Contextual Essay

From the end of Reconstruction through the beginning of the twentieth century, African Americans living in the South faced an increasingly thoroughgoing system of legalized discrimination that came to be known generally as "Jim Crow." Beginning in the 1880s, southern states passed laws that mandated the separation of the races in public spaces. By the turn of the century, disfranchisement laws had robbed nearly all black southerners of the right to vote. At the same time, white southerners also resorted to racial violence and intimidation to keep African Americans "in their place," and the black victims of these crimes found little recourse in the courts.

African Americans did not simply accept these increasing attacks on their freedoms, however. Through day-to-day resistance, court challenges, and public protests, African Americans insisted that they were entitled to their rights as citizens. Nevertheless, black Americans were not all in agreement about the appropriate response to the increasing abrogation of their rights. Some African Americans, led by Booker T. Washington, believed that African Americans should focus their efforts on industrial education and economic uplift, convinced that economic success would engender white respect. By contrast, other African Americans, led by W.E.B. DuBois, insisted that education and economic success were meaningless in the absence of real civil and political equality. Ultimately, hundreds of thousands of black southerners would decide that their only recourse was to leave the region, as they sought escape from Jim Crow in the Great Migration to the cities of the North.

Many Americans assume that racial segregation in the South was the natural outgrowth of slavery. Yet, as C. Vann Woodward demonstrated in his classic The Strange Career of Jim Crow, "segregation would have been impractical under slavery, . . . and the circumstances that later gave rise to the segregation code did not exist so long as the Negro was enslaved." Writing in 1955, Woodward challenged conventional wisdom by arguing that segregation was a new invention of the 1890s, not a throwback to the system of race relations that had existed in slavery. While both slavery and segregation were rooted in an ideology of white supremacy, Woodward argued that legalized segregation was not white southerners' immediate response to black freedom. Indeed, many African Americans continued to vote and even serve in public office in the 1880s, and the thoroughgoing legal system of racial separation that would characterize the first half of the twentieth century had not yet been created. Published at a time when African Americans were staging increasing challenges to legalized segregation, The Strange Career of Jim Crow stressed that the enactment of segregation statutes was neither natural nor inevitable. Instead, he argued, those laws which had been created to serve social and political ends could also be destroyed.

Although Woodward's work remains a central work in the history of segregation, many scholars have critiqued Woodward for his insistence on the newness of legalized segregation. Instead, scholars like Joel Williamson have emphasized the continuities in American race relations. In After Slavery: The Negro in South Carolina During Reconstruction, published in 1965, Williamson agreed with Woodward that the formalized system of southern segregation first appeared in the late nineteenth century, but he insisted that a "pattern of separation" had characterized race relations in the antebellum North as well as in the Old South and increasingly defined relations between white southerners and newly freed African Americans in the years that followed Emancipation. In the years since the publication of these two influential books, most scholars have agreed that white southerners demanded substantial racial deference and social and physical distance between the races even before the rigid system of segregation that Woodward identified was set into place. Nevertheless, scholars also generally agree that the rigid, formalized system of race relations that emerged in the 1890s marked a change in southern race relations.

Most historians mark the beginning of Jim Crow with the passage of segregation laws mandating the separation of black and white on the railroads and other public transportation in the 1880s. Tennessee was the first to segregate public transportation, with the passage of state legislation in 1881. Segregation laws then spread, at both the state and municipal level. Ultimately southern states and municipalities would mandate the separation of the races in nearly every conceivable aspect of life—from movie houses to public parks, hospitals, restrooms, schools, cemeteries, hotels, prisons, and brothels. Southern courtrooms had separate Bibles for black and white witnesses, and as modern blood supplies became available, they, too, were separated by race. Florida and North Carolina mandated not only that black and white students attend segregated schools, but that textbooks for black and white students be stored in separate warehouses as well.

