Blair Kelley tells the story of several turn-of-the-century desegregation campaigns. Many readers will be aware that black Americans mounted successful boycott campaigns to desegregate urban transit systems, particularly from August Meier and Elliot Rudwick?s 1969 article.? Kelley looks at several of these, and takes issue with Meier and Rudwick?s depiction of them as essentially conservative and middle-class, in contrast to the more radical and mass-based Montgomery bus boycott of 1955. His story shows the complex problems that arose in black communities divided along lines of class, ideology, and complexion. Meier and Rudwick told their story in a journal article. Though Kelley provides a ?thick description? social history, he probably could …show more content…
have done as well in a smaller compass. Most of the book is a prelude to the actual boycotts, telling the story of the development of urban transportation in the late nineteenth century. The railroad, the advance agent of the urban and industrial revolution, ?threatened the stability of the racial order in an increasingly fluid society? (p. 34). He suggests, but does not conclude, that the segregation of the 1890s (like lynching) was a response to rapid black progress in the late nineteenth century — that whites imposed segregation ?despite or perhaps because of the progress made by African Americans? (p. 60). New Orleans blacks were divided between an old Creole elite and the newly freed slaves and their children.
One of Homer Plessy?s complaints against the Louisiana segregation law was that it deprived him of his reputation as a white man. (Plessy had one black great grandparent — an ?octoroon,? in the parlance of the day.) Kelley notes that this part of Plessy?s plea was ?perhaps too clever. His approach fell short of offering a more universal solution to the problem of Jim Crow? (p. 80). It also reflected the Creole elite?s failure to work with the …show more content…
freedmen. Kelley reconstructs an interesting debate between two leaders of the Richmond black community, Maggie Walker and John Mitchell, on the question of whether elite whites or lower-class whites pressed for segregation, and whether there was anything in lower-class black culture that fed the movement. Some sympathetic whites, like novelist George Washington Cable, were comfortable with class-based segregation, one that would recognize that blacks could meet bourgeois white cultural standards. The country?s first independent regulatory agency, the Interstate Commerce Commission, did not clarify the problem. It ruled that segregation could not be based solely on color, but that racial segregation within equal first-class cars or second-class cards was acceptable. Kelley calls the commission?s report ?a bungled attempt to argue for a fairer segregation system? (p. 39), but this was also what the Montgomery Improvement Association initially sought in 1955. The most interesting and controversial part of Kelley?s story concerns the role of the streetcar companies.
Years ago, economist Jennifer Roback showed that history confirmed the economic argument that rational businessmen would oppose the costs of segregation, and that southern railroads helped fund Plessy?s challenge to the Louisiana segregation law. Kelley recognizes this, but is so patently biased against business (his heroes, after all, are the proletarians whom Meier and Rudwick neglected) that he puts the worst possible face on what he calls ?this unholy alliance? of black citizen groups with the companies who ?viewed Jim Crow cars as an expensive inconvenience? (p.
74). New Orleans? only black newspaper and many prominent ministers did not support a boycott approach, preferring instead to work with the railroads to challenge the segregation law in the courts. (This was also Thurgood Marshall?s position during the Montgomery bus boycott. The future Supreme Court justice scoffed at the boycott, and took credit for the victory when the Supreme Court overturned the Alabama segregation law Gayle v. Browder. ?All that walking for nothing,? he cracked.) Kelley doubts whether the New Orleans companies really wanted to win in court. Their weak case suggests that the suit was ?perhaps … simply a stopgap designed to divide the city?s black leaders poised for a boycott? (p. 113). The climax of his tale is the 1906 Savannah boycott. Progressive elements in that city enacted a segregation law in order to bankrupt the Savannah Electric Company. (Kelley rightly recognizes the conjunction of segregation and progressive reform in the South.) The politicians knew that a segregation law would provoke a black boycott and ruin the railroad. The company (a subsidiary of the Boston-based Stone and Webster Co.) took steps to combat the boycott, patronizing black ministers and hiring black workers. Kelley claims that this demonstrates that ?northern companies contributed the capital necessary to make the segregated South,? and ?the streetcar companies? willingness to invest in segregation? (pp. 187, 193). In fact, it demonstrates that Kelley shares the progressive assumption of business guilt. For progressives a century ago, business was guilty of undermining the racial order and making segregation necessary for white supremacy. Today, progressive historians try to hold business responsible for fostering that segregation. One might even call this ?blaming the victim.? Yet Kelley himself concludes that the boycotts failed ?in the face of lawmakers? unflinching support for separating the races? (p. 196). Right to Ride would benefit from a more through treatment of legal history, of the sort provided in Andrew Kull?s Color-Blind Constitution. Kelley mentions that Martin Luther King was in the Birmingham jail for violating an Alabama anti-boycott law enacted after successful black efforts of 1900-02. The story of these laws would have been useful. Also, he makes no mention of the case of Hall v. DeCuir, in which the Supreme Court held that a state?s proscription of segregation interfered in Congress? power to regulate commerce. But it remains an impressive and thorough work of historianship.
