Chapter Two: AFRICAN-AMERICANS IN THE ERA OF THE GREAT WAR
At the time of the Great Debate, the United States was a terrorist state solidly based upon the mass murder, torture, and oppression of African Americans--a government wholly illegitimate even by the standards of its own constitution, and worsening with every passing year. White supremacy both fostered and depended on economic exploitation, apartheid, educational disadvantage, terrorism, state-sanctioned private violence, disfranchisement, a justice system that was literally criminal, and racist vituperation from politicians, editors, and religious leaders. Litwack summarizes the plight of blacks in the decades 1877-1929 and beyond. The whites
owned the land, the law, the police, the courts, the government, the armed forces, and the press. The political system denied blacks a voice; the educational system denied them equal access and adequate resources; popular culture mocked their lives and aspirations; the economic system left them little room for ambition or hope; and the law and the courts functioned effectively at every level to protect, reinforce, and deepen their political powerlessness, economic dependence, and social degradation..... The terror inflicted by white mobs was far more spectacular, but scores of blacks who had never witnessed a lynching or a riot fell victim to the quiet violence practiced by whites who rigidly controlled their daily lives. From their personal experiences, most blacks knew how the landlord, the merchant, the banker, the judge, the sheriff, and the local politicians interacted to make certain the machinery of domination functioned effectively. This kind of violence devastated lives by depriving people of choices, dramatizing how little black men and women could do to make changes in their lives.[1]
The Economics of Neo-Slavery
In the decades surrounding World War I, the vast majority of Afro-Americans lived in the rural South as tenant farmers, sharecroppers, or landless day laborers. The laborers lacked even the security of employment and the basic necessities afforded those who cultivated a landlord's fields, usually on one-year contracts. Tenant farmers and sharecroppers cultivated a plot of land under the close supervision of the white owner. For this privilege, they paid exorbitant rents. Tenant farmers paid a fixed amount, while sharecroppers forfeited a portion of their crop; but in both cases the landlord confiscated between a third and half of the product. Tenant farmers and sharecroppers also paid astronomical interest (often 60% per year) on the seeds, supplies, and food advanced them by the "furnishing merchant" (often the landlord). Under the system known as the crop lien, the owner of the land and/or the furnishing merchant legally owned the crop. The tenant or sharecropper received only what remained after paying all debts; this residue was usually little, nothing, or less than nothing. At "settling time" black families (and, increasingly, white ones) often learned that an entire year's backbreaking work left them only further in debt. Landlords and merchants often concealed the price of tools, food, and supplies, and the amount credited for cotton; only after the harvest would the hapless serfs learn the extent of their debt. Because many African Americans could neither read nor calculate (and those who could risked expulsion, torture, or murder if they challenged the boss's figures) fraud was widespread.
Other laws besides the crop lien securely locked the chains of servitude around black necks. Many Afro-Americans were coerced by state law, local custom, or planter terrorism into signing year-long contracts at the beginning of each season; they would then be arrested if they left before the contract expired. Vagrancy and loitering laws criminalized blacks who lacked employment or a contract, while anti-enticement laws kept other employers from offering better conditions. Together, these laws almost reintroduced slavery.
Northern capitalists, and Southern landlords and poor whites, deliberately kept blacks in this state of bound labor. After the Civil War the United States government bestowed hundreds of millions of acres of land upon railroad companies, and levied high tariffs (paid by consumers) on imported manufactured goods. But it denied Afro-Americans the land they needed for economic self-sufficiency, and which they had earned by centuries of unrequited toil (and, often enough, by service in the armed forces during the Great Rebellion). Northern capitalists profited from black servitude: they required cotton for their textile mills and for the export trade, and they further enriched themselves by financing and transporting the crop. White capitalists were well aware that African Americans, given the choice, would have supported themselves on largely self-sufficient yeoman farms, rather than producing cotton for the national and international markets. Such self-sufficient homesteads, while allowing their black owners maximum freedom and economic independence, would have generated no rent, dividends, or interest for whites of either section. Instead, they would have partly liberated Afro-Americans from white control and substantially raised their living standards. Either from ideological conviction or fear of community retaliation, white landowners often refused to sell high-quality land to blacks who somehow accumulated the purchase price. White capitalists also denied blacks employment in the Southern textile mills; such jobs placated poor whites driven from the land, while black exclusion ensured a permanent black rural proletariat.[2]
The combination of law, custom, lack of employment opportunities, and outright terrorism ensured that both tenant farming and sharecropping shaded over into peonage, or debt slavery. Planters kept blacks forcibly at work on the grounds that the blacks owed money and could not leave the plantation until they had paid it. Peons were often sold, with their families and debts, to planters or other capitalists (especially timber or turpentine barons and railroad builders). They were beaten, tortured, chained, locked in stockades, starved, worked under the gun, and sometimes murdered. Escapees were tracked by dogs and hunted down by armed men. In 1917 a peon testified that whites "took a colored man out last night and tied him to a tree and blindfolded him and they beat him until the blood run down on the ground and they shot they guns till the people thought war had begun and the people went today and looked at where the blood soaked in the ground, and I am afraid my time next I cant sleep at night when I go to bed....." Pete Daniel, a historian of peonage, states that "the violence that attended peonage sent tentacles of dread throughout the entire black community.... It was the fear that a beating or death was the reward for leaving a plantation that kept many laborers quietly at work." One official investigating peonage at a railroad camp found that local whites would not fish in the river, because too many Negro corpses were dumped there.[3] Peonage kept the Southern rural economy alive; in 1907 one authority stated that one-third of the medium and large planters in Mississippi, Georgia, and Alabama operated peon farms. On those rare occasions when planters faced federal investigation, they usually claimed--no doubt sincerely--that they had no idea they were violating U.S. law. Everyone, it seemed, worked peons.
