lower-class whites in the South at this time, as the contemporary evidence documents well. My point is that the benevolent wealthy conservatives were a central part of the public posture of the Redeemers, who were liars and frauds and enemies of democracy. So we would do well to apply a very critical eye to arguments used to validate that myth.

And it's actually surprising to me that Woodward is willing to give as much credence as he does to the tale of the broad-minded, tolerant Bourbon patricians like the noxious L.Q.C. Lamar. Because he proceeds to describe very well what was actually going on. With the resolution of the 1876 Presidential election, which has some eerie resemblances to the 2000 election including disputed Florida ballots, the stage was set for a North-South reconciliation. A reconciliation among Norther and Southern whites at the expense of African-Americans.

The absence of overt segregationist laws, the preservation of the franchise for many blacks, the presence of African-Americans in government, and other manifestations of a less racially hostile Southern society that Woodward cites, were largely due to the need of white Southern spokesmen like Lamar to keep up appearances. Northern Republicans were ready in 1877 to withdraw federal troops from the South, accept the overthrown of the democratic state governments and turn a blind eye to vigilante racist violence by terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan. The latter was no secret. It had been extensively documented in Congressional hearings in testimony that fills many volumes.

But Northerners weren't yet ready to accept the overt, blanket denial of citizenship to African-Americans and attempts to enforce a post-slavery form of servitude on southern blacks. Southern whites had tried to do just that with their Black Codes during "Presidential Reconstruction" in 1865-8. Those codes had been enacted under the leadership of those allegedly benign and tolerant white Bourbons.

So black voters weren't overtly disenfranchised everywhere. But those benign conservatives continued to apply their Redemption strategy of removing most actual significance from the black vote through force, violence, threats, fraud and massive corruption. As Woodward writes of the immediate post-1876 situation:

It is perfectly true that Negroes were often coerced, defrauded, or intimidated, but they continued to vote in large numbers in most parts of the South for more than two decades after Reconstruction. In the judgment of the abolitionist Higginson, 'The Southern whites accept them precisely as Northern men in cities accept the ignorant Irish vote, - not cheerfully, but with acquiescence in the inevitable; and when the strict color-line is once broken they are just as ready to conciliate the negro as the Northern politician to flatter the Irishman. Any powerful body of voters may be cajoled today and intimidated tomorrow and hated always, but it can never be left out of sight.' As a voter the Negro was both hated and cajoled, both intimidated and courted, but he could never be ignored so long as he voted. (my emphasis)

The African-American vote was not completely meaningless in the 1877-1890 transition period. But very close to it. The attempts by some of the Populists and their predecessors to give more weight to black votes failed. Even before the segregation laws that denied the vote to most blacks (and, with some policies like poll taxes, to many poor whites), the national Republicans were shedding any identification with the rights of black citizens:

Caught between the 'Lily-White' policy of the Republican party and the blandishments of the Southern Democrats, the Negro became confused and politically apathetic. Republican organizations declined in strength in the South and many state parties ceased to put forth tickets altogether. Despite that, the Negroes did not flock to the opposing party. For one thing they knew from long experience that, for all their kind words and blandishments, the Democrats would resort to force or fraud in a pinch. For another, Negro leaders were beginning to think in economic terms and ask their people what they had in common with their white landlords, creditors, and employers that would justify a political alliance with the conservatives. (my emphasis)

Alliances of black Republicans and white Populists briefly led to a resurgence of actual African-American political power in North Carolina and Georgia in the 1890s. This was a major factor in encouraging those benevolent Bourbons to take further measures to disenfranchise black voters.

Woodward's account of the segregation laws that affected virtually every aspect of life, from voting to the use of public water fountains, is a powerful reminder of how undemocratic and even bizarre those measures could be. Woodward writes:

The extremes to which caste penalties and separation were carried in parts of the South could hardly find a counterpart short of the latitudes of India and South Africa. In 1909 Mobile passed a curfew law applying exclusively to Negroes and requiring them to be off the streets by 10 p.m. The Oklahoma legislature in 1915 authorized its Corporation Commission to require telephone companies 'to maintain separate booths for white and colored patrons.' North Carolina and Florida required that textbooks used by the public-school children of one race be kept separate from those used by the other, and the Florida law specified separation even while the books were in storage. South Carolina for a time segregated a third caste by establishing separate schools for mulatto as well as for white and Negro children. A New Orleans ordinance segregated white and Negro prostitutes in separate districts. Ray Stannard Baker found Jim Crow Bibles for Negro witnesses in Atlanta courts and Jim Crow elevators for Negro passengers in Atlanta buildings.

Woodward describes the ebbs and flows of racial politics after 1910. It's noteworthy that he correlates the White Man's Burden ideology of external imperialism that went along with the Spanish-American War and the brutal conquest of the Philippines with the ascendancy of Jim Crow laws. He also talks about how the democratic ideology of the US during the Second World War provided strong encouragement to black Americans to push for democracy for themselves at home:

The foremost of the Axis powers against which the Untied States fought in the Second World War was the most forceful exponent of racism the modern world has known. The Nazi crime against the minority race, more than anything else, was the offense against the Western moral code that branded the Reich as an outlaw power. Adolf Hitler's doctrine of the 'master race' had as its chief victim the Jew, but the association of that doctrine with the creed of white supremacy was inevitably made in the American mind. The association is not likely to be broken very easily. American war propaganda stressed above all else the abhorrence of the West for Hitler's brand of racism and its utter incompatibility with the democratic faith for which we fought. The relevance of this deep stirring of the American conscience for the position of the Negro was not lost upon him and his champions. Awareness of the inconsistency between practice at home and propaganda abroad placed a powerful lever in their hands. (my emphasis)

He also describes developments in the civil rights movement of the 1960s and conflicts among African-Americans over strategy in the context of the different issues posed by Jim Crow segregation in the South and de facto racism in other parts of the country:

Striking incongruities appeared between the needs and moods of the black ghetto and the goals and strategies of the civil rights crusade, as typified by the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr., and voiced in his lyrical Dream. Northern blacks began to ask what their problems had to do with freedom rides, sit-ins, and lunch-counter integrations - or, for that matter, with the ideal of racial integration and assimilation in general. While they had been stirred by the March on Washington, thrilled by the heroism of Birmingham brothers, and moved by the drama of the Selma March, they could not see how such tactics were adaptable to the scene at Newark, Detroit, Chicago, or Harlem. Granted the effectiveness of such crusading strategies for limited goals, even granting that they finally toppled the formidable but hollow legal defenses of Jim Crow - what now? Now on the very eve of those triumphs the triumphs themselves suddenly appeared quaint and anachronistic. What had they been but the belated fulfillment, partial at that, of promises a century old, restitution of historic commitments? They evoked racial yearnings of the past, powerful nostalgias for simpler and more heroic days, not answers to immediate needs and future problems. What had for years been the slogan of the day, the last word in an ongoing crusade, the leadership all acknowledged suddenly seemed old, dated, the commitments of another generation. (my emphasis)

Tags: c vann woodward, lost cause, racism, strange career of jim crow