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The UNITED STATES to 1910 (3 of 8)

At the turn of the century, most Americans of African descent still lived in the South, and the South was changing. The South had been sending its cotton to factories in the north and in England, but now fabric manufacturing was rising in the south. Atlanta, Georgia, was already a factory town, and, with its skyscrapers, it looked like a northern city.

At the turn of the century it had been only thirty-five years since the American Civil War had ended, and Negroes, as they were then called, had not yet acquired equality. The victorious north had disenfranchised the South's most able white leaders, and with the failure of reconstruction most Afro-Americans had emerged disenfranchised, with no property, no wealth and no education. At the turn of the century, many blacks were still working on plantations or as sharecroppers. Many Southern whites still believed that the Bible proclaimed blacks inferior and a damned people. Southern whites had as much of a capacity for myth as people elsewhere, and they saw blacks, in general or uniformly, as uneducable and culturally primitive. Some who believed in Darwin's biologically evolution held the view that blacks were lower in evolutionary development than whites. Like other people, whites tended to view people who looked different from them as ugly in appearance -- for example, the way that indigenous people in the Americans in the 1500s saw Europeans. Many whites believed in the divine right of whites to rule, which fit with what they saw in the growth of Europe's empires. Many whites, themselves wanting in status, were content to have blacks identified as lower in status than they. However superior the Southern whites believed their white race to be, they feared that this superiority would melt away by the granting of equal rights to blacks. To preserve their culture and maintain the status they had they favored keeping the races publicly separate. Many whites in the South were conforming to what they saw as the values of whites in general -- as most individuals do regarding the society with which they identify. And there remained a legacy among whites in the South, from the days of Reconstruction, that whites were going to be overwhelmed and ruled by blacks.  

In 1896, the Supreme Court, in a case called Plessy versus Ferguson, sided with Southern states that wanted "separate but equal" facilities for blacks. And, by the turn of the century, many Southern whites were exercising what discrimination they could. "White Only" and "Colored Only" signs appeared, as did laws describing where blacks could and could not reside, attend church, eat, use public toilets or drink water. Laws appeared against the ultimate in integration between the races: intermarriage. And outside the South, most whites either cared little about segregation in the South or they welcomed it.

Some in the Democratic Party -- which dominated southern politics -- were resorting to demagoguery. They associated Yankee intrusions with the Republican Party -- the party in power in Washington. A few demagogic southern politicians spoke of Republican misrule and the threat of Negro domination. And to limit the power that blacks might exercise through voting, southern states were creating literacy tests, poll taxes and long residency requirements. In the South, except in Maryland, Tennessee and Kentucky, nearly all Afro-Americans became disenfranchised, and fifty percent of the whites were caught by the requirements and also disenfranchised. But voting by Afro-Americans remained in Memphis, Houston and San Antonio, where black voters had helped progressive city administrations come to power.

At the turn of the century, vigilantism still existed. Lynching was its common method. Most of the lynching of whites, by whites, took place in the western states. It was not only Southern whites who were lynching blacks: ten percent of the lynching of blacks took place outside the South, where blacks were fewer in number. In 1900, more than a hundred black males were lynched, one quarter of them accused of raping a white woman. If a white man raped a black woman he might be fined twenty dollars.

In Mississippi, "night riding" whites attempted to force black farmers to abandon land they owned or rented. And in many places in the Deep South, blacks remained at the mercy of the whims of white folks. So as not to offend, black men shuffled and cringed. And rather than understanding the source of this, it reinforced the belief among some whites that whites were superior. And some whites with a status-problem could salve their wounded egos by lording over blacks while characterizing all blacks as figures even less worthy than they.

Another defense for blacks was migration. In the north and west were few jobs for blacks, but many blacks, filled with hope for a better life, left anyway, and some southern landowners were distressed at losing the labor of blacks. In the north, blacks found employers hiring immigrant white workers, and they found urban slums, prejudice, resentment and fear. In the north, blacks were being ridiculed in vaudeville shows and in some popular songs. And the jobs that blacks found paid only about half what whites were paid for the same or comparable work.