Peonage was legally sanctioned in many Southern states. An Alabama law not only allowed debt enslavement, but expressedly forbad testimony by the accused debtor. Even accommodationist Booker T. Washington complained that "any white man, who cares to charge that a Colored man has promised to work for him and has not done so, or who has gotten money from him and not paid it back, can have the Colored man sent to the chain gang." Although the Supreme Court struck down this law (Bailey v. Alabama, 1911) Georgia and Florida enforced almost identical statues until Pearl Harbor and beyond. More important, peonage was backed by white terrorism and violence even when it lacked statutory authority. Local sheriffs would arrest blacks on spurious charges, fine them, and then release them to a local planter or other capitalist who paid his fine. In 1914 the Supreme Court outlawed this practice (United States v. Reynolds), but with little effect. White landowners and other capitalists staged private, mock trials in which the black was seemingly convicted of a crime.[4] A white man who tracked down a black, alleging an unpaid debt, encountered no opposition from public officials or ordinary white citizens.
Although the United States had outlawed peonage in 1867, it rarely prosecuted its practitioners. When it did, it secured few convictions. In Clyatt v. the United States (1905), the Supreme Court exonerated a peonage driver who had crossed state lines and, with the cooperation of local law enforcement officials, openly kidnapped black laborers at gunpoint, claiming that the men owed him money and had fled from his turpentine camp. The blacks' main witnesses quickly disappeared--almost certainly murdered--so the Court decided that debt peonage remained unproven. Nor were the perpetrators prosecuted for their other atrocities, such as kidnapping or assault (crimes that remained under local jurisdiction). Timber barons and turpentine operators had joined forces after Clyatt's indictment and raised a $90,000 war-chest, claiming, in the words of a U.S. attorney, that unless they could "control their labor as they saw fit, without any interference from the federal authorities, they would be unable to carry on the saw mill business."[5]
Similarly, in Georgia (1920), the local sheriff asked for a three-day postponement of a peonage trial; in the interim, the black peon witness was murdered, his corpse dumped in a river, and his skull torn off to prevent identification by dental records. The foreman of the coroner's jury investigating this death (who, unsurprisingly, had himself previously been convicted of peonage), had sold the victim to his killer. The all-white jury, predictably, declared the murderer innocent. The prosecutor accused the judge of bias and lamented that "peonage in this State is practiced chiefly by people who stand high socially and politically and who are people of wealth and influence." Furthermore, black victims, knowing they would soon find themselves back in the clutches of their tormentors, were afraid to testify. In 1911 another U.S. attorney lamented that "negroes will be compelled to work out labor contracts even if a few of them have to be lynched in order to terrorize the remaining ones into complying with these iniquitous contracts."[6]
Peonage remained endemic because the beneficiaries--rich Southern planters and other capitalists--controlled the local sheriffs, courts, and governments. They routinely used terrorism, murder, and torture as instruments of compliance, with the almost complete acquiescence of the United States. (The U.S. did, on the other hand, prosecute Southern whites who enslaved Italian immigrants, after the Italian government complained).[7] Indeed, during the calamitous Mississippi River flood of 1927, blacks were impressed into slave labor on the crumbling levees; hundreds were killed when the levees broke. U.S. troops placed the survivors in concentration camps under armed guard, and kept them prisoner until their de facto owners (the lords of the plantations on which they toiled) claimed them.[8] Daniel concludes that "the decisions of the Supreme Court... simply did not touch the Southern peonage farms, and the custom of peonage had become so entrenched that even poor neighbors whom it affected economically would seldom complain. The race issue proved more than just a valuable tool to move the masses at election time; it also blinded them to the economic possibility of successfully competing with peon labor.... The South had changed little since antebellum slavery days."[9]
Ironically, the U.S. had no law penalizing outright slavery--the kidnapping, imprisonment, and coercion of workers when no debt was claimed. One capitalist accused of peonage admitted that he practiced slavery (which was not penalized by Congressional enactment); another, accused of slavery, admitted to peonage (a crime with which he was not charged). Both were ultimately acquitted. As Daniel remarks, "individuals acting on their own volition could hold laborers in slavery, for there was no state or federal statute that prohibited it." The U.S. Attorney General asked vainly for such federal legislation in 1911.[10]
Peonage was itself buttressed by convict leasing, a form of state-sponsored exploitation, torture, and murder. Blacks were routinely arrested for petty or nonexistent crimes, fined a sum they could not pay, and sold for their debt to agricultural or industrial capitalists who could work them to death with impunity. Because capitalists rented convicts for a set time period, they could starve, beat, and work their property to death and then procure a free replacement from the government. Historian David Oshinksy, who chronicles the horrors of the convict lease, states that Black prisoners would suffer and die under conditions far worse than anything they had ever experienced as slaves.... They would serve their sentences in the coal mines, sawmills, railroad camps, and cotton fields of the emerging New South.... From its beginnings in Mississippi in the late 1860s until its abolition in Alabama in the late 1920s, convict leasing would serve to undermine legal equality, harden racial stereotypes, spur industrial development, intimidate free workers, and breed open contempt for the law. It would turn a few men into millionaires and crush thousands of ordinary lives.... In a region where dark skin and forced labor went hand in hand, leasing would become a functional replacement for slavery, a human bridge between the Old South and the New.[11] Oshinsky concludes that "the South's economic development can be traced by the blood of its prisoners.... The convict lease had become a huge operation, supplying bodies like the slave trade of old."[12]