Making Whiteness: the culture of segregation in the south, 1890-1940 is the work of Grace Elizabeth Hale. In her work, she explains the culture of the time between 1890 and 1940. In her book she unravels how the creation of the ‘whiteness’ of white Southerners created the ‘blackness’ identity of southern African Americans. At first read it is difficult to comprehend her use of the term ‘whiteness’, but upon completion of reading her work, notes included, makes sense. She states that racial identities today have been shaped by segregation, “...the Civil War not only freed the slaves, it freed American racism
...isely. This book has been extremely influential in the world of academia and the thinking on the subject of segregation and race relations in both the North and the South, but more importantly, it has influenced race relations in practice since it was first published. However, Woodward’s work is not all perfect. Although he does present his case thoroughly, he fails to mention the Negroes specifically as often as he might have. He more often relies on actions taken by whites as his main body of evidence, often totally leaving out the actions that may have been taken by the black community as a reaction to the whites’ segregationist policies.
Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow immediately became an influential work both in the academic and real worlds because of the dramatic events that coincided with the book’s publication and subsequent revisions. It was inspired from a series of lectures that Woodward delivered at the University of Virginia in 1954 on the Jim Crow policies that the South had reverted to in order to deal with the dynamics of its Negro population. The original publication debuted in 1955, just prior to the explosive events that would occur as part of the civil rights movement climax. Because of these developments in less than a decade, the book’s topic and audience had drastically changed in regard to the times surrounding it. Woodward, realizing the fluidity of history in context with the age, printed a second edition of the book in 1966 to “take advantage of the new perspective the additional years provide” and “to add a brief account of the main developments in ...
Hahn discusses both the well-known struggle against white supremacy and the less examined conflicts within the black community. He tells of the remarkable rise of Southern blacks to local and state power and the white campaign to restore their version of racial order, disenfranchise blacks, and exclude them from politics. Blacks built many political and social structures to pursue their political goals, including organizations such as Union Leagues, the Colored Farmers’ Alliance, chapters of the Republican Party, and emigration organizations. Hahn used this part of the book to successfully recover the importance of black political action shaping their own history.
The original edition of The Strange Career of Jim Crow had as its thesis that segregation and Jim Crow Laws were a relative late comer in race relations in the South only dating to the late 1880s and early 1890s. Also part of that thesis is that race relations in the South were not static, that a great deal of change has occurred in the dynamics of race relations. Woodward presents a clear argument that segregation in the South did not really start forming until the 1890s. One of the key components of his argument is the close contact of the races during slavery and the Reconstruction period. During slavery the two races while not living harmoniously with each other did have constant contact with each other in the South. This c...
Although some of Woodward’s peripheral ideas may have been amended in varying capacities his central and driving theme, often referred to as the “Woodward Thesis,” still remains intact. This thesis states that racial segregation (also known as Jim Crow) in the South in the rigid and universal form that it had taken by 1954 did not begin right after the end of the Civil War, but instead towards the end of the century, and that before Jim Crow appeared there was a distinct period of experimentation in race relations in the South. Woodward’s seminal his...
... newspaper article shown by Woodward gave a picture of how new the idea of segregation was in the South. Woodward put it best when he stated, “The policies of proscription, segregation, and disfranchisement that are often described as the immutable ‘folkways’ of the South, impervious alike to legislative reform and armed intervention, are of a more recent origin.” (65) He wanted to show how the roots of the system were not integrated with slavery. Jim Crow laws and slavery were both horrible institutions, but they existed as two seperate entities. Woodward does not claim the South to be picturesque, because the Jim Crow laws were not established in the region. The South established Jim Crow laws and made them worse than found in the North. Woodward’s goal was not to protect the South’s legacy, but to give a clearer picture of the facts regarding the Jim Crow laws.
The book “Boston Against Busing: Race, Class and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s” written by Ronald P. Formisano examines the opposition of court-ordered desegregation through forced busing. The author comes to the conclusion that the issue surrounding integration is a far more complex issue than just racism that enveloped the southern half of the country during this time period. Formisano argues that there were broader elements including a class struggle, white backlash and “reactionary populism” that contributed to the emotions of those involved.