Perhaps most devastating to black southerners were the category of laws that became known as disfranchisement. Despite the legal protections afforded by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, southern states beginning as early as the 1870s sought ways to legally exclude African Americans from the ballot box. In 1871 Georgia passed the first poll tax law, and nearly every southern state followed suit in subsequent decades. In 1890, Mississippi pioneered the use of educational and literacy requirements for voting with the enactment of an "understanding clause." With this new provision, would-be voters in Mississippi had to demonstrate to a registrar's satisfaction that they understood the state constitution. In other states these educational requirements took various forms and left registrants' fitness for voting at the discretion of voter registrars. In addition to these most famous voting restrictions, southern states also adopted registration and ballot marking procedures that made it difficult for voters to participate and made it easy for unscrupulous election officials to disqualify the ballots of dissident voters. In most southern states, deadlines for voter registration ad poll tax payment came and went months in advance of an election, when no one was paying attention. Registrars in some states had to sit for registration only one day each year, so would-be voters not only had to know how to qualify to vote, but where and when to find the registrar. In Virginia, as well as some other southern states, voters had to strike through the names of the candidates they did not want instead of marking the name of the candidate they did want to elect.

The combination of registration obstacles and difficult ballot-marking procedures not only excluded nearly all black southerners from participating in electoral politics, but helped prevent the emergence of any opposition to the Democratic party. The devices that southern political leaders ultimately enacted not only excluded nearly all black southerners from participating in electoral politics, but prevented enormous numbers of white southerners from participating as well.

Finally, in addition to these legal statues that codified the southern system of white supremacy, white southerners in the last decades of the nineteenth century also increasingly resorted to violence to protect their racial privilege. Although a perfectly accurate account of lynching victims is not available, one conservative figure puts the death toll at 139 victims each year during the 1890s, the peak decade of lynching. Between 1890 and 1917, an average of 2 or 3 black southerners were lynched each week. Although lynching had long been associated with frontier life in America, by the late nineteenth-century lynching became almost exclusively a racially motivated crime, and most of its victims lost their lives in the South. Two other characteristics distinguished late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century lynching from its earlier forms—the sadism of the murderers and the numbers of people involved. By the early twentieth-century it was not uncommon for large crowds to gather to watch a black man be lynched, and for white women and children to be part of those crowds. These spectators watched intently as victims were not just murdered, but were often tortured to death or burned alive. Spectators and participants often collected victims' body parts as souvenirs.

For years, historians have sought to explain why white southerners created the system of legalized segregation that they did, and how white southerners' beliefs in white supremacy led them to partake in the racial violence that characterized the Jim Crow South. Here the debate has been lively. In The Strange Career of Jim Crow and in his Origins of the New South, Woodward portrayed white racism as a false consciousness, and argued that demagogic leaders took advantage of this false consciousness to gain the political support of poor white men whose economic interests the leaders did not really share. Thus, according to Woodward, the changes in southern race relations in the 1890s emerged because southern political leaders used segregation laws and race-baiting in their campaigns as a way to obtain power and secure the votes of lower class whites who threatened revolt, most notably in Populism. By contrast, Joel Williamson, in The Crucible of Race, argued for a more psychological explanation of the increasing rigidity of the Jim Crow South. Instead of being driven by pragmatic political concerns, Williamson argued that the white intellectuals and political elites who spurred the "radical hysteria" of the 1890s were motivated by genuine psychological fears of black southerners and of the disruption to the social order that had come with emancipation. Edward Ayers, in The Promise of the New South, contends that the formalization of segregation statutes and the passage of disfranchisement laws were not simply the result of opportunistic politicians or the psychological needs of white southern men. Instead, Ayers argued, the rise of Jim Crow was the result of a variety of forces: class, political, and psychological, as Woodward and Williamson have argued, but also generational and gender issues. In particular, Ayers emphasized the relationship between the rise of segregation and the new modernizing economy and society of the New South, with its increasingly anonymous social relations and the growing success and assertiveness of black southerners.