Convict leasing served multiple purposes. It profited state and local governments (the latter were largely financed by court costs), intimidated African-American workers, and provided cheap labor for capitalists. Corrupt alliances between local businessmen and politicians enriched both at the expense of mutilated black lives. In a statement applicable to other states, Oshinsky says that "the exclusive right to lease state convicts quickly became Mississippi's most prized political contract, coveted by planters, businessmen, and speculators across the board." Many capitalists rented convicts at bargain rates and then sold them to others at prices far above what they had paid; such middlemen were "a latter-day version of the slave broker who supplied fettered Africans to the great plantations of the antebellum South.... The convict now found himself laboring for the profits of three separate parties: the sublessee, the lessee, and the state.... If the convict died or escaped, his employer lost nothing."[13]
Leased convicts worked at a pace and at tasks that free labor abhorred. One railroad company's convicts worked chained in knee-deep pools of muck, "their thirst driving them to drink the water in which they were compelled to deposit their excrement." Many others were starved, served food crawling with vermin, and bunked, often naked, on bare ground. Some had a metal spur riveted in their foot. Convicts died of every possible disease, including shackle poisoning. They were beaten and tortured and, if too sick to work, sometimes killed. Those familiar with convict camps frequently complained of the stench, filth, and vermin. An Alabama warden (1882) said that convicts "breathed and drank their bodily exhalation and excrement." Three years later a visitor, echoing common complaints, described Alabama inmates as clothed "in filthy rags, with vile odors and the clanking of shackles." Plantation and corporate doctors seldom tended the sick; rather, they certified which convicts were too sick to work and signed death certificates.[14] In Mississippi in the 1880s the annual mortality rate of the convicts was between 9 and 16%, not counting the sick and maimed convicts released in expectation of imminent death. (At least one in four convicts was an adolescent or child; some, sentenced for stealing a hat or some change, were as young as six or eight.) In Alabama in 1870 over 40% of the convicts perished; a South Carolina railroad killed 45% of its convict workers between 1877 and 1879. Convicts were routinely beaten by sadistic guards and left to die covered with vermin and filth. In Mississippi, white newspaper editors who exposed similar evils were killed. "Nobody was surprised," Oshinsky comments; "crusading editors in Mississippi did not often die in their sleep."[15]
Convict leasing became endemic throughout the South in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Convicts inhabited a wide-ranging gulag and were exploited with the efficiency and thoroughness of abattoirs that proverbially used "every part of a pig except the squeal." Tennessee convicts laid track and mined coal; Oshinsky says that "each morning their urine was collected and sold to local tanneries by the barrel," while the Medical School at Nashville purchased their unclaimed corpses for dissection. Convicts laid most North Carolina railroad track in the 1870s and 1880s because, as a railroad official said, "if [the convict] dies it is a small loss, and we can make him work here, while we cannot get free men to do the same kind of labor for, say, six times as much as the convict costs." Oshinksy reports that the convicts, living in an 8x8x15 rolling iron cage in which twenty slept and were transported to work, "slept side by side, shackled together, on narrow wooden slabs. They relieved themselves in a single bucket and bathed in the same filthy tub of water. With no screens on the cages, insects swarmed everywhere.... A year or two on the Western North Carolina Railroad was akin to a death sentence."[16]
Conditions in other states were similar. Oshinsky says that "on the Great Northern Railroad, Texas convicts were starved, whipped, beaten with tree limbs, and hung naked in wooded stocks. At the prison camps of the Greenville and Augusta Railroad, convicts were used up faster than South Carolina authorities could supply them.... As the railroads expanded, new industries followed in their path. The South's economic development can be traced by the blood of its prisoners." On Texas convict-labor farms, nightly screams so disturbed the bucolic serenity of the neighboring farmers that camp officials gagged the prisoners "to muffle their cries." A legislative committee admitted that "as a rule, the life of a convict is not as valuable in the eyes of the sergeants and guards and contractors as that of a dog.... [Convicts are routinely] whipped into unconsciousness.... shot down upon the least provocation.... [and worked] until they drop dead in their tracks." One prisoner died a lingering death after having been whipped, sprinkled with sand, whipped again, and forced to climb an ant-infested tree. "Incidents like this tarnished convict leasing but failed to drag it down," Oshinsky says. "For one thing, the major lessees in Texas were bank presidents and railroad builders, cattle barons and cotton planters, merchants and politicians--all competing for the labor of shackled men." When Joseph Brown, owner of the Dade Coal Mine in Georgia, was accused of operating a death-camp, he casually replied that "We make some profit at the Dade Coal Mines, and there we use convict labor. Is it a crime for a citizen to put his money into the development of mineral interests, especially if he should succeed in making money by his energy and enterprise?" In some places, recalcitrant convicts were tortured in tin sweatboxes, which had a small hole for the convict's nose; when the box was placed in the broiling sun, the convict's body swelled and sometimes bled.[17] Many of these tortures were performed openly, near cities. Albert S. Burleson, Woodrow Wilson's Postmaster General (who mercilessly suppressed radical publications during World War I) operated a convict-labor torture chamber.
In most Southern states, blacks needed for labor were simply rounded up and accused of crimes. In 1907 a journalist described how a local sheriff and turpentine operator made a list of eighty healthy blacks; within three weeks all eighty were arrested and sent to the turpentine camps. Elsewhere, Oshinsky says, convict "numbers ebbed and flowed according to the labor needs of the coal companies and the revenue needs of the coal companies and the state. When times were tight, local police would sweep the streets for vagrants, drunks, and thieves." Capitalists "routinely worked county convicts beyond their scheduled release dates."[18] Because convicts required no investment on the part of the capitalist, they were indeed treated worse than slaves.
