The Misery That Never Should Have
Been, 1877-1954
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 and
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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