The Nadir of Race Relations
John Boles
[1] In agricultural practices, the
South of 1930 or so seemed almost indistinguishable from the South of 1900 or
1870. Poor black and white framers walked behind mules in dusty cotton fields;
lived in small, unpainted shacks made simply of planks nailed to a frame,
without inner walls or ceilings; and stayed in hock to the furnishing merchant –
almost powerless to change their lives for the better. The southern journalist,
Walter Hines Page, returned to his homeland in 1920 after an absence of two
decades and found life and labor practically unchanged; “pickled” was his
phrase. “Southern rural society,” he wrote, “has remained stationary longer
than English-speaking people have remained stationary anywhere else in the
world.” But in one area there was change, and in large measure for the worse.
Perhaps it should be no surprise that in an era of increasing agricultural
poverty and the disillusionment following the Populist collapse, white racism
increased. Blacks became the scapegoats for the frustration, poverty, and
bitterness of poor whites, and the white establishment harnessed this displaced
anger to thwart threats to its power. Blacks’ hard-earned economic successes,
limited though they were, by implication threatened whites’ image of superiority,
and the specter of black political influence in the wake of the Populist revolt
unleashed white hate. White politicians played the race card to push down
blacks and created a rape hysteria to weld together a cross-class coalition of
white support. The poorest class of white women were elevated by political
rhetoric to the sacred ranks of southern ladyhood in order to win the support
of their husbands at the polls – white economic interests were trumped by
social fears. This was the nadir of race relations in post-slavery America.
[2] Blacks were almost completely
disenfranchised by the end of the century, but disenfranchisement is only one
index of the dilemma. Lynching had long
been a weapon of vigilantes in the South. Well into the 1880s, it was
frequently used against whites, but the race of its victims changed. In 1885,
for example, of the 184 lynching in the nation (almost all of which were in the
South). 110 of the victims were white, 74 black. By 1900, the ratio had
drastically reversed; of 115 total lynchings, 9 were of whites, and 106 victims
were black. Two blacks a week were lynched in the South. The number of
lynchings decreased in the next three decades, but the overwhelming majority of
victims remained black - 53 blacks and 5 whites in 1920; 20 blacks and 1 white in
1930. In addition, many southern trials were simply domesticated forms of
lynching, with evidence ignored and innocent blacks - like the nine so-called
Scottsboro boys in Alabama in 1931 - victimized by what were, in effect,
kangaroo courts. It has been suggested that southern white men who had largely
lost their ability to provide for their families sought in compensation to
enhance their many self-images by casting black males as beasts - as an enemy
with - from whom their white families had to be protected.
[3] Prominent white southerners also,
men and women, publicly and privately defended the lynching of blacks as necessary
to defend Western civilization, the scantily of womanhood, and the southern way
of life. In fact, a distinct minority of lynching victims were accused of
raping white women, yet in the rhetoric used to defend the heinous practice of
lynching, rape was almost always the alleged crime being punished or being
prevented. The climate of hate and suspicion, fanned by such spokesperson as
Tom Watson, the former Georgia Populist leader, and Senator Furnifold Simmons
of North Carolina, created an environment where almost unbelievable prejudice
and violence became socially acceptable. Even a white person who seemed foreign
or insufficiently supportive of southern customs could be shunned, beaten, or
killed. Leo Frank, for example, a mild-mannered, well-educated, but
Brooklyn-reader Jewish factory manager in Atlanta, was accused in 1931 of
raping and killing a thirteen-year-old white girl, Mary Phagan, who worked in
his factory. The evidence was scanty, but the jury, whose members hate and
feared people of the Jewish "race," convicted Frank and sentenced him
to die. When the governor, after an investigation, commuted Frank's sentence to
life imprisonment, an outraged mob on August 17, 1915, seized Frank from his
jail cell in Marietta and lynched him. What happened to Frank - which became a
cause célébre across the nation - happened to hundreds of blacks throughout the
South.
