[Artical] "The Nadir of Race Relations" by John Boles

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."

[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.

[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.