Emerging patterns of discrimination; The Negro in America

I speak it today is presently working on a book dealing with a nigger in American society. In the period between 1860 and 1896 Moreover he is the author of north of slavery the negro in the free States 1789 to 1860 a book that was published in 1961. He is also the author of articles in The New England Quarterly and the Journal of Negro history. He's an associate professor of history at the University of Wisconsin and will be a visiting professor in the department history at Berkeley. Next year since he received his B.A. M.A. and Ph.D. at Berkeley and also as a visiting professor here during the summer of 63 we can hardly welcome to the Bay Area but certainly we can welcome back welcome back. Thus I hope you will all join me in welcoming back a Professor Leon back to talk about the development of Jim Crow. You know the stage is to talk essentially about the Negro in the 19th century. This is what are we trying really concerned with today.

When asked recently to comment on the centennial celebration of the Civil War negro satirist Dick Gregory replied to all that means to me is 100 years of separate toilets and simple as this remark may have been it points up the persistence of a problem whose roots lie deep in American mores and customs. In fact predates the civil war itself. It may not have been until the last two decades of the 900 century that southern states began to construct an elaborate and systematic network of legal segregation and in almost every phase of human activity. But too much should not be made of the relative recency of segregation by statute. Such segregation was in fact a based on racial theories customs traditions and practices which had long prevailed in the north and in the

south. Racial discrimination and segregation have never been a sectional phenomena and racial segregation as the historian of Jim Crowe Stephen Woodward himself has conceded it is but the latest phase in a long history of white efforts to fix the negro's place in American society. The history of racial relations the 19th century is by and large a history of subordination of negroes by whites and the determination of whites to maintain it whether by subtle or violent means their superior position in American society and to justify their exploitation the domination of negroes on grounds of innate racial superiority of paternal the benevolence of Christian charity and political expediency. This is the heritage of the 19th century and it might be added the white man's image of the negro in the twentieth century as well as many of his assumptions regarding good race have stemmed in large part from his my 19th

century experience. Institutions slavery for example the condition that not only the life of the negro slave but also the southern if not the northern white man's image of the negro. And it has been a persistent image. In the aftermath of an integration riot that shook the city of New Orleans in December of 1960 almost 100 years to the day after the first shot to been fired at Fort Sumpter a local resident whose grandfather had been a slave owner and had served on the personal staff of Jefferson Davis made this confession to a newspaper reporter. I asked myself just what do I fear an integration. I'm not afraid of what my neighbors or relatives will say I don't honestly fear intermarriage because I'm confident family guidance will keep my children from that. I don't fear the negro economically he threatens me in no way. Why why why do I oppose integration. Because I know one better than they are. I just know it. The negro was the slave we

brought him here in chains we auction them off like cattle what used to be Congo Square just a short distance from here. He was just an animal he had no born to be a servant. I can't defend this but there it is deep in my bloodstream. Sure colored white children used to play together in the old days but that was different. It was in the grand manner of the Old South. They always played at the Big House and top of the hill for the white boy rode the mayor and the colored boy rode behind him. The relationship was clear. The negro boy addressed his friend as message John. He was always the one who helped the other down off the horse. I never lived then but the spirit of those days was so ingrained in me I can't shake it. I can't endure the idea of Negro kids playing with mine at all today because now they are being taught they are as good as the whites. Thus does the image persist. The negro unfit to assume the responsibilities of freedom servitude service to his natural status. Under slavery there had been no compulsion to subjugate to the negro by

statute the status of slavery recognized by law was sufficient to define the negroes inferior status and elaborate the slave codes that carefully outline the place the negro was to occupy and Southern society. He was to respect all white man the slave holders and non slave holders alike. He was needed to raise his hand against the white man or use insulting or abusive language. And he Richmond the code required the Negroes to step aside when whites passed them. His movements about the countryside there were rigidly controlled as were his communications and meetings that with other negroes. No person not even a Master was to teach him to read or write or employ him in setting type in a printing office or give him books or pamphlets. And many states have stipulated that he was not to be immense abated unless his master provided for his removal from the state. But the various slave codes only underlined the complete and absolute authority of the master who was accountable to virtually no one for the way in which he managed or mismanaged to his

slaves the institution of slavery after all rested essentially on force and violence the whip there was not a figment of the abolitionist imagination. And while slaveholders a differed it widely in the treatment of their chattel. A few hesitated to use force it to break their negroes into slavery and keep them there. The object of slavery a proclaimed the chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court in dismissing a Dykeman of a master for an assault upon a slave is the prophet of the master. His security and the public safety. The subject of one doomed in his own person and his posterity to live without knowledge or without the capacity to make anything his own at a toil that another may reap the fruits such services as a slave is to perform can only be expected from one who has no will of his own who surrenders his will in implicit obedience to that of another. Such a beauty and as a consequence only of uncontrolled authority over the body. There's nothing

else which can operate to produce the effect the power of the master must be absolute to render the submission of the slave perfect. The institution of slavery conditioned to the negroes place in southern society. It kept him illiterate or largely so with few slaveholders required a lot to remind them of the potential danger of an educated or literate Negro in oppressed upon the negro the dichotomy of justice in a white man's society. But white witnesses the jurors and the judges are recognizing the need for racial solidarity and the maintenance of control which is seldom if ever a question a white man's discretion in dealing with the negro. It made a mockery of any pretense that toward family life the family simply had no significance under slavery could be broken up and so whenever the master deemed it advisable profitable that to do so marriages were only informally recognized. It bred a sexual promiscuity among slaves that which some masters encouraged.

