The deal, the
Compromise of 1877, came about as a
result of the disputed election of 1876.
The contest was between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat
Samuel J. Tilden. Tilden won the popular
vote but needed the electoral votes from the state of Florida in order to claim
victory in the Electoral College. The
popular vote was very close; each party
maintained that it had the majority necessary to claim victory in the Electoral
College.
But before
any recount could proceed, or independent election inspectors brought in, the
Republicans and Democrats cut their infamous deal:
In exchange
for Democrats’ conceding the Florida votes and thus the election to them, the
Republicans promised that they would order the withdrawal of all federal troops
from the South. Ever since 1865, federal
troops had been instrumental in combating violent expressions of white
animosity, making sure that constitutional and statutory laws were obeyed,
ensuring that the educational and health initiatives of Reconstruction went
forward, providing protection for African Americans in their election booths
and public offices, and in many ways acting to prevent the white power
structure from
reestablishing
business as usual in the post-Civil War South.
Without the enforcement power represented by the federal troops
stationed in the South, the constitutional and civil rights laws that had held
such promise for African American citizenship would be ineffective.
But the
cynical deal resulting in the Compromise of 1877 was cut, whites returned to
near-exclusive power in the South, and an awful road was cleared for some of
the darkest moments in the history of African America.
IV.
The Misery That Never Should Have Been, 1877-1915
The era in
history extending from the Compromise of 1877 up to the Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka,
Kansas decision of 1954 constitutes the most shameful era in the
experience of African America. Many will
argue that nothing could be worse than slavery, but I would even challenge that
common view. Slavery was brutal and
objectively sinful. But the institution
of slavery had existed in many places throughout history, so that the large
plantation owners of the Americas during 1500-1865 were able to put to
particularly economically remunerative purposes, with weapons of great violence
in their hands, an institution with which both Africans and Europeans had long
been familiar. But by 1865, the great
opportunity of Reconstruction loomed;
instead of seizing fully the chance for racial justice and sectional
reconciliation, decision-makers and implementers charged with the
responsibility of bringing African Americans wholly into the civic life of the
nation did their duty with only variable effectiveness. And those making the most important decisions
in 1877 completely sold their souls to the gods of political expediency.
`Thus did
the misery that never should have been ensue.
Slavery was an abomination but an accepted institution at the time of
utilization in many parts of the world.
The dark nights overseen by Jim Crow, though, were the most shameful
ever spent by an American people attesting to ideals of freedom and justice for
all; far from realizing their own best
ideals, American powerholders during the 1877-1954 era consistently and
flagrantly violated their own expressed values, very much embodied in that
United States Constitution touted as the supreme law of the land.
Jim Crow
Throughout
the southern states, in the aftermath of the withdrawal of federal troops,
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 questions, “How many
bubbles are in a bar of soap?,” for example, might send a prospective African
American Voter home without having to cast 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 “god 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.
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