Convict leasing by the states had died out in most places by the time of World War I. By 1915 only Florida and Alabama allowed the leasing of state convicts. However, equally horrible forms of forced labor replaced it. Florida ended state convict leasing in 1919, but this only resulted in a massive increase in blacks arrested and sentenced for petty or non-existent crimes by the counties. White capitalists still demanded black laborers for the turpentine camps (some of which were owned by Northerners). The death-knell of convict leasing occurred only in 1922, when Martin Tabert, a white from North Dakota who hitched a ride on a freight train, was tortured to death in a lumber camp. Because Tabert was white, his murder generated a national uproar. The Florida legislature investigated and found, Oshinsky says, that "Tabert had been put to work in a poison swamp, shovelling mud in hip-deep water for fifteen hours a day. When he could no longer keep the pace, he had been flogged with a seven-pound strap until his back 'was all scabs and cuts from his shoulder to his knees.'" The whipping boss had laid on dozens of lashes, dragging the strap through sugar and sand "to increase its sting and weight." Tabert died and was unceremoniously buried in the old clothes of a black convict. The lumber company unctuously wrote his family that "the boy was given a Christian burial in a cemetery near here and had a minister officiate in same.... Please accept our sympathy in your bereavement."[19]
Florida ended county convict leasing because adverse publicity generated Northern boycotts and hurt tourism. "Yet the abolition of convict leasing did little to disturb the brutal turpentine culture of the north Florida woods," Oshinsky concludes. Tabert's murderer, acquitted on all charges, soon killed again--this time murdering a "free" turpentine worker. Only the end of the turpentine boom after World War II ended these horrors. The end of convict labor elsewhere had similar results. Tennessee abolished the system in 1896, after the "Tennessee Convict War" in which free coal miners forcibly liberated the convicts who undermined their wages. The state government, burdened with the high cost of guarding the convicts with troops, ended convict labor because it no longer paid. "But the end of convict leasing in Tennessee did not mean a new beginning for the prisoners who had suffered under it," Oshinksy says. "Instead of mining coal for a private corporation, the bulk of them were shipped to Brushy Mountain and forced to mine coal for the state."[20]
The abolition of convict labor in Mississippi similarly kept black prisoners in virtual slavery. Governor James Vardaman, virulently racist even by Southern standards, abolished convict leasing because it primarily benefited rich whites. Demanding that all white Mississippians share the profits of enslaved black workers, Vardaman created Parchman State Penitentiary, a massive state-run slave labor camp. Parchman was self-sufficient by 1915, producing most items needed by the inmates and huge profits (almost half the state education budget) besides. Oshinsky says that Parchman "resembled an antebellum slave plantation with convicts in place of slaves. Both systems used captive labor to grow the same crops in identical ways. Both relied on a small staff of rural, lower-class whites to supervise the black labor gangs." The white sergeants had absolute power; gun-toting inmate trustees were chosen from the most brutal and depraved criminals, who were pardoned if they killed an escapee. Inmates were fed rancid food, crowded into squalid barracks, and publicly whipped by sadistic guards. Homosexual rape of young convicts was common. The main goal of Parchman was crop production, not rehabilitation (not in any case needed for the mostly innocent prisoners) or even punishment.[21] Parchman was a durable institution; as late as the 1960s, the Kennedy administration helped Mississippi incarcerate Freedom Riders, who had peaceably integrated interstate busses in accordance with federal law, in Parchman, an institution described by Oshinsky as "worse than slavery."
Other Southwestern states built penitentiaries such as Parchman, but the former slave states of the Southeast replaced convict labor with the chain gang, used mostly for constructing and improving roads. Southern Progressives viewed the chain gang as a modernizing reform that placed convicts under the direct supervision of the state while employing them on projects benefiting all whites rather than a few rich capitalists. As one reformer gushed, "the convict is as much the property of the state as the slave before the war was the property of the slave owner. The state is his real master and as such is not only responsible for his well-being, but for the productivity of his labor to the end that the community at large may be served." In fact, chain-gang slaves were driven as relentlessly as convict leasees; economic production remained paramount. Alex Lichtenstein, who has analyzed the transition from the convict lease to the chain gang, comments that "the most ambitious pre-New Deal effort to nationalize and modernize the isolated rural South depended on one of the region's most viciously racist local institutions. For Progressive Era chain gangs had their origins in some of the worst prison camps found during the era of leasing, those reserved for petty criminals sentenced in county or municipal courts for misdemeanors.... With such an overwhelming emphasis on the economic benefits of forced labor it should come as no surprise that for the convicts themselves the difference between the chain gang and the convict lease proved negligible."[22] Tales of horror abounded in the new, "progressive" chain gangs:
Convicts labored, ate, and slept with chains riveted around their ankles. Work was done "under the gun" from sun-up to sundown, shoveling dirt at fourteen shovelfuls a minute. Food was bug-infested, rotten, and unvarying; "rest" was taken in unwashed bedding, often in wheeled cages nine feet wide by twenty feet long containing eighteen beds. Medical treatment and bathing facilities were unsanitary, if available at all. And above all, corporal punishment and outright torture--casual blows from rifle butts or clubs, whipping with a leather strap, confinement in a "sweat-box" under the southern sun, and hanging from stocks or bars--was meted out for the most insignificant transgressions, particularly to African Americans who remained the majority of the chain gang prisoners.[23]
Progress of a sort did occur: in at least one camp the whipping bosses roamed in automobiles, and studded their whips with brass nails. One observer claimed that chain-gang inmates often invited the whip-master's bullet as ending their sufferings. All of this was accompanied by pious exhalations about reforming inmates through wholesome work in the great outdoors. Racist arguments were also freely employed: whites asserted that blacks would not work except under the lash.