And as Professor stampers pointed out in his book with a peculiar institution that also bred a cynical a double standard among Southern whites a veneration of white womanhood and the exploitation of Negro womanhood for sensual pleasure which by 1860 had yielded five hundred thousand mulattoes in the south. And slavery a stamp also has demonstrated this ought to make the negro A conscious of his own personal inferiority. He was taught that slavery was his natural God given lot on earth that it was his for deigned to rule in society and to sort of the white man the white man knew what was best for him that he in return must be deferential to the white man the slave holders and non slave holders alike. Moreover he was encouraged to feel an almost childlike dependence on his masters and he must be made aware of his master's enormous power contrasted with his own helplessness. The negro under slavery in other words was asked to surrender not only

his independence but his self respect as well. And this was a condition with statutes that alone could never achieve. It is a fact a rights a negro novelist James Baldwin over 100 years later. Every American Negro bears a name that originally belonged to the white man whose chattel he was. I'm called Baldwin because I was either sold by my African tribe or kidnapped out of it into the hands of a white Christian named Baldwin who forced me to kneel at the foot of the cross. I am then both visibly and legally the descendant of slaves and a white Protestant country. And this is what it means to be an American Negro. This is who he is. A kidnapped pagan who was sold like an animal and treated like one who was once defined by the American Constitution as three fifths of a man and who according to the Dred Scott decision had no rights that a white man was bound to respect. So much for the heritage of Negro slavery. But all negroes were not slaves in 1860 a sum two hundred forty thousand free Negroes lived in the south.

Most of them in Maryland Virginia and North Carolina. Some had been voluntarily emancipated a few had managed to purchase their freedom but this was at best a sharply prescribed freedom. Free negro After all it symbolized the fact that there were some other status of negro than slavery is very present said challenged in some way of the institution of slavery. And he was often blamed for inciting slavery votes free to go with us a misfit in ante bellum Southern society often a nuisance they victim of a society which simply had no use for him. The same code of laws that applied to slaves that usually applied to free Negroes. Thus the laws and customs denied him the rights and privileges of citizens the right to assemble in large numbers the right to an education the right to travel freely and the right to testify against a white man or serve on juries. The right to mix with whites or slaves in public

places when he rode on a train he was usually confined to the second class a car a reserved divorced smokers in Augusta Georgia for example of free Negroes were forbidden to ride or drive about the town except on business to carry canes to clubs or sticks unless blind to smoke in public places to attend military parades. He was to abide by a 9 15 curfew. This ordinance was typical of other towns as well. The chief justice of the Georgia State Supreme Court set forth the legal position of the free negro in the antebellum South. We maintain he said that the status of the African in Georgia whether bond or free is such that he has no civil social or political rights whatever except such as are bestowed upon him by statute that he can neither contract nor be contracted with. But the free negro can only act by him through his Guardian that he is in a condition of perpetual people IJ or wardship and that this condition he can never change by his own

volition. It can only be done by legislation. But the fact of manumission confers no other rights but that of freedom from the dominion of the master and the limited liberty of locomotion that it does not and cannot confer citizenship. But the social and civil degradation resulting from the taint of blood at here is to the descendants of Ham in this country like the poisoned tunic of Nessus that nothing but an act of the assembly can purify the soul of its grace the bitter fountain the darkling sea. He the free negro resides among us and yet is a stranger a native even and yet not a citizen though not a slave. Yet he is not free. Protected by law yet enjoying none of the immunities of freedom. Though not in a condition of childhood yet constantly exposed to it. He lives among us without motive and without hope. His fancy freedom is all a delusion. The great principle of self preservation demands on the part of the white population unceasing vigilance and firmness as well as uniform kindness justice and humanity.

But then all Negroes did not live in the south by 1860 approximately two hundred fifty thousand free Negroes reside in the north where slavery had been abolished in the late 18th and early one thousandth century. But the Mason-Dixon line it did not set apart to racial inhumanity in the south of racial. The Netherlands of liberality and tolerance in the north. Such a myth accords with the realities of neither the 19th nor the twentieth century in the north of the negro the legally free it was an object of scorn ridicule discrimination and exploitation. Most of Northerners the shared with Southerners the conviction that God had condemned the blacks into perpetual subordination Verrier African race that could never be assimilated into white society politically socially or economically. And northerners it justified these feelings on the basis of certain pseudo scientific racial theories which allegedly demonstrated the physical and mental inferiority of the negro. Very few

northerners In fact I would have disagreed with the charge made by the New York globe on January 8 of 1847 that the efforts of negroes and what it called deluded whites to achieve racial equality was a warfare against God and nature. A battle with a revokable fate with inexorable and unyielding principles. True this newspaper conceded the laws do not restrict the negro's social rights but there are restraints stronger than law. There are mountain and ocean barriers stronger than any parchment of constitution that him in and limit the sphere of his social rights. And these restraints of the globe added are founded on the deep and abiding and eternal version to social domestic relations with the negro. And finally in this New York newspaper returned it to the inevitable and seemingly eternal question. Have you ever met the white man a father a brother. No matter how his zeal burned as an abolitionist you could answer in the affirmative the question. Are you willing that a negro should visit

your family marry your daughter or pay court to your sister. But then this ideological framework the federal and state governments are reflecting the force of public opinion and a custom constructed barriers of legal and extra legal which sharply prescribe the negro's position in northern society. Congress a limited naturalization to white aliens restricted in Rome and in the militia to white male citizens excluded negroes from carrying the United States mail lest they form some subversive a courier service approve the admission of new states or whose constitution severely restricted the legal rights of free Negroes amended to various land and homestead bills or to limit land granted to white settlers. And on one occasion the Senate voted to exclude negroes from the Army Navy after narrowly rejecting a proposed amendment by Sen. John C. Calhoun of South Carolina that would have permitted the employment of Negro senators quote in unhealthy climates

unquote. Nearly every Northern state considered it some time and several adopted the laws to restrict negro immigration although not vigorously enforced as such laws are often used to harass a Negro president. Nor did negroes share in the expansion of political democracy. Most states confine the suffrage to whites by 1860 in fact only five states in which a resided a paltry 6 percent of the total Northern Negro population permitted Negroes to vote on an equal basis with whites. Several northern states prohibited negro testimony in cases where a white man was a party. Almost all states excluded the negro from jury service and one state Oregon who went so far as to forbid Negroes to hold real estate make contracts or maintain lawsuits. Oregon had a few negroes and want to remain that way and negroes had to contend in the north of the two sided nature of justice. Authorities are frequently arrested Negroes for various minor

offenses like the vagrancy and while ignoring similar infractions of bite whites negroes found it difficult to secure a competent legal counsel or witnesses on their behalf. They often found themselves sentenced for much longer prison terms of than whites though convicted of identical low crimes and found it much more difficult to obtain pardons than whites or to pay the fines imposed upon them. Statistics which showed the disproportionate number of negroes in northern jails prisons and penitentiaries ignored of this two sided judicial system as it did the general economic degradation of the Northern Negro in an era of expanding economic opportunity and social mobility the negro found no cause for optimism. He was forced to assume in the north the menial tasks of the white man society of those working largely as a common laborer Mariner servant waiter a barber a coachman boot black or porter by the 1840s

