How We Got to Where We Are Today in the Inner Cities of the United States >>>>> Part One >>>>> The Jim Crow South

Throughout the southern states, in the aftermath of the withdrawal of federal troops according to the Compromise of 1877, legislatures moved quickly to establish the Black Codes, laws that directly contravened federal legislation and relegated African Americans to second-class citizenship. According to these codes, blacks were restricted in their rights to testify in court, either not allowed to do so at all, or only given the opportunity in cases involving fellow African Americans. The codes of South Carolina forbade African Americans from holding jobs other than those related to farming or involving menial tasks. These codes also typically forbade blacks from leaving their jobs without forfeiting back pay, which many employers retained as security against lost labor. The Black Codes in most states specified the right of employees to whip their employees; often the language reverted to the days of slavery, with the terms “master” and “slave” fixed in the codes.


The codes fixed penalties for African Americans who made gestures deemed to be insulting or speech judged to be seditious in content. These codes clearly established different standards for whites and blacks. The dream of equality of opportunity envisioned by those who had worked for Reconstruction faded. The Black Codes included provisions for a rigidly segregated society, preventing multiracial access to drinking fountains, hospitals, hotels, libraries, parks, playgrounds, sidewalks, transportation systems, and institutions of learning at the elementary, secondary, and postsecondary levels.


Even prisoners were kept separate under the codes of the Jim Crow South: Correctional institutions and chain gangs were usually segregated according to race. Legislators in South Carolina passed a law that criminalized the action of any African American who dared to look out the same window as a fellow white worker in any of the state’s cotton mills. Florida legislators passed a law that called for different content in “Negro” textbooks and “white” textbooks. Lawmakers in Oklahoma passed legislation deeming that whites and blacks should use different telephone booths.


The term, “Jim Crow,” which came to refer to the laws and practices pertinent to rigid segregation in the South during 1877-1954, is mysterious as to its origins. The term may have been derived from a slave trader named Jim Crow, or to a slave who escaped such a trader, or to a lame dancer known in local folklore by such a name. One story specifies that the term’s origin is traceable to an African American slave named Jim, whose very dark skin pigment led boarders in his owner’s hotel in Charleston, South Carolina, to add the additional appellation, “Crow.”


The name is also connected to a silly minstrel show character created back in the late 1820s by the white performer Thomas “Daddy” Rice (1808-1860); the character, presented in black-face, was a stereotypical buffoonish slave who danced and sang as he went about the plantation. The story goes that Rice had heard an African American singing and dancing a number called “Jump Jim Crow.” One version has it that Rice witnessed a lame black man named Jim Crow (or Crowe) perform for fellow workers at Thomas Crowe’s Livery Stable at 3rd Street in Louisville, Kentucky. Another version has Rice witnessing a similar performance by a youth in Cincinnati, Ohio. The dance was in any case incorporated into Rice’s routine and other minstrel shows, with numerous variations.


In time, the term came to be applied to the legalized system of segregation that took shape in the years after Reconstruction. The laws that established legal segregation in the South flowed from the imaginations of whites who similarly held a stereotypical view of blacks; thus did the term, “Jim Crow,” seem appropriate. The term can be used to refer to the whole system of segregation and discrimination that contravened federal law but which somehow the Supreme Court--- the highest judicial body in the United States with the authority to rule on the constitutionality of laws--- found ways to uphold.


The most portentous of the Supreme Court rulings came in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). The case was brought by African American Homer Adolph Plessy against Louisiana Judge Ferguson, who had found Plessy guilty of an 1890 state law requiring separate accommodations in public facilities for blacks and whites. Plessy had been arrested for failing, during a 60-mile ride from New Orleans to Covington, Lousiana, to move to a different car as requested by a white passenger. The Supreme court ruled that as long as railroad car accommodations (and, by extension, facilities of many kinds) were “separate but equal,” the law calling for segregated facilities was consistent with the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution.


In the months and years immediately following the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, legislated their movements down the path to a fully segregated and cruelly discriminatory South. And the right to vote that is clear to anyone who reads the 15th Amendment faded with the enactment of poll taxes and literacy tests:


Poll taxes were fees placed on the right to vote, thus discriminating against most African Americans in their general condition of poverty, and also against poor whites.


Literacy tests were designed to prevent those with limited or no ability to read from voting. The prospective voter might be asked to read a section of the state constitution. A similar outcome was achieved in states that did allow the illiterate voter to ask that the section be read aloud to her or him, whereupon she or he could demonstrate understanding of the law with a proper interpretation. The accuracy of the interpretation was then left to the judgment of a white official, who invariably ruled against the responses of African Americans. Sometimes questions ranged into the realm of the ridiculous:  A “wrong” answer to the question, “How many bubbles are in a bar of soap?,” for example, might send a prospective African American voter home without casting a vote.


Other means were used to deny African Americans the right to vote. These included violence or the threat thereof. Alternatively, and in an attempt to re-enfranchise poor whites who could not pay the poll tax or meet property qualifications, a number of states enacted “grandfather laws.” These laws made possible the vote for someone who could not meet economic or property qualifications to gain suffrage only if his (only men could vote until 1920) ancestors had voted before 1867 of some other date chosen prior to Reconstruction; such a law clearly made impossible the exercise of voting rights by the overwhelming number of African Americans in the South.


A number of states used “good character tests,” necessitating that an African American who sought to vote bring with him a white individual willing to vouch for his good character; there was little chance that a white citizen in the Jim Crow South would do so. Any African American who opposed Jim Crow, or strove to organize others to do so, would face a community of white employers and business leaders commonly resolved to deny her or him ca job, credit, or mortgage.