Convict labor, the chain gang, and the state penitentiaries bolstered both capitalism and white supremacy in many ways. First, by primarily victimizing African Americans, they radically differentiated blacks from whites, who perceived blacks as both degraded and as dangerous economic competitors. Second, they terrorized planation blacks into docility. A Georgia road engineer exulted in 1912 that "the most striking effect of the convict camp on the roads is its effect on free labor in producing abundance of labor on the plantations. The prompt arrests for loitering, gambling and other petty offenses with a short sentence on the chain gang has a wholesome effect on a race that are not noted for either industry or thrift."[24] Third, coerced labor provided an indispensable subsidy for capitalists who built railroads, mined coal, harvested timber and turpentine, and in general fostered the economic modernization of the South. The convict lease and the chain gang recruited toilers for industrial and extractive-industry capitalists without competing for plantation labor or creating a free, mobile Afro-American proletariat. Lichtenstein says:
Above all, convict labor made modern economic development of the South's resources compatible with the maintenance of racial domination.... New South capitalists in Georgia and elsewhere... [used] the state to recruit and discipline a convict labor force, and thus... [developed] their states' resources without creating a wage labor force, and without undermining planters' control of black labor. In fact quite the opposite: the penal system could be used as a powerful sanction against rural blacks who challenged the racial order upon which agricultural labor control relied.... Since it reinforced, rather than disrupted, the forms of social control necessary for extreme labor exploitation in the South's plantation districts, this was a form of "modernization" acceptable to planter and industrialist alike.... Strict laws against breaking contracts and harsh sentences for petty theft served the dual purpose of disciplining rural labor and increasing the pool of convicts for Georgia's coal mines, brickyards, lumber mills, and railroad camps.... Thus the legal mechanisms of social and racial control devoted to the perpetuation of plantation society could also channel forced black labor into a developing, industrial section.... What anti-enticement laws, crop-liens, and vagrancy statutes were to the planters, the convict lease was to an emerging class of industrial entrepreneurs, in Georgia and elsewhere.[25]
Lichtenstein concludes that "if the labor contract stood as the sine qua non of Reconstruction agricultural production, the convict lease provided a ready means of recruitment for the heavy labor of grading railroads," mining coal, harvesting timber, and extracting turpentine.[26] Some of these functions--building railroads and roads, mining coal, and making pig iron--undergirded economic development generally; others, such as timber and turpentine harvesting, benefited specific sectors.
Enslaved black labor also helped reduce free white wages, break strikes, and discourage unionization. This effect was especially pronounced in the coal mines, where free white workers competed with convict labor. In 1886 a U.S. Bureau of Labor agent reported that Alabama mine owners claimed that "they could not work at a profit without the lowering effect in wages of convict-labor competition." Six years later a former president of the massive Tennessee Coal and Iron Company boasted that "we were right in calculating that the free laborers would be loath to enter upon strikes when they saw that the company was amply provided with convict labor." This particular boast was ill-timed, coming just before the Tennessee Convict War which ended convict leasing in that state. Yet convict coal miners helped break the regional coal strike of 1894. At other times and places surviving convicts remained on the job after their term expired; convict leasing was therefore a method of "state-sponsored proletarianization." Convict miners continued working during economic downturns, and fostered the systemized production of coal, coke, and iron. Capitalists in a region where free labor was sporadic and unreliable valued the dependability, even more than the cheapness, of slave labor.[27]
Lichtenstein places the new forms of black slavery at the very heart of the new political economy of the industrializing South. Convict labor constituted a relation of production suited to modernization while maintaining a commitment to a restrictive racial order.... The use of the penal system to recruit and control black labor stood at the cutting edge of southern politics and economic development, not in its dark corners. Far from representing a lag in southern modernity, convict labor was a central component in the region's modernization. The chain gangs which built the roads of the twentieth-century South became an enduring symbol of southern backwardness, brutality, and racism; in fact, they were the embodiment of the Progressive ideals of southern modernization, penal reform, and racial moderation. In this duality the southern chain gang replicated the most significant feature of the convict lease system it had superseded.[28]
Lichtenstein reminds us that "this continual correspondence between the forces of modernization and the perpetuation of bound labor was no anomaly. Even chattel slavery in the Americas was a crucial component in the development of capitalism.... Rather than constituting an 'archaic' obstacle to capitalist development, destined to be swept away by modernity, unfree labor has frequently been an essential element in the accumulation process that made that development possible." Convict labor, the chain gang, and the state penitentiary built the railroads, mines, timber camps, and roads of the South; they drew their advocates "not from those who yearned for the social and economic order of the slave South, but from the region's most ardent advocates of progress, who sought to reconcile modernization with the racial caste system."[29] Forced labor undergirded the Southern economy at least until World War II.
City and town life in the South was equally lethal for blacks. Denied justice and economic opportunity in the countryside, blacks fled to Southern cities whenever they could. But the men were denied all but the most menial, difficult, dirty, intermittent, and dangerous jobs; and by the 1920s they were being driven out of even those few niches (such as barbering) where they had predominated. Black women could find work mainly as personal servants of various kinds, such as washerwomen, cooks, and nursemaids. Most urban black women worked long and backbreaking hours in white households, and were often so busy raising white children that they had scant time for their own. In addition, black women were the sexual prey of their white employers. However exploited and low-paid (the "service pan," table scraps left after the whites had eaten, was a significant portion of the pay) servants at least had some income. However, female employment in an economy that denied men jobs undermined the position of black men, who could not fulfill the socially-proscribed male role of supporting their families. Black male unemployment, of course, impoverished black families. Black men, like whites in the same circumstances, often considered themselves a burden, and deserted families they could not help feed. Others took their impotent rage out on their wives and children.[30]
In addition, urban blacks usually resided in shantytowns on the outskirts of town, or in horrible, squalid sections denied city services such as sanitation and water. Some urban blacks lived in old slave quarters, or in housing designed for cattle. Historian Howard Rabinowitz concludes that blacks "occupied land considered unfit for white habitation," and lived "in unkempt alleyways, on low-lying ground near contaminated streams, or near slaughterhouses, flour mills, or other industrial sites.... [Black neighborhoods] were filthy narrow places, often open sewers, and the breeding grounds of disease and crime.... Poor living conditions not only took their yearly toll of deaths from the constant companions of consumption and pneumonia, but periodically the black areas were ravished by epidemics of cholera, smallpox, and, to a lesser extent, yellow fever." Whites worried only that the white-imposed filth and disease of the black sections might spread through white neighborhoods.[31]
Apartheid
African Americans suffered not only from government-enforced poverty and semi-enslavement, but from state-mandated apartheid. American apartheid consisted of a pervasive, legally-enforced subordination actively imposed by the federal government as well as by state and local authorities. After the collapse of Reconstruction, Congress and Presidents, regardless of party, bolstered white supremacy North and South. In 1883 the Supreme Court struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875; in 1896 it legitimated segregation (Plessy v. Ferguson), thereby placing its imprimatur upon apartheid just as it had previously fostered slavery. Jim Crow ostensibly enforced a rigid separation of the races, but its actual purpose was not segregation but degradation and subordination. Jim Crow designedly humiliated Americans of African descent, even as the Southern social system integrated the most intimate aspects of private and public life.