However the newly arrived Irish a challenge to the negroes monopoly of even the menial employment. Why I asked the valedictorian of a Negro school in 1819 Why should I strive hard and acquire all the constituents of a man if the prevailing genius of the landed met me not as such but in an inferior degree. Pardon me if I feel insignificant and weak. What are my prospects. To what shall I turn my hand shall I be a mechanic. No one will employ me. White boys won't work with me. Shall I be a merchant. No one will have me in his office white clerks want to associate with me drudgery and servitude then are my prospective portion. Can you be surprised at my discouragement. But the educated negro in the north was an exception and a few Negro efforts were made to provide negroes with educational facilities. When such efforts were made it was clearly understood that the facilities would be separate. The possibility in the north of Negro children might be mixed with white children in the same classrooms arouse intense fears and

prejudices. Was this not it was asked the first step toward a racial amalgamation. That's what some abolitionists opened an academy and came to New Hampshire for both the Negroes and whites and they mixed the basis of the local citizenry using 100 a yoke of oxen pulled a school from its very foundations to an outlying a field where it was permitted to stand as a monument. They said to those who are struggling to Troy what are fathers that have gained. In a nearby Canterbury Conn. A young Quaker a schoolmistress Prudence Crandall admitted the Negro girls at her school fought off repeated and often violent attempts to close the school. But finally gave up after being jailed for violating a new state law prohibiting the establishment of any school for the instruction or education of negroes and not residents of the state. And in Massachusetts where the legislature 955 after years of abolitionist a negro agitation prohibited racial or religious distinctions and getting

students into the public schools. A New York newspaper proclaimed the fears of many about this dire occurrence. Now it said the blood of the Winthrop's the notices the Lyman's the Endicott's and the Elliotts isn't a fair way to be amalgamated with the Sambos the Cato's in the pump pays the North to be Africanized amalgamation has commenced. New England heads the column. God save the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Whites are complained of the economic degradation of the Negro but confined him to the menial employment of whites to complain of the poor living conditions of negroes but confined him to certain sections of town. Whites complained of the ignorance of the Negro but either refused him educational opportunities or placed him in separate and unequal schools and concluding that the negro were degraded inferior and ignorant. The white man relegated him to a position of social inferiority and segregated him in almost every phase of public a kid's activity. And here

custom rather than statutes of prevailed racial integrity of the US demanded that Negroes be segregated in all forms of public transportation that they be excluded from the regular cabins and dining rooms on steamboats that they be compelled to ride in the outside of stagecoaches that they be permitted to ride in special Jim Crow cars on the railroads or wait for special Jim Crow with street railways. A New England railroad official recalled that scenes of a riot and violence took place in the then existing state of opinion. It seemed to me that the difficulty could best be met by signing a special car to our colored citizens. Only in New England or prior to the civil war it did negroes a manager to win integrated transportation facilities. But only after prolonged agitation during which Negroes and white abolitionists deliberately violated the Jim Crow rules and had to be dragged from the train's white supremacy also demanded that

Negroes be assigned to so-called Negro pews in the white churches and partaking of the second into the Lord's Supper be ordered to wait until the whites had first been sort of the bread and wine in Boston decide a rather classic example a local negro acquired a white man's a church pew in payment of a debt but was ousted from a day by some white parishioners and grounds that it would depreciate the property value of nearby pews. Little wonder that many negroes withdrew from white churches or rather than accept further humiliation and that independent Negro churches they should have thus been established. Finally white supremacy demands that Negroes be educated and segregated schools punished and segregated to prisons entertained if at all in segregated theaters be excluded from most hotels restaurants resorts except as servants and be buried in segregated cemeteries. Quite symbolic it was the public cemetery in Cincinnati where Negroes were buried.

North the South and whites east to west to preserve distinctions even among the dead. But such was the place of the Negro in northern society and he was expected to keep it. Race riots in New York of Philadelphia and Cincinnati made this abundantly clear. The negro was expected to acquiesce in the racial status quo in this implied more than tacit consent acquiescence. It was a way of life in the manner that the negro daily conformity to the white man's image of him an image of formed in no small part by the minstrel show a very popular form of Northern entertainment which pictured to the negro as a clown the shit childish and carefree irresponsible shuffling difficult Tom. The negroes are expected to conform to this a public impression not to to agitate for an improvement of their position but to act the part of the buffoon to cater to the white man's wishes and pride.

While we are servants a remarked nigger leader Frederick Douglass we are never offensive to the whites or marks of popular displeasure. We have been often dragged or driven from the tables of hotels where colored men were officiating acceptably as waiters in from Steamboat cabins were twenty or thirty colored men in white jackets and white aprons were frisking about as servants among the whites in every direction. In these conditions we are thought to be in our place and to aspire to anything above them is to contradict the established views of the community. To get out of our sphere and commit the provoking sin of impudence. To the south the treatment accorded to free Negroes in the north confirmed to the relative beneficence of slavery how the Southerners asked could the negro. Could the north so glibly condemn slavery when it worked its own negroes in menial employment excluded them from the polls of the jurys the churches learned professions of the schools and even barred them from entering some states go home an emancipator free Negroes a Virginia congressman told his and Northern colleagues. When you do that that we will listen to you with more

patience. Of course the South chose to overlook some of the fundamental distinctions of between bondage and even a restricted freedom. The Northern Negro after all was a free man and not an item of merchandise. He could not be sold or arbitrarily separated from his family and he could and did agitate for an improvement to his position. Still the south made a telling point. The North that went to war in 1861 had come to hate both slavery and the negro. Like the Kansas a Free Staters who wanted to keep all negroes a slave free out of their territory. Busted the Republican Party maintain that it was the only white man's party. He wanted to stem the advance of negroes into the free territories and thus was it possible to be both anti-slavery and anti negro. To proclaim in the same breath the Free Soil and white supremacy.