[4] Many lynchings were not secret
affairs, conducted surreptitiously under cover of darkness or sheets. On the
contrary, lynchings often became public spectacles, with huge crowds, voluntary
participation, refreshments served, innocent blacks terrified, law enforcement
officials averting their eyes. At some of the more outrageous events, any
interested party could shoot, stab, hit, burn, or otherwise brutalize the
victim. A particularly brutal fate befell Sam Hose, a black from rural Georgia
community who allegedly killed his white employee, raped his wife, and robbed
them as well. Hose was apprehended and lynched on April 23, 1899, with special
trains bringing spectators from Atlanta to witness the Sunday event. After the
lynching, Hose was burned, his body cut open, and cooked slices of his heart
and liver sold as prize souvenirs; his knuckles were later displayed in the
window of an Atlanta grocery store. In the largest sense, the respectable white
society condoned such barbarities while members of the lower order did most of
the dirty work. In 1898, Rebecca Latimer Felton of Georgia, a leading Methodist
layperson, journalist, prohibitionist, feminist, and the first woman appointed
to the U.S. Senate, exhorted white men that "if it takes lynching to
protect woman's dearest possession from drunken, ravening human beasts, then I
say lynch a thousand a week if it becomes necessary."
[5] Popular stereotypes and literary
depictions of blacks revealed the heightened racial animosities during the
1890s and thereafter. The iconography of blacks degenerated. Children's books,
cartoons, face mugs, miniature status for lawns, knick-knacks, and advertising
all exaggerated the black phenotype. Every black male had grossly oversized
lips, bulging eyes, and awkward posture; every black woman was rotund, with a
shiny black face and a turban; every black child seemed to cavort unharmed with
jungle animals and eat watermelon and appear not fully human. Often these
images were not consciously vicious, although on occasion black males were
depicted with razor in hand as though a quick slice was as natural as a
handshake. Blacks were shown as decidedly comical or dangerous or ridiculous,
never as mature, thinking, self-possessed adults: even the images that whites
insisted were lovable were inherently demeaning to blacks.
[6] Popular literature and film
expressed identical images, as did vernacular humor One of the more vicious
literary portrayals occurred in Thomas Dixon, Jr.'s, lurid bestseller, The Leopard's Sports: A Romance of the White
Man's Burden, 1865-1990 (1902) and The
Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905). These two
novels represented the darkest interpretation of Reconstruction, a vengeful
period in American history when evil outside forces attempted to destroy
southern white Christian civilization and mongrelize the population. Every
imaginable stereotype was given memorable form: opportunistic, corrupt
carpetbaggers hoping to enrich themselves; mousy scalawags bent on humiliating
former planters; ignorant, smelly, barbarous blacks whose votes were
manipulated by the carpetbaggers; beautiful white women, pious and genteel,
subject to the animalistic desires of black beats; and heroic southern white
men fighting against all odds for civilization. The obvious stereotypes ring
hollow today, but such images seemed to many white southerners at the turn of
the century to capture essential truths about the last generation. Blacks were
the foulest villains: no longer smiling, suffering Sambos, but evil beasts.
Such images lay behind the white defenses of disenfranchisement and lynching. The Clansman was loosely adapted as the
story line for the 1915 movie Birth of a
Nation, breathtakingly innovative cinematographically but reactionary in
message. When Woodrow Wilson first saw this film, with its stark portrayal of
Reconstruction, he is said to have commented that this was history written with
lightning. The racist portrayals of blacks, larger than life on the silver
screen, were seared into the southern white psyche.
[7] It is difficult for readers today to grasp how rigid and far-reaching segregation became in the South during the two generations after 1900. Blacks went to separate schools and churches, lived in separate parts of town (often called "nigger town" or "nigger quarters"), used separate water fountains and restrooms, and had separate waiting rooms; they were often prohibited from parks, playgrounds, and music halls; and they could not sit in a restaurant and order a meal - perhaps they could enter through a back door and eat in the kitchen with the cooks. Blacks had to sit at the rear trolleys and in special train cars; they often could not try on clothes in department stores; they could not stay at "white" hotels but had to try to find black relatives or an obliging black family to stay with when traveling across the South - a dangerous trip even when not inconvenient. Curfews were enforced in some cities - Mobile in 1909, for example, required blacks to be off the streets by 10:00 PM. In every personal interaction with a white, blacks had to be careful to be properly deferential, to "know their place."
[7] It is difficult for readers today to grasp how rigid and far-reaching segregation became in the South during the two generations after 1900. Blacks went to separate schools and churches, lived in separate parts of town (often called "nigger town" or "nigger quarters"), used separate water fountains and restrooms, and had separate waiting rooms; they were often prohibited from parks, playgrounds, and music halls; and they could not sit in a restaurant and order a meal - perhaps they could enter through a back door and eat in the kitchen with the cooks. Blacks had to sit at the rear trolleys and in special train cars; they often could not try on clothes in department stores; they could not stay at "white" hotels but had to try to find black relatives or an obliging black family to stay with when traveling across the South - a dangerous trip even when not inconvenient. Curfews were enforced in some cities - Mobile in 1909, for example, required blacks to be off the streets by 10:00 PM. In every personal interaction with a white, blacks had to be careful to be properly deferential, to "know their place."