African Americans were allotted separate drinking fountains, waiting rooms, telephone booths, hospitals, windows in banks, cemeteries, elevators (often that "for freight and niggers"), and Bibles on which they swore in court. Black travellers were forced into dirty and decrepit railroad cars, often the "smoker" in which the most vulgar, abusive, and tobacco-spitting white men congregated. (When a black woman objected that a white entered the so-called Negro car, the conductor replied that "the law was made to keep you in your place, not the white people.") Afro-Americans were confined in designated sections (often separated from the white area by a moveable screen) on streetcars; if the white area filled up, blacks had to stand so that boarding whites could sit. Blacks were usually relegated to the back of the streetcar or bus, but in Birmingham they sat in the front. Explaining this anomaly, one white epitomized the logic and purpose of Jim Crow. "After all," he said, "it is not important which end of the car is given to the nigger. The main point is that he must sit where he is told." Afro-Americans were completely excluded from many libraries and parks ("Negroes and Dogs Not Allowed" was a commonplace sign), and from almost all restaurants and hotels except those exclusively catering to blacks. When served in public facilities such as ticket offices or restaurants (at a side window for take-out), blacks were forced to wait until all whites were served.[32]
Justifying these laws and customs and the assiduous terrorism which enforced them, whites vilified African Americans much as Nazis demonized Jews, constantly using the imagery of vermin, disease, infection, viruses, toxicity, and filth. One white woman told a Northern visitor: "If anything would make me kill my children, it would be the possibility that niggers might sometime eat at the same table and associate with them as equals. That's the way we feel about it, and you might as well root up that big tree in front of the house and stand it the other way up and expect it to grow as to think we can feel any different." Vardaman, in his usual inimitable way, said that he would gladly countenance the extermination of "every Ethiop of the earth to preserve unsullied the honor of one Caucasian home." Admitting that this would kill the good as well as the bad, Vardaman admonished his listeners that "the good are few, the bad are many, and it is impossible to tell what ones are... dangerous to the honor of the dominant race until the damage is done.... We do not stop when we see a wolf to find it if will kill sheep before disposing of it."[33]
The result was continual insult, humiliation, and degradation for blacks, who could never forget their inferior status. As activist and writer Pauli Murray remembered, "We came to know that whatever we had was always inferior. We came to understand that no matter how neat and clean, how law abiding, submissive and polite, how studious in school, how churchgoing and moral, how scrupulous in paying our bills and taxes we were, it made no essential difference in our place."[34] Many streetcar conductors, ticket agents, elevator operators, clerks, and other (themselves lowly) personnel took sadistic delight in humiliating blacks who inadvertently stepped over the line--a line that was differently drawn depending on time, place, and the mood of the officiating white. In 1904 in Alabama, a black woman sat in the wrong section of a streetcar; the conductor rudely exclaimed that "niggers don't sit with white folks down here." White passengers sneered at the hapless woman and applauded the conductor. The woman later wrote:
Not one of them thought that I was embarrassed, wounded and outraged by the loud, brutal talk of the conductor and the sneering, contemptuous expressions on their own faces.... I have been humiliated often, but I never get used to it; it is new each time, and stings and hurts more and more.... I dread to see my children grow. I know not their fate.... It does not matter how good or wise my children may be, they are colored.[35]
Blacks were also segregated in separate neighborhoods, especially in newly built cities or the expanding sections of older urban areas. As a North Carolina white said, "In this white man's town when an African proposed to 'move into' a white section, he was given to understand that it wouldn't do. And if he had moved in he would have moved out a great deal quicker--and a pile of ashes would have marked the house. That is what the White Man will do, law or no law, and that is understood." Black neighborhoods were often in death-trap lowland areas, and were denied the elementary city services provided for whites; this contributed to the extraordinary death rate among blacks.[36]
Although Jim Crow ostensibly separated the races and preserved whites from the contamination of blacks, whites and blacks actually mingled with the greatest possible intimacy throughout the South. White children suckled at the breasts of black women, who often raised white children as well as nursing them. Blacks also performed much of the cooking and serving of food, and washing of clothes, for white families throughout the South. Jim Crow enforced subordination, not separation. As a black South Carolina newspaper said (1889), "the blackest hands can cook the food for prejudiced throats; the blackest, dirtiest arms can hold the whitest, cleanest baby; the blackest, most illiterate man can sit on the same seat, even with a lady, as driver; but the angry passions rise when a well-dressed, educated, refined negro pays his own fare and seats himself quietly in a public conveyance." A house servant in Georgia agreed: "everything was all right, so long as I was in the white man's part of the street car or in the white man's coach as a servant--a slave--but as soon as I did not present myself as a menial, and the relationship of master and servant was abolished by my not having the white children with me, I would be forthwith assigned to the 'nigger' seats of the 'colored people's coach.'" Parks which otherwise banned blacks did allow Negro servants. A white Episcopal minister in Louisiana aptly summed up the intent and impact of Jim Crow: "The black nurse with a white baby in her arms, the black valet looking after the comfort of the white invalid have the label of their inferiority conspicuously upon them; they understand themselves, everybody understands them, to be servants, enjoying certain privileges for the sake of the person served. Almost anything the Negro may do in the South, and anywhere he may go, provided the manner of his doing and going is that of an inferior. Such is the premium put upon his inferiority; such his inducement to maintain it."[37]