That's good northerners a feeling that no hypocrisy of flocked to see the successful stage production of Uncle Tom's Cabin plane to capacity audiences in the 1850s in the sort of gated theatres of the north. Opposing slavery and hating its victims. Frederick Douglass lamented has come to be a very common form of abolitionism. The north as it turned out was to fight a war for the liberation of the slaves. But with mixed feelings. I don't think enough of the nigger to go and fight for them in Ohio in a road shortly before enlisting. I would rather fight them in a New Yorker wrote home after a few months of military service. I think the best way to settle the question of what to do with the darkies would be to shoot them from a young Bostonian a member of one of the best families of that city writing to his brother from New Orleans that during the war. As I was going along this afternoon a little black baby that could just walk got under my feet. It looks so much like a big worm that I wanted to step on it and crush

it. The nasty greasy little vermin was the best it could be said of it. They may have been good soldiers observed a Massachusetts captain on Christmas Day of 1864. But the attempt to mix them up with white soldiers and people is productive of mischief. They are very arrogant and insolent presuming altogether too much on their social position. Republican as I am keep me clear of the darkie in any relation my repugnance to the make creases with the acquaintance. They have their place in their work. The time is not yet in my judgment when they can strike hands with the whites. He civil war it destroyed the institution of slavery did not destroy the values or attitudes which that institution had bred in its 200 years of existence. It had not altered in any fundamental way the Southern image of the negro. Most Southerners still felt the compulsions of habit and custom which had determined the negroes that place in their society. These were still deemed to be just right and proper. We can't feel toward them as you

do in South Carolinian told the Northern traveller I suppose we ought to it is possible for us that's wrong or to be pitied rather than blamed for something we can't help. Another Southerner at told this traveler. The death of slavery is recognized and we don't believe that because a nigger is free he ought to be saucy and we don't have any such nonsense as letting him vote. And in defining a status the for the freedmen only Southern white it drew upon the experience of the past. The antebellum code of racial etiquette the former slaves of the South had become free Negroes and the Southern white man had had experience with free Negroes before the Civil War. And now drawing upon that experience the south moved to preserve the ante bellum a code of etiquette did racial relations to legislate if necessary into law what had been custom to apply now to all the freed men to the position of inferiority which codes of customs and habits they had

applied to antebellum free Negroes principles and practices that which had guided them in their previous relations with the free negro population. Under the benevolent operation of the Lincoln and Johnson plans of the South was given an opportunity in the days following to the end of the war to reconstruct itself to fashion a new place for the Negro in Southern Society for the South fashioned no new place it proceeded to legislate what had been known of the ex Confederate States that gave any serious consideration to broadening the franchise to include even a few negroes as a freedman were mostly illiterate. They could not be trusted it was said with political responsibilities and to meet the problem of Negro illiteracy. The ex Confederate States excluded negroes from the newly established public school systems. Free public education was to be for whites only. There was no responsibility a claim to Louisiana legislate or to

educate any but the superior race of man. The white race through the southern states made some concessions that negroes could not legally hold property as Sue would be sued to have the legal marriages testify in court as competent witnesses. Some states forced the negro agricultural laborers A to make one year contracts that during the first ten days of January and Mississippi it for example authorized any person to arrest and return to his employer any negro who quit before the expiration of his contract. Several states have stipulated moreover that a Negro could not enter any other than an agricultural employment without securing a special license from a judge. South Carolina had not only had to secure a special license but he also had a pain in your tax ranging from $10 to $100. We chose to follow any employment other than that of a farmer or a servant and a new rate vagrancy

laws that provided that Negroes without lawful employment could be imprisoned and fined if they could not pay the fine. They were to be auctioned out to freight stated to period of time until it had been worked off. Mississippi provided also that all white persons assembling it with Friedman or associated with them shall be deemed to vagrants and dealt with accordingly. Due subordination was also demanded of the Freedman the Louisiana black code to for example stated the freight people of color ought never to presume to conceive themselves equal to the white from the contrary they ought to yield to them in every occasion and every speaker answer to them except with respect. Well this then was to be the future of the negro in a self reconstructed self an illiterate unskilled propertyless boatless agricultural laboring force under strict control and with inferior rights. This was the dynamic role designed for the Freedman in the reconstructed south. Wherever I go

reported a northern traveler a Carl Schurz at this time straight to shop the house the hotel of the steamboat. I hear the people talk in such a way as to indicate that they are yet unable to conceive the negro as possessing any rights at all. Men who are honorable in their dealings with their white neighbors will cheat a negro without feeling a single twinge of their own or to kill a negro they cannot be murdered to the bhajan a grown woman. They do not think fornication to take the property away from a negro they do not consider robbery. The people boast that when they get Friedman's affairs in their own hands to use their own expression the niggers will catch hell. The reason of all this is simple unmanifest the whites esteem the blacks their property by natural right. And however much they admit that the individual relations of masters and slaves have been destroyed by the war by the president's Emancipation Proclamation they still have an ingrained feeling that the blacks at large belong to the whites at large. And the North too had its doubts about the proper disposition of the emancipated slaves.