[8] The retribution for being
"uppity" could be both economic and physical, and, if a white woman
was involved, a black male even rumored to have breached in the slightest
regard the racial etiquette was very likely to be severely beaten, castrated,
or killed. Several southern cities - Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, New
Orleans in 1900, Atlanta in 1906, for example - suffered terrible race riots:
In Atlanta as many as ten thousand whites went on a rampage against blacks,
killing or beating every black they encountered. When the violence finally
subsided after hours of lawless assaults, 25 blacks were death, 150 wounded,
and hundreds left the city for good. Over a thousand black Wilmingtonians fled
that city never to return. Black prison inmates were also victimized by the
cruel system of leasing them out to private employers, and when that was
reformed was only moderated, not stopped. Violence toward blacks was the
reverse side of south gentility. Blacks often had no practical recourse but to
grin and bear it or to flee the region; and millions fled. In 1910, fifty years
after the Civil War, nine out of ten American blacks still lived in the South;
by 1960, only six out of ten blacks live in Dixie. In that half-century,
4,473,300 blacks migrated from the South to the North and the West.
[9] Blacks in the South constituted a
society with a society. Blacks lived in segregated sections of cities, and
black-owned businesses and a black professional class arose to serve their
needs. Black leadership came disproportionately from this business and
professional class, especially from ministers. Following the organization of
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1908,
black leaders joined the NAACP in hopes of advancing their race. Efforts in the
South had to be cautions, gradual, and piecemeal. For most American whites, and
probably most southern blacks, the preeminent black leader was educator Booker
T. Washington.
[12] New Englander William E.B. Du Bois, who was the first black to earn a Ph.D. at Harvard (1895), disdained such temporizing and argued that a talented minority of blacks should work for enhanced opportunities in matters cultural and social as well as economic. Du Bois argued that Washington insufficiently appreciated black culture and history and was too deferential toward the regnant ideas of business capitalism. Du Bois's eloquent book of essays, The Souls of Black Folk (1930), a kind of antidote to Up From Slavery, also became a classic and was particularly venerated by black intellectuals. The black community itself was divided on the proper response to segregation, but maneuvering room for southern blacks was extremely limited.
[12] New Englander William E.B. Du Bois, who was the first black to earn a Ph.D. at Harvard (1895), disdained such temporizing and argued that a talented minority of blacks should work for enhanced opportunities in matters cultural and social as well as economic. Du Bois argued that Washington insufficiently appreciated black culture and history and was too deferential toward the regnant ideas of business capitalism. Du Bois's eloquent book of essays, The Souls of Black Folk (1930), a kind of antidote to Up From Slavery, also became a classic and was particularly venerated by black intellectuals. The black community itself was divided on the proper response to segregation, but maneuvering room for southern blacks was extremely limited.
[13] In the early-twentieth century,
as in slavery times, some blacks did learn ways to carve out more autonomy and
freedom of action than the system seemed to allow. Black ingenuity, creativity,
and an inextinguishable desire to maximize control of their own lives resulted in
a limited degree of black progress, prosperity, and cultural expression in a
desperately racist society. Black businessmen in certain trades, especially
those with an all-black clientele, occasionally prospered, and the National Negro
Business League by 1915 had dozens of chapters across the South. Throughout the
region there were prosperous black stores, pharmacies, and funeral homes. Black
banks, though usually small and prone to failure because of their depositors'
weak resources, nonetheless sprouted across the South. Several black-owned
and-operated insurance companies were founded, the largest of which was the
North Caroline Mutual Life Insurance Company of Durham, established in 1899 by
John Merrick.