While lively debates continue to offer new and revised explanations for the formalization of segregation and disfranchisement and the sharp increasing in the number of lynchings by the 1890s, many new works have focused on new questions, not laid out by Woodward. In particular, scholars have shown increasing interest not just in what was done to African Americans, but how black southerners responded to the new conditions in which they found themselves by the turn of the century. In addition to explaining the divergent paths for resistance offered by Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois, scholars have highlighted the ways that ordinary black southerners resisted Jim Crow in their daily lives. For example, Leon Litwack, in Trouble in Mind, clearly demonstrated that despite the brutality of both legal and extra-legal forms of white supremacy in the New South, African Americans resisted Jim Crow in a variety of ways. They built schools and churches and business districts, and they taught their children how to survive within the confines of their segregated society. Individual black southerners refused to participate in segregation by walking instead of riding the bus, boycotting streetcars, and seeking redress from the federal courts.

By the turn of the century, however, it was increasingly clear that federal government was not going to enforce rights of African Americans. With its ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled famously that states could mandate "separate but equal" facilities for the races, thereby providing the nation's imprimatur for the region's discriminatory racial code. In the end, as segregation endured and became more rigid and entrenched, many black southerners seized the opportunity to leave the region. As James Grossman has pointed out, however, black southerners were both pushed and pulled out of the South. To be sure, segregation, disfranchisement, racial violence, and the lack of economic opportunity gave black southerners ample reason to leave. But as Grossman demonstrated in Land of Hope, wartime employment opportunities and the encouraging reports of friends and family as well as the northern black press also played crucial roles in encouraging the Great Migration.

Two of the central themes in recent studies of segregation have been African-American resistance and that segregation was not inevitable. One way to help students understand these issues is to stage classroom discussions in a debate format. For example, when my students study segregation, I often organize a discussion around the divergent viewpoints of DuBois and Washington. I ask half of the class to advocate DuBois's viewpoint and half to advocate Washington's, and I ask them to think hard about the options that African Americans at the turn of the century had in responding to Jim Crow. Another good discussion technique is organizing a discussion around whether segregation was modern. In the twenty-first century we think of segregation and lynching as archaic and barbaric, and many associate it with the evils of slavery. Thus, a debate centered around whether segregation was modern helps students better understand some major issues historians are grappling with as they consider what was new about segregation in the 1880s and 1890s, how Jim Crow was a new response to black freedom, and how it differed from both slavery and the early days of black freedom. Asking the questions this way also helps students to keep in mind the ways in which segregation grew and modernized as South changed over next half-century. Finally, it helps them to keep in mind the tradition of resistance that laid a foundation for the successful Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

Since the publication of Woodward's The Strange Career of Jim Crow nearly a half-century ago, the origins and inner workings of the southern system of Jim Crow have remained a central topic of scholarly research. One could spend years reading the impressive books that have been devoted to the topic, but two short volumes will provide a solid introduction to the central issues. First, the abridged version of Ayers' The Promise of the New South, entitled Southern Crossing, provides an outstanding examination of the period and fascinating details that are useful for lectures or class discussion. Another volume, entitled When Did Southern Segregation Begin?, offers a solid overview of the scholarly debates, with excerpted selections from some of the most important works. Though the focus of scholarly inquiry has expanded to include greater emphasis on African-American resistance and the role of gender, many of the essential questions remain the same: why did southerners create Jim Crow? and how did that system of segregation, disfranchisement, and racial violence shape the history of the region?

Selected Readings

Ayers, Edward L. The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Ayers, Edward L. Southern Crossing: A History of the American South, 1877-1906. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Dray, Philip. At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America. New York: Random House, 2002.

Grossman, James R. Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners and the Great Migration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Litwack, Leon F. Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.

Smith, John David. When Did Southern Segregation Begin? Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2002.

Williamson, Joel. The Crucible of Race: Black / White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. New York: Oxford University Press, 1955.