Slavery is dead to proclaim to the Cincinnati Enquirer the Negro is not there is the misfortune for the sake of all parties that would that he were still the north despite its doubts was not yet ready and to permit to the defeated South to return to pre-war methods of dealing with the negro. The first fruits of reconstruction the remark the editor Horace Greeley were a deplorable harvest and the sooner he said the North could plow the ground again and sow new seed the better. This the North would seek to do in Radical Reconstruction innovation was considered necessary at this time to salvage some semblance of victory to insure at least some measure of security and freedom for the emancipated slaves. I never believed in negro equality you declared Republican leader a Scot of Colfax. I believe God made his for his own wise purposes it's a period race. We have proved ourselves by our inventions and science history and philosophy to be superior. But God forgive me

if I think so. I would endeavor to grind them lower of the oppressed race. Our principle is liberty to all. We all shall meet at the same judgment bar. But I think I can say without any impiety I wish he had made all these races white for had he done so they would not be a Democrat today. It was a fair summary of. Northern opinion at least on the eve of record reconstruction but Radical Reconstruction simply failed to reconstruct it failed or to alter in any fundamental way of the economic and social pattern of the Old South. And this in turn ensured of the continued economic dependence of the freedman upon the Southern white man. Radical Reconstruction as a matter of fact was surprisingly conservative in practice. Only three reconstruction legislatures have for example provided for racially integrated schools.

No reconstruction legislature tampered with prevailing bans on interracial marriage. Still these much maligned reconstruction governments were the only democratic governments in the history the south. That is the only governments that which granted the negro equal civil and political rights with the white man. And that is what the Southern white men objected to not the fancied or real corruption of these the governments of for corruption was at this time a bipartisan and a national phenomena involving both that Negroes and whites. But the Southern white man objected to was the assumption of political responsibilities that by negroes and provisions the for the education of both the negro and white children and the protection of negroes and their relations with white employers. The success of this kind of programming might well have had disastrous effects on the continued subordination of the Southern negro. And this is what concerned the Southern white man about reconstruction. But radical reconstruction that was short

lived. It was never really given a chance to succeed. It was overthrown and in many states that by force violence and intimidation neither the newly adopted the 14th or 15th amendments that were adequate at this time to protect the negro in the exercise of his political and civil rights the full force of the federal government. It would have been necessary and such force was not forthcoming. The north in other words was to permit the overthrow of Radical Reconstruction preoccupied with its own problems anxious for sectional reconciliation. The North permitted the south the to go its own way and in time came even to accept the southern version of what had happened during Reconstruction the so called A tragic era as a convenient rationale for secession to abandon the negro. True Congress made one last attempt to secure the rights of negroes and 875 the Congress passed a civil rights bill which provided to that innkeepers theater owners hotel

managers and operators a public conveyances must accord equal treatment to all persons regardless of race or color. A provision requiring the admission of persons regardless of race to all public schools was limited in the final bill. But the Civil Rights Act of 1875 that went virtually unenforced. Still its very existence on the statute books a created considerable uneasiness especially in the south in 1883 However as if to confirm the new Northern consensus. The Republican northern dominated Supreme Court ruled that the Civil Rights Act unconstitutional. The South was henceforth to have a free hand in determining the negroes position in society. The negro asserted the majority decision must now assume the rank of a mere citizen and ceased to be the special favorite of the laws. His rights as a citizen were not to be protected in the ordinary modes by which other man's rights are

protected. The descent to Ironically it was written by Justice John Marshall Harlan of Kentucky a former slave holder and one of the two Southerners on the high bench. We shall enter upon an era of constitutional law Harlan declared. When the rights of freedom and American citizenship cannot receive from the nation that efficient protection which heretofore was unhesitatingly accorded to slavery and the rights of the master and the negro it Justice Harlan pointed out was not asking for special treatment as the majority decision inferred he was simply asking for equal treatment. News of the Supreme Court decision was announced to during a performance at the Atlanta Opera House and the audience of one newspaper reported broke into such a thunder of applause as with never before heard within the walls of the Opera House. And Society announced in Little Rock newspaper on hearing the decision is a law unto

itself which in matters of social in their nature overrides the statutes. Again it's decrees against his decrees the written law is powerless. Well now that this obnoxious statute has been erased from the books now the congressional reconstruction it ended. Now that northern intervention had apparently ceased. Southern editors and political leaders promised peace and harmony an era of racial good feelings. The north was the nigger was told that he could now rely upon that sense of justice which prevailed in the southern white community. The colored people are proclaimed at one Ed. It will do right to lay their grievances before the state legislators. And also to look to their rights under the common law. They are not to be oppressed or defrauded. The sentiment of justice and American of manhood forbids it. And so it went down as Nation magazine commented in 1883 expressing that expectations as well as the fierce passions of the war have died out between

1882 and 1888 the lower federal courts upheld the principle of separate but equal facilities for the gross. The interstate commerce a commission in the in three rulings between eight hundred eighty seven and eight hundred eighty nine also approved of this doctrine only remained afore the Supreme Court to do at its sanction this it did in 1896 in the case of Plessy versus Ferguson that's formally accepting of the doctrine of that legislation is powerless to eradicate racial distinctions and laying down the separate but equal rule in defense of segregation. There was only one dissent that from the sole southern justices on the court. Again Justice Harlan. The end of Radical Reconstruction did not automatically eliminate the negro from Southern politics. Some areas of the South negroes continued to vote and even hold office should they in any way threaten the supremacy of the whites of fraud violence and intimidation to quickly put them back in their place and in some areas of the south of the

Democratic ruling class. The conservative Democratic ruling class affectively controlled or coerced the Negro vote to maintain its own power and to defeat to the new challenge a depressed white to farmers and where it was unable to control the Negro vote whereas southern populists have made some inroads into that vote or appeal to that vote. The conservatives raised the specter of Negro domination. The end result was the disfranchisement of the negro in the south. White men would now be free to divide among themselves not the fear of Negro rule. The negro would now be forced to abandon the false hopes and find his proper place in the southern society. Mississippi set the pattern in 1890 when a constitutional convention disfranchise the negro by 1910 the negro had been does that franchise in almost every Southern state. And whatever method a state might use or to circumvent to the provisions of the 15th