[14] Blacks churches grew rapidly in
size and influence in the decades after Preconstruction, and frequently they
were the largest religious instructions in southern cities. The churches
ministered to a broad spectrum of human needs - social, educational, economic,
cultural, and recreational - not just spiritual. Black women, especially, found
in the churches an opportunity for service and growth, although the male
ministers were often authoritarian. Black fraternal organizations and social
clubs offered additional ways for finding an arena for self-expression and
community service. A typically impressive self-help community organization was
the Neighborhood League, founded in 1908 in Atlanta by Mrs. Lugenia Hope, the
wife of Atlanta University president John Hope. The neighborhood Union
successfully advocated street, sanitation, and educational improvements in the
city's black neighborhoods. In other states and other cities, talented black
women - like Charlotte Hawkins Browns in North Carolina - organized clubs,
civic leagues, and even interracial initiatives with white women reformers to
offer home demonstration courses, sewing classes, and health clinics. No matter
how bad conditions got, many black women maintained their dignity and dedicated
heroic amounts of time and effort to "raise their race." But while it
is important to recognize black victories over the system, one should never
minimize the prejudice, poverty, injustice, and violence that afflicted
southern blacks in the midst of what was ironically labeled the Progressive
Era.
[15] During the course of World War
I, approximately fifty thousand American blacks, most of them from the South,
served in the military. Most of them had auxiliary duties, but some were
combatants and, because of their bravery and ferocious fighting, they suffered
casualties out of proportion to their numbers. When black soldiers returned
home after the war, they found racism just as entrenched as before. The war
might have been intended to make the world safe for democracy, but democracy
was for whites only in the American South. Black soldiers were less willing
after their military experience to turn the other cheek to repeated insults and
injury. The result, in response usually to unprovoked assaults by whites, was a
series of deadly race riots in Longview and Houston, Texas; in Knoxville,
Tennessee in Elaine, Arkansas; in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The North, too, was wracked
with a string of bloody confrontations, and a newly emergent Ku Klux Klan found
as strong as an acceptance in the North and West as in the South. Catholics, immigrants,
and outsiders in general, not just blacks, were the victims of the resurgent
KKK of the 1920s.
[16] Southern rural blacks in
particular, though, were pummeled with repeated blows of hateful racism, random
violence, and a cotton economy ravaged by boll weevils and overproduction.
Blacks were hardly in a position to withstand the collapse of the sharecropping
system. When, during the Great Depression, planters reduced their crop acreage
and kept the government reimbursements to themselves, blacks had no means to
defend their interests. When white government officials disbursed welfare
payments and severely discriminated against blacks, no effective black
challenge could be mounted. Whites, often ravaged by the depression themselves,
could rarely find within themselves the moral resources to be magnanimous
toward the poor blacks in their midst. In this context, the effort of the NAACP
to chip away legally at the monolith of segregation is a tale of heroism and
persistence.
[17] One of the first efforts of the
NAACP was through research and publication to reveal the extent of lynching in
the South. A study was issued in 1919 but had little effect, and in 1929,
Walter White, executive secretary of the NAACP, published Rope and Faggot: A
Biography of Judge Lynch. The NAACP, with the help of northern liberals, tried
to push federal antilynching legislation through Congress. Southern congressmen
fought these efforts hard and successfully. Although Eleanor Roosevelt
encouraged her husband to propose racial reform, Franklin D. Roosevelt thought
his New Deal programs too dependent on southern Democratic support to risk
alienating southern congressmen on the lynching issue. The concern of southern
whites - especially the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of
Lynching, organized in 1930 by Jessie Daniel from Texas - over the damage to
the South's reputation caused annually fell to eight, then six, then two, in
1939.
[19] As storm clouds of war rose over Europe at
the end of the decade, few observers of the South fully understood the
significance of the changes underway. Blacks were leaving the South in record
numbers, propelled by crushing rural poverty, the constant threat of violence,
and continuing racial discrimination. The boll weevil, crop limitation
policies, and the bare hint of the farm mechanization suggested that real
agricultural change was imminent. The courts seemed to reformers to be the
mechanism to break the nearly fatal hold of legal segregation. But taken as a
whole, the South still seemed to be pickled in time, as Walter Hines Page had
described it, rather than a region on the edge of transformation. W.J. Cash, a
North Carolina journalist who had a morbid fascination with the South and a
penchant overripe prose, summed up his critical evaluation of the South’s
entire a history and – in The Mind of the
South, published in 1941, now universally considered a classic – deemed the
region’s history tragically marked by continuity with the past. But he was
writing of the South he had known. Even so probing an analyst as Cash could not
foresee as the decade of the 1930s closed that the South was nearing the end of
an era. Events in the next decade and a half would reconstruct the South was
nearing the end of an era. Events in the next decade and a half would
reconstruct the South more completely than had the Civil War and Reconstruction
four score years earlier.