The motive of degradation, humiliation, and subordination were clearly revealed in "linguistic Jim Crow." Blacks under compulsion addressed any adult white with a courtesy title (Mr, Mrs, or Miss) followed by his or her last name; whites called blacks of whatever age by their first name, by the epithet "boy" or "nigger", or, for older blacks, "Aunt" or "Uncle." Any Negro who addressed another black with a courtesy title risked violence as surely as one who dropped the title when addressing whites. Christopher Brooks of Wilmington was fined and then incarcerated in the workhouse for regularly calling Negroes by a courtesy title; another well-regarded black was run out of town for politely asking that he be called Mr. Foster rather than Dick, even though he quickly apologized for his indiscretion. Such grotesque, if often lethal, absurdities reached their apogee in the case of the founder of Tuskegee, regarding whom a white man said: "Now I admire Booker Washington. I regard him as a great man, and yet I couldn't call him Mr. Washington. We were all in a quandary until a doctor's degree was given him. That saved our lives! We call him 'Dr.' Washington now."[38]
Schooling for Slavery
African Americans were also segregated in their own distinct schools, which--in addition to stigmatizing blacks as inferior and unworthy--were starved for funds even by Southern criteria. In 1927, black schools received less than 10% as much per pupil as white schools in South Carolina and Alabama, roughly 25% as much in Georgia and Mississippi, and about 50% as much in Tennessee and Arkansas. Such figures--which starkly revealed the fatuousness of the Supreme Court's "separate but equal" doctrine and the travesty of Booker Washington's gospel of uplift through education--affected black children at every stage in the educational process. African-American school buildings were often dilapidated shacks with gaping holes in the roof and walls; some schools convened in mule stables, warehouses, churches, or private homes. The most rudimentary supplies were often lacking. The school year was greatly shortened for black children because white planters exploited them in the fields, and black parents often depended on the tiny incomes their young children could provide. Afro-American teachers were paid much less than their white counterparts, often collecting their wages "in kind" as potatoes, eggs, or chickens. At the insistence of white officials, many black teachers were scarcely educated themselves, while Northern whites who taught Southern blacks suffered from social ostracism, the denial of credit at local stores, and difficulty in finding lodging. If their black pupils greeted them on the street, the teacher, the student, or both might suffer instant death. In 1913 a white North Carolina official denounced his state's schools for blacks as a blot on civilization. "To one who does not know our history," he said, "these schoolhouses, though mute, would tell in unmistaken terms a story of injustice, inhumanity and neglect on the part of our white people." Pauli Murray sadly remembered that "it was never the hardship which hurt so much, as the contrast between what we had and what the white children had.... Our seedy run-down school told us that if we had any place at all in the scheme of things it was a separate place, marked off, proscribed and unwanted by the white people."[39]
Horrible facilities and unequal expenditures were only part of the problem, however. When African Americans attended school, they imbibed the same white-supremacist historical lies pounded into white children. The Horatio Alger/capitalist illusion that promised success for those who worked hard also falsified the Afro-American (and poor white) situation; however, it was fervently inculcated, even though blacks who followed its precepts often met death at the hands of outraged and humiliated whites. The black-run Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical College's motto, "Work is the Measure of Worth" pleased elite whites who battened on black toil. One African American critic charged that a prominent black college president had reassured whites that the aim of his institution "was not so much to lift the Negroes socially but to make better cooks, nurse maids, mechanics and share farmers of them. Thus the real benefit would come to whites." Similarly, a black Texan complained that the chief lessons taught at Negro schools were cowardice and cringing. Many whites agreed, though from their opposite perspective. A white Mississippian praised Lawrence Jones, Afro-American head of the Piney Woods School. Jones "says he ain't gwine to teach 'em so much book larning, but he wants to learn 'em to do more and better work, so when we wants good work done we can git it. That nigger seems like a good nigger. I like him." A white Maryland paper advocating Negro education urged that schooling inculcate deference to whites and respect for manual toil. "What the negro needs is to be taught and shown that labor is his salvation--not books. The state appropriation is intended to encourage that teaching."[40]
White demands on black educators were murderously contradictory, depending on time, place, and whim. A senior class in North Carolina endangered their school's very existence by choosing a Latin motto, which local whites deemed far above the proper station of a race divinely ordained for menial labor. Ironically, however, the main state-supported black school in Virginia taught the classics but steadfastly eschewed courses in scientific agriculture. Latin and Greek had no practical value; modern farming techniques might liberate some blacks by giving them the knowledge and motivation necessary to acquire their own land.[41]
Despite the uses of education in bolstering white supremacy, many whites opposed all forms of Afro-American schooling. Such racists believed that education ruined blacks for labor, raised their expectations, ambitions, and self-esteem, and generated discontent. A white South Carolinian lamented that "after a fellow has learned to wear a clean shirt at college, he is not going into the cotton patch." One Montgomery attorney frankly stated: "It's a question of who will do the dirty work. In this country the white man won't; the Negro must. There's got to be a mudsill somewhere. If you educate the Negroes they won't stay where they belong; and you must consider them as a race, because if you let a few rise it makes the others discontented." A Baptist teacher likewise argued that "if a man is engaged in work below his education, he feels degraded by it, and that sense of degradation compels him to do inferior work.... The bootblack is not a better bootblack, but a worse one, the ditcher is not a better ditcher but a worse one, if he can also calculate a solar eclipse or read with a critic's ken the choral odes of the Greek dramatists.... The cook, that must read the daily newspaper will spoil your beef and your bread; the sable pickaninny, that has to do his grammar and arithmetic, will leave your boots unblacked and your horse uncurried.... To invite the negro from those pursuits which require firm muscles and little intelligence to those callings which demand less muscle and higher intelligence, is to invite him to his sure extermination."[42]