Amendment. The objective that was set forth the quite explicitly by a delegate to the Virginia constitutional convention. Carter Glass and later a United States senator. Discrimination. He asked. Well that's precisely what we propose that exactly is what this convention was elected for to discriminate to the very extremity of permissible action under the limitations of the federal constitution with a view to the elimination of every negro voter who could be gotten rid of legally without materially impairing the numerical strength of the white electorate. And the intensive campaign of race hatred waged to justify disfranchisement soon made itself felt in other sectors of Southern life where custom and etiquette had previously defined the social relations between Negroes and whites of legal statutes and now intervened. The roots of Jim Crow that is the separate and usually inferior facilities for Negroes lie deep in the antebellum period as has been suggested in both the door

and the south. So this then was no new phenomena statute had not been considered necessary to enforce prevailing customs and habits and some contended they were not even necessary in the 1880s 1890s social custom for example had effectively excluded negroes from most public accommodations such as hotels where their reception according to a Charleston newspaper in 1885 would interfere with the accommodation and comfort of the white people and especially of the visitors from the north. State institutions A for the deaf and dumb and blinded like wise long practiced that strict segregation factor in the South Carolina superintend of education 873 order to the admission of Negroes to the state institution for the education of the deaf dumb and blind on the same basis as whites. The officers of the institution resigned the institution momentarily closed that was reopened on a second gaited basis.

Several attempts have been made in the aftermath of the Civil War to subjugate the public transportation facilities. Florida in 1865 it declared it a misdemeanor punishable by a whipping for any negro to intrude himself into any railroad car or other public vehicle set apart for the exclusive accommodation of white people. Mississippi that same year excluded negroes from first class cars unless travelling with their mistress capacity of maids and Texas in 1066 require that every railroad company attach to each passenger train a car for the special accommodation of freedmen they reconstruction legislatures are subsequently repealed the laws and some actually prohibited that racial discrimination in public transportation. But in most cases a social custom in the absence of any statutes still confined Negroes to second class cars and various cities also moved at this time and to segregate street railways that is in the

18 as early as the eighteen seventies but was not until the 1890s in the wake of disfranchisement than a rabbit did negro phobia. But the South moved to legislate what had been largely custom and to extend that legislation to practically every situation in which Negroes and whites might conceivably come into social contact. Henceforth of these laws declared the races were to be kept separate on the job while eating and drinking aboard trains and street cars and buses in waiting rooms in theatres the hospitals the places of amusement and Recreation public schools or churches parks prisons orphanages housing and as before institutions of for the insane the people minded the blind deaf the poppers the tubercular patients and juvenile delinquents. They were to get separate while a visiting zoo was that while using water fountains the targets of libraries boating bathing fishing facilities and even no elevators.

The rich list ran on in the state of Oklahoma once upon us to authorize a separate telephone booth. Several states ordered that public school textbooks be kept separate even while in storage. Some. Some states provided the Jim Crow Bibles A for Negro witnesses in court and a New Orleans ordinance segregated white and Negro prostitutes. And in Death of course the Negro is to be buried in a Jim Crow cemetery in 1900 the Richmond Times demanded that the rigid principle of segregation be applied in every relation of Southern life on the ground it said that God Almighty drew the color line and it cannot be obliterated. Well whoever drew it the line was there. The law had no confirmed presumably for all time the existence of two worlds. It had to confess to a southern white minister a mate of our eating and drinking are buying and

selling our labor and housing our rents our railroad our orphanages and prisons all recreations our very institutions religion a problem of race as well as a problem of maintenance. Well what had become of that sentiment of Justice said to be fail in southern society. What is become of that promised era of racial good feelings. Federal intervention had ended the negro had been disfranchised. Now he was systematically segregated conceivably race relations that might well have proved that the negro had been put in his proper place. But this was not the case. The truth is that the combination of white supremacy propaganda the negro phobia of race chauvinism an intense feeling generated by this campaign to effect the disfranchisement and second Gagan simply bred more race hatred more suspicion and increased violence. Between 1882 and one thousand or three some 2000 negroes were lynched in the southern

states and that is a very conservative estimate by 1900. Lynching it become almost a Southern and racial phenomena and to justify what was taking place the newspapers printed lurid tales of Negro crime and impertinence scores of tracts and books and pamphlets appeared around the turn of the century which purported to demonstrate the essential inferiority and inhumanity of the negro. But he was incapable of improvement in civilization. That freedom had caused a reversion to barbarism but the Negro race was an inferior immoral and criminal race that could never catch up with white civilization at the mixture of the races would dissipate at both. That even lynching was at times that necessary because the negroes increasing get tendency it was rape. And the North acquiesced with every form of fervor remained there was now devoted to the complex

problems of industrialization. When the Supreme Court invalidated the Civil Rights Act of the Northern press was generally favorable. This it said would hasten the end of race prejudice. It will reduce all citizens to equal status before the law instead of throwing it all of federal protections around the few. The negro race would ultimately benefit to from this decision. The size of North felt her conscience was clear. North was able to delude itself of the notion that it set the negro free more united given the negro the right to vote. And by 1900 only a few isolated cities unlike Indianapolis and Philadelphia and some scattered sections in southern Illinois Ohio and Indiana continued to separate the races and public schools. And most of the northern states after the Supreme Court decision on the Civil Rights Act passed the state civil rights laws modeled on that of the federal act. But the courts proceeded to to narrow the scope of the state laws and most of them remain in

forest especially in privately run into prizes like amusement parks hotels and theaters and even where litigation was successful which was not very often. The fines imposed were ordinarily very small. Most Northerners appeared to accept the principle underlying the civil rights legislation as long as legislation itself was not enforced the laws were acceptable in other words as long as they were not applied traditional assumptions regarding the negro it still largely shaped to the negroes position of the north. And these were reinforced in the 1890s or by some of the new sciences and especially psychology and sociology which added respectability to arguments about the physical and mental inferiority of the negro. The eminent scientist and naturalist Louis legacy argue that history had proved Negroes to be incapable of rising to the levels of white culture and living as equals in the white community.