In many southern towns and cities, organizations known as White Citizens’ Councils determined matters pertinent to jobs and credit, ensuring in each case that African Americans were limited t certain kinds of jobs and kept firmly under behavioral control. Hate groups did terrible damage to African Americans in communities across the South, becoming such a force of disorder that the United States Congress felt compelled to pass two Force Acts (1870 and 1871) and the Ku Klux Klan Act (1871) that proscribed judgment and executions outside regular legal proceedings. Even some southern states passed laws with the expressed purpose of curtailing the most egregious forms of violence perpetrated by hate groups.


The Ku Klux Klan Act authorized the President to use military force and to impose martial law in those areas where terroristic groups were active. But as of the Compromise of 1877, United States troops had no regular presence in the South, and local police and militia forces did not have the staff, money, or time to protect the lives of African Americans; moreover, southern law enforcement officials often either sympathized with the sentiments and activities of hate groups, or they were too cowed by them to take any action. In time the organization of hate groups did wither due to internal stresses rather than vigorous government action. But the revival of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and the terrible legacy of lynchings serve as testimony to the lack of ability and inclination n the part of federal and state governments of the United States to protect African Americans from criminal violence.


Lynchings became part of the terrible reality of life during the Jim Crow era: Statistices compiled by the Tuskegee Institute show that from the first recorded lynching in 1882 through 1968, at least 4,743 people saw their lives end in this brutal way. During these years, nine states recorded over 200 lynchings; those states included Mississippi (581 lynching during 1882-1968), Georgia (531), Texas (493), Louisiana ( 391), Alabama (347), Arkansas (284), Florida (282), Tennessee (251), and Kentucky (205).


By far, African Americans were the most frequent targets, but the statistics reveal that in some geographical areas whites were also lynched with considerable frequency. In Texas, 141 (28.6%0 of those lynched were white; this was similar to the overall national pattern, in which 1,297 (27.4%) of those lynched were white.


But in most southern states, the targets of lynchings were overwhelmingly African Americans (over 90% in Georgia), Mississippi, and South Carolina [97.5%], but in several northeastern amd western states where African American populations were low, whites were the most frequent targets. In Arizona, all 31 of those lynched during 1882-1968 were white. These data indicate a disturbing tendency toward generalized violence in American life that, when paired with particularly virulent prejudices, fell most heavily on African Americans.


The key components of physical and economic control that had undergirded the slave system also constituted the foundation of the Jim Crow system. In the countryside, where most southern African Americans lived, the economic terms of life lay in the sharecropping system. Sharecroppers had to pay for their cabins, clothes, food, tools, work animals, and such items as flour, salt, and sugar. Most of these items were sold to them on credit by the landowners to whom they owed their labor; when their crops came in, a large portion of their profits went to pay for the items that had been purchase on credit. Landowners frequently earned high interest on loans, and they sold goods at prices above market value. Sharecroppers fell steadily into a level of debt from which there was no hope of extracting themselves.


But African Americans were not always passive actors in schemes of landowners. Some black farmers were so adroit in their labor that they could use their productivity as leverage against an overweening landowner. In rare cases, such leverage could be used to ratchet down rents, interest rates, and prices enough that a bit could be saved. An ingenious and extraordinarily diligent African American farmer might save enough to purchase land from a poor farmer or a landowner who had fallen on hard times. This same farmer or that agriculturalist’s descendants might invest in a wagon to haul goods, expand into other entrepreneurial endeavors, and maneuver into position for the purchase of more land. In this way were a few small fortunes made, so as to expand familial wealth in the South, sponsor family members who might want to go to college, or to realize the dreams of those who sought a better life in the North.


A remarkable motif of African America during the Jim Crow era is in fact the creative response to life under the most daunting conditions: African American Baptists in South Carolina, Georgia, and florida organized their own association in 1866. Black Baptist churches from across the south held a convention in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1880. Black Presbyterians also formed churches of their own, and in 1870 African American Methodists organized the colored Methodist Church in America. Pastors in these churches manifested an animated style that influenced white pastors and transferred to the purposes of secular speechmaking. African American choirs sang with great fervor; black gospel joined a tradition that included the work songs of the slaves, each traveling pathways of influence that eventually produced jazz and blues.


Southern food is one of the main forms of purely American food. Its progenitors were African American slaves in the kitchens of the Big House and sharecropping farmers who invented tasty dishes with the produce from their own land, game from the hunt, and plants gathered from the woods. With artful applications of spices, herbs, and animal fats, African American cooks produced excellent tasting and nutritious food that became part of the great American tradition.


African American rural folk could generate lives real substance and joy while living in the most humble cabins, under the most stringent of economic conditions, and enveloped by the hate of the white majority:


Stories were told on Saturday evenings around the fire in an otherwise cold cabin in January: Children huddled together while daddy regaled them with another hair-raising tale of creatures lurking in the woods of Louisiana, Mississippi, or Georgia.


There as poetry in those words, even as there was poetry in the everyday cadences of a people who through some combination of ancestral inheritance and immediate environment boomed out with metaphors brilliant enough to make the best classically trained poets green with envy: hot as a depot stove, skippin’ over the due, easy like Sunday morning.


African Americans represented the best of the Old South. Through participation in the church, in the creation of song and dance, in the acquisition of culinary brilliance, in their ability to make crops grow whether the plot be the richest in the South or the most hard-scrabble, in their artisanry with wood and iron and needle and thread, they kept the Old South full of crops, they enabled the trains to run, they saw children grow strong and confident and secure, and through their sheer hard work they ensured that even a people who hated them beyond any logical understanding would thrive.


But having given so much of value while receiving so much animosity in return, striving for lives of greater material circumstance and civic sustenance, many African Americans of the South began to search other locations for work and residence. This search led to migrations both westward and northward, ultimately emphasizing the latter in the great movement known as the Northern Migration.