Whites feared retaliatory violence from educated African Americans, and therefore justified pre-emptive terrorism against such people. In 1904 a Charleston newspaper stated: "Let us be frank and honest. The great mass of the white people of the South have no idea of educating the Negro to be a citizen--their equal, either social or political. They want him to be the white man's help, and if he is not willing to occupy a subordinate position in this country, the sooner he leaves it, or the southern part of it at least, the better for all concerned." The editor of the Atlanta Constitution avowed that "Education brings light, and light perception, and with quickened faculties the negro sees the difference between his real and his constitutional status in the republic. He sees that neither worth nor merit nor attainment can overcome the world-wide revulsion of type and color; and seeing this, he is moved to rebellious protest and sometimes to violent revenge." Whites feared that educated Afro-Americans would register and vote, or, even worse, demand social equality. "Ambition in the negro is consecrated in lust," proclaimed one Mississippi politician; another white asserted that educating the Negro resembled "placing a loaded magazine rifle in the arms of a chimpanzee." Whites repeatedly claimed that educated blacks committed the vast majority of crimes. But as Du Bois perceived, whites feared that educated, successful African Americans would earn and demand higher wages, home ownership, and their own farms or businesses. Atlanta whites, he said, overwhelmingly preferred "cringing vagrants and criminals" over industrious property owners not because they wanted Negro crime but because "they fear Negro ambition and success more. They can deal with crime by chain gang and lynch law, or at least they think they can, but the South can conceive neither machinery nor place for the educated, self-reliant, self-assertive black man."[43]
White fears of successful Negroes evoked savage retaliation against those few blacks who, surmounting all odds, partly escaped from white control by owning their own farms, businesses, or homes. Prosperous African Americans often found their property torched or otherwise destroyed, while they themselves often suffered torture and/or murder. Some blacks highly valued literacy and numeracy as checks upon the landlord's and furnishing merchant's account books. Many others, however, found that merely asking whites for information on their debts and credits (much more contesting it) evoked instant, barbaric violence. Henry Kirkland asked that his educated son Emmet keep his own set of books, and at settling time questioned his employer's figures; the insulted (and doubtless thieving) white murdered Henry and seriously injured his son, who soon fled North.[44]
The sad story of Charles Holcombe, a North Carolina sharecropper, similarly epitomized the situation of many educated blacks in the South. Mr. Holcombe worked for a lifetime in hopes of owning his own land; repeatedly cheated by his landlord, he placed his hopes on his eldest son, Willie. Willie's college education, however, merely embittered him because he could find no outlet for his skills or ambitions; soon Willie was mauled and killed by a white whose payment for the tobacco crop he had disputed. Mr. Holcomb had learned his lesson. Arriving at the scene of the murder (perpetrated in full public view), Mr. Holcomb said:
I knowd he wad dead de minute I seed him.... Right den I knowed dey wan't no use to ax for no he'p and dat I was jist a pore nigger in trouble.... Dey was tears funnin' down my cheeks and droppin' on his face and I couldn't he'p it... For a long time after that I couldn't seem to git goin', and dey was a big chunk in de bottom o' my stummick dat jist wouldn't go away. I would go out at night and set under de pine by Willie's grave, and listen to de win' swishin' in de needles, and I'd do a lot o' thinkin.... I knowed [that Willie]... had stepped outen his place when he got dat eddycation. If I'd kept him here on de farm he woulda been all right. Niggers has got to l'arn that dey ain't like white folks, and never will be, and no amount o' eddycation can make 'em be, and dat when dey gits outen dere place dere is gonna be trouble.... Niggers is built for service, like a mule, and dey needn't 'spect nothin' else.... God made a nigger like a mule to be close to nature and git his livin' by de sweat o' his brow like de Good Book says.[45]
Mr. Holcombe ensured that none of his other children attended college. Instead, they lived nearby on the land, and helped him in his old age (a duty that educated children with opportunities elsewhere might neglect). "Dey don't hab much, but dey is happy," Mr. Holcomb said.[46] No wonder that another black man admonished his grandson: "School don't mean anything to a nigger. What do they have to do except work like hell from morning till night year in and year out, and do what the white man tells them to do, and it don't take no education to do that." Many black parents lived on the edge of starvation and needed their children in "the cotton patch and corn-field school" for family survival. For these reasons, some black leaders opposed education, believing, in the words of one businessman, that education made a Negro "dissatisfied with his position.... And then you have a dangerous situation." For similar reasons, many black pupils regarded excelling at school as "acting white," a betrayal of the racial group. Southern blacks almost unanimously abandoned hopes for integrated schools, instead advocating (just as hopelessly) equal resources for black schools.[47]
Terrorism
Extralegal terrorism and violence--pervasive, ubiquitous, and inescapable--undergirded the entire white supremacist system. The ritualized murder and torture of Afro-Americans constituted both a foundation and capstone of forced labor, Jim Crow, disfranchisement, inadequate and pernicious education, and criminal justice. Virtually any white could publicly insult, rob, assault, mutilate, torture, or murder almost any Afro-American at any time, for any reason or no reason, in full public view or in private, without fear of punishment. At least three thousand blacks were lynched between 1890 and World War I, and uncounted others murdered secretly by individuals or officially by law-enforcement personnel conducting authorized "nigger hunts". As Litwack reports:
The story of a lynching, then, is more than the simple fact of a black man or woman hanged by the neck. It is the story of slow, methodical, sadistic, often highly inventive forms of torture and mutilation. If executed by fire, it is the red-hot poker applied to the eyes and genitals and the stench of burning flesh as the body slowly roasts over the flames and the blood sizzles in the heat. If executed by hanging, it is the convulsive movement of the limbs. Whether by fire or rope, it is the dismemberment and distribution of severed body parts as favors and souvenirs to participants and the crowd: teeth, ears, toes, fingers, nails, kneecaps, bits of charred skin and bones. Such human trophies might reappear as watch fobs or be displayed conspicuously for public viewing. The severed knuckles of Sam Hose, for example, would be prominently displayed in the windows of a grocery store in Atlanta.[48]
The Sam Hose lynching (1899) epitomized the apotheosis of murder-by-torture as public spectacle. Hose had argued with his employer, Alfred Crawford, about his pay and his hope to visit his sick mother. The next day, while Hose was chopping wood, Crawford renewed the argument, drew his gun, and threatened Hose with death. In self-defense, Hose threw the axe at Crawford, killing him instantly. Within two days, the Atlanta papers were branding