But whites and AC argue distort is the most elevated species of the human race and blacks the most support of it both mentally and physically. Still further it g Stanley Hall an early and we known psychologist advised the Negro in his words who take his stand squarely upon the fact of his race. I respect its unique gifts develop all its capacities and make himself the best possible black man and not desire to be a brunette imitation of the Caucasian. And Hall's studies indicated that lower standards of health and sexual morality for Negroes alas lamented nigra leader a WB Dubois an 1897 sociologist to gleefully count his bastards and his prostitutes. The very soul of the toiling and sweating black man is darkened by the shadow of a vast despair. Men call the shadow prejudice and learnedly explained it as the natural defense of culture against barbarism.

Learning against ignorance purity against crime the higher against the lower races economically of the Negro is still confined to the low paying a low prestige occupations or giving further credence into the public image of the lazy shuffling of poverty stricken irresponsible negro a wedded to to positions of service and common labor. And should he try to rise up from his knees and labor unions were also on hand to exclude him as were bar associations and professional societies like the American Medical Association which in 1970 and not only refused to accept the credentials of Negro delegates but also white delegates who did not scruple to consult with colored physicians and those hospitals that did not accept negroes as staff members thus forcing them to turn their hospitalized patients over to white doctors and giving them no opportunity to use the facilities of hospitals to learn new skills and practices and a tween

eighteen eighty one thousand nine hundred almost every large northern city developed its own negro ghetto and this soon produced what has come to be called a de facto a second occasion in the public school system which of course at this particular school is an outstanding example. The negro had once symbolized the sectional strife. Now that he had been relegated to an inferior place in American society he came to symbolize sectional reconciliation. It was very dramatic testimony to this fact in 1890 when Henry W. Grady a prominent Southern spokesman for the industrial aspirations of the new South took his message to the north and in Boston he spelled this out in a speech entitled the race problem the self the south the argued would enjoy racial harmony if only the North would permit the South to work out the race problem in its own way. But the Southern white man best understood the Negro but hardly had he finished a report of the

Boston newspaper when the audience rose in mass and joined in one great cheer and thus as one historian has noted of Boston the very cradle and nursery of militant abolitionism had capitulated to the south at last and as if to underline this capitulation to Charles Debbie Elliott the president of Harvard University now called upon the North to be more sympathetic with the Southern problem. There was many negroes in the north. He argued as in the south it might well be preferable that separate schools would be established at present he said Harvard had about 5000 white students and 30 negroes the latter Elliott explained are hidden in the great mass and are not noticeable. If they were equal the numbers or in a majority we might deem a separation necessary. But they were even more compelling reasons in the 1890s for northerners to reappraise of their attitude toward the south and the Negro in many parts of the North especially along the seaboard to white supremacy had been translated into Anglo-Saxon Protestant supremacy into a fear that the new immigrants that were

polluting the old American stock the West Coast to face the problem of assimilating Orientals the east coast of assimilating southern and eastern Europeans and both created stereotypes of these groups which resemble in many ways the stereotypes of which Southerners had drawn of the negro and to the conquest of the Spanish American War which added new peoples or to the burgeoning American empire gave even greater urgency and impetus to a solution of these problems. The Southern final solution thus began to strike a more sympathetic chord among northerners northerners who were now asked in effect to themselves take up the white man's a bird overseas. So what the Supreme Court upheld in 1898 the disfranchisement of the Negro in Mississippi Nation magazine was moved to pronounce it. An interesting coincidence that this important decision is rendered at a time when we are considering the idea of taking in a varied assortment of inferior races in different parts

of the world races ahead which of course could not be allowed to vote. And the ultra respectable Atlantic Monthly have made this point even more forcibly if the stronger and clever races free to impose its will upon new cops sullen people is on the other side of the globe. Why not in South Carolina and Mississippi. Finally Professor John Bridges of Columbia University historian and a political scientist of considerable evidence of the turn of the century concluded that the Republican Party and its work of opposing the sovereignty of the United States upon eight millions of Asiatics has changed its view with regard to the political relations of the races and has at last virtually accepted the ideas of the South upon that subject and never again he assured Southern leaders. But that party of emancipation give themselves over to the vain imagination of the political equality of man. And in a book on reconstruction published in 1902 Professor Burgess asserted that the

North was rapidly learning that as he put it vast differences in political capacity existed between whites and negroes that he said it is the white man's mission his duty and his great right to hold the reins of political power in his own hands for the civilization of the world and the welfare of mankind. A black skin means membership in a race of man which has never of itself succeeded to reason has never therefore created any civilization of any kind. Well the implications of this new imperial as it were by no means lost on southern political leaders. The race problem proclaimed a delegate to the Alabama constitutional convention which disfranchised of the negro. Is no longer confined to the southern states. United States that faces the same problem from Cuba to Alabama to Hawaii to the Philippines and he said we have a sympathy instead of the hostility of the north. The North that then indicated its acquiescence in this final solution to the problem of racial relations just franchise with the new

segregation of the South a more subtle form of prescription in the north. And both policies that were supported by racist doctrines which held that the negro was innately inferior immoral and a criminal prone race that could never equal the whites and civilization is in. It is an indisputable fact that summed up the Washington Post in 1881. But there was an almost insuperable objection on the part of most whites to social contact with the blacks. We did not propose to argue about this feeling that exists in all sorts of time it may soften the prejudice but attempts to destroy it by summary methods will only intensify it. Even those who are known as the loudest champions of equal rights do not mingle with the blacks and do not encourage them to apply for civil office. Encouraged by this northern attitude of hands off of the South it was in a position to give full vent to to its a racist of feelings. There's no need to any longer to apologize for what was happening there was no need to rationalize in any way the

suppression of the negro's constitutional rights. We took the government away and boasted to Senator Tillman of South Carolina. We stuffed ballot boxes we shot them. We're not ashamed of it. The senator from Wisconsin would have done the same thing. I see it in his eye right now. He would have done it. In fact a Senator Tillman claim the support of large segments of northern opinion when he toured to the north on a lecture circuit he attracted enthusiastic crowds. He told his audience that the negro was a kin to the monkey an ignorant and debased and he botched race of any northerner it chose to challenge him. Senator Tillman retorted the brotherhood of man exists no longer because you shoot negroes in Illinois when they come in competition with your labor as we shoot them in South Carolina. They come in competition with us in the matter of elections. You do not love them any better than we do. You pretend that you did but you no longer pretended except to get their votes. And race riots at the turn of the century in Atlanta Georgia. New York City Akron Ohio.