On the date May 26, 1956, two female students from Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, Wilhelmina Jakes and Carrie Patterson, had taken a seat down in the whites only section of a segregated bus in the city of Tallahassee, Florida. When these women refused to move to the colored section at the very back of the bus, the driver had decided to pull over into a service station and call the police on them. Tallahassee police arrested them and charged them with the accusation of them placing themselves in a position to incite a riot. In the days after that immediately followed these arrests, students at the Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University organized a huge campus-wide boycott of all of the city buses. Their inspiring stand against segregation set an example and an intriguing idea that had spread to tons of Tallahassee citizens who were thinking the same things and brought a change of these segregating ways into action. Soon, news of the this boycott spread throughout the whole entire community rapidly. Reverend C.K. Steele composed the formation of an organization known as the Inter-Civic Council (ICC) to manage the logic and other events happening behind the boycott. C.K. Steele and the other leaders created the ICC because of the unfounded negative publicity surrounding the National Associat...
C. Vann Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow looks into the emergence of the Jim Crow laws beginning with the Reconstruction era and following through the Civil Rights Movement. Woodward contends that Jim Crow laws were not a part of the Reconstruction or the following years, and that most Jim Crow laws were in place in the North at that particular time. In the South, immediately after the end of slavery, most white southerners, especially the upper classes, were used to the presence and proximity of African Americans. House slaves were often treated well, almost like part of the family, or a favored pet, and many upper-class southern children were raised with the help of a ‘mammy’ or black nursery- maid. The races often mixed in the demi- monde, and the cohabitation of white men and black women were far from uncommon, and some areas even had spe...
In 1887, Jim Crow Laws started to arise, and segregation became rooted into the way of life of southerners (“Timeline”). Then in 1890, Louisiana passed the “Separate Car Act.” This forced rail companies to provide separate rail cars for minorities and majorities. If a minor sat in the wrong car, it cost them $25 or 20 days in jail. Because of this, an enraged group of African American citizens had Homer Plessy, a man who only had one eighth African American heritage, purchase a ticket and sit in a “White only” car on June 7, 1892.
Success was a big part of the Civil Rights Movement. Starting with the year 1954, there were some major victories in favor of African Americans. In 1954, the landmark trial Brown vs. The Board of Education of Topeka Kansas ruled that segregation in public education was unfair. This unanimous Supreme Court decision overturned the prior Plessy vs. Ferguson case during which the “separate but equal” doctrine was created and abused. One year later, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. launched a bus boycott in Montgomery Alabama after Ms. Parks was arrested for not giving up her seat in the “colored section”. This boycott, which lasted more than a year, led to the desegregation of buses in 1956. Group efforts greatly contributed to the success of the movement. This is not only shown by the successful nature of the bus boycott, but it is shown through the success of Martin Luther King’s SCLC or Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The conference was notable for peacefully protesting, nonviolence, and civil disobedience. Thanks to the SCLC, sit-ins and boycotts became popular during this time, adding to the movement’s accomplishments. The effective nature of the sit-in was shown during 1960 when a group of four black college students sat down at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in hopes of being served. While they were not served the first time they commenced their sit-in, they were not forced to leave the establishment; their lack of response to the heckling...
People who were not European back in the 1800s, were considered a lower class than them, they later enslave people from Africa just because and for the next hundreds of years they were slaves. Many people tried to end slavery because the concept was inhuman.And at 1865 the United States banned slavery, but still had the right to mistreat people of color. One of the people who stood up to these rights, Homer plessy, who was ⅛ African because his great-grandmother was from Africa. Plessy was light enough to considered white, but when he people ask him if he was a man of color, he would gladly answer yes. Furthermore, because of Plessy’s actions, it help solidifies the establishment of the Jim Crow era.
San Antonio, Texas is no exception to the inherent racism and Jim Crow law that dictated African American lives soon after Reconstruction. However, one question needs to be asked when analyzing racism, what enables the justification of racism in society? By analyzing the San Antonio Traction Company Correspondence, one can view firsthand accounts of Jim Crow law enforcement and gain insight towards the reasons for the justification of racism. In the early 1940s, the San Antonio Traction Company enforced the racist Jim Crow laws rather than face the consequences of breaking a law, upsetting whites, and opposing the normalized racism in the south at the time.
Robinson, Jo Ann Gibson, and David J. Garrow. The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: the Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson. Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 1987. Print.