New Orleans. Springfield Illinois bore very vivid testimony into Senator Tillman's pronouncements. Well what was the Negro to do. I asked the philosophical saloon keeper Mr. Dooley a creation of Peter Finley Dunn around the turn of the century the negro he exclaimed can go to the north and be a subject race or stay in the south and be an object lesson. But the negro was compelled to do what effect was to construct a separate world. He whirled on the other side of the color line ostracized from the white world of the negro sought to establish in some ways a carbon copy of it. A world made up of Negro churches and schools the banks of theatres or professions and business establishments a world which was soon producing a substantial and Negro middle class that soon found itself caught in the rather awful a dilemma of suffering from segregation. While at the same time having a vested interest in maintaining it it was just to this rising middle class in the Negro community that look at the Washington was to make such a powerful

appeal that toward the close of the century. And paradoxically And finally a progressive ism as it evolved in the early 20th century coincided with this great wave of racism sweeping across the country and in fact progressivism often rested on racist foundations as in the south and in the advocacy of overseas and probably less of it was in the administration of Woodrow Wilson for example of the deterioration of the negroes position was acted out on still another level that of the federal government. With the election of the Virginia born of Democrat Woodrow Wilson the racism ran rampant in the nation's capital. The South returned in full force to Washington government the departments of public services that were now rigidly segregated. The city of Washington itself it was now literally Jim Crow the negro civil servants were down graded when the president was pressed on this point. He insisted that segregation was being instituted for the benefit of the negro.

And Wilson the curtly dismissed the delegation of Negro leaders and carrying a protest to the White House. This is a white man's country and no social equality no political equality in matters of civil rights and legal adjustments to give the white man as opposed to the colored man the benefit of the doubt and under no circumstances interfere with the prestige of the white race in educational policy that the negro have the crumbs that fall from the white man's table. Let there be such industrial education the negro as will best fit him to serve the white man. Only Southerners understand the bigger question that the South settled the negro question the status of the peasantry as all the Negro may hope for if the races are to live together in peace. Let the lowest white man count for more than the highest negro and the above statements indicate the leadings of Providence. Of course not all Southerners subscribe to this creed. Nor was this creed confined to the south or for that matter to the negro by

1913 when Bailey set down this creed. One could at least argue that a national racial racial pattern had begun to emerge. The oriental of course was to be excluded from the American shores. Federal legislation would resolve this question as it would the ever increasing tide of European immigration immigrant stream to us to be very carefully refined. The negro is to be kept in his inferior place in American society. The Indian reservation and then four years later in 1917 the United States under President Woodrow Wilson went to war to make the world safe for democracy for its own power mean. You know. I would say that.

The policy of a Booker T Washington to in effect encouraged some of this legislation. Now the whole question of Booker T Washington and segregation is still a rather controversial one. And in fact. August Meyer who Fessor at Morgan State has in a very recent book negro thought in America from about 800 to 900. Fourteen argued in effect to that Booker T Washington was at the same time. Carrying on a kind of oath brother servant surreptitiously carrying on a campaign against segregation they never really accepted the idea of social segregation is some historians contended and quite frankly I have not investigated Booker T Washington thoroughly to be able to make any kind of conclusion between these two arguments.

But certainly Southerners and northerners were much encouraged by Washington's message and in fact in 1895 to my way of thinking is in some ways at least very symbolic year because it's the year of course of Washington's Atlanta speech and also the year of the death. Of Frederick Douglass and indeed I think there's a Consider amount of symbolism there. But certainly northerners and southerners were encouraged northerners in the rectory essence with the Southern solution and southerners in the policies which they've adopted by the so-called accommodation ism of Booker T Washington game again very heavy the legislation was passed. But here in the time cycle. Right or whether you are like me really waiting like a slave. Well I think primarily much of the lynching is the result of the kind of campaign that was waged to affect the disfranchisement and segregation.

There was intense nigger phobia that was foisted upon the south at this time. I think also resulted in a great deal of violence of the sort. Now lynching actually up to this time was by no means a strictly racial phenomena or Southern phenomena. So the number of lynchings in the north as well. But by 900 least as I pointed out this had become largely a racial and sexual phenomena. The problem of course a lynching with with statistics about lynching is that it simply does not take into consideration the deaths caused by other means of which there are these are considerable and of course these are simply unrecorded recall one case in Lake City South Carolina where a late 1890s a negro postmaster had been appointed. There are still some leaders being appointed to federal positions and the community resented it and simply invaded his house at a fire in his the family and the postmaster came out of the house and shot them

down. Well this it does not become a statistic and lynching such things as hunting parties of negroes are after all not even a not simply development of the of the late 19th century these persisted into the into the 20th century as well. It has to be for sport. Only tell me the importance of the. Last ones from her eyes and. Not tell them that it was certainly important force in the eighteen seventies in the overthrow of reconstruction. The Klan is only one of many secret societies organized into the overthrow of reconstruction and then it had the Klan of course had a great revival in the years immediately following the First World War and that time it was quite different from the seventies movement because it was primarily a northern movement it was a clan the strongest that the national headquarters in the factor of the clan of at least the strongest state of the clan was in

Indiana where I actually managed to elect a governor. In the years following the. First World War was also very strong in Oregon. An organ coming into into this. At that time of need in the 1905 or the Klan It also was aimed not only at negroes but at the Jews. Communists. Had all sorts of. Things was going after was also very very important and doesn't give me very important business enterprise and fact The Indiana. Clan who only collapsed collapsed rather glamorously when the leader of the clan in Indiana apparently. Violated a white secretary on a train heading for Chicago and then had her imprisoned in some

hotel room in Chicago when all of this came out. The Klan lost a great deal of. Room for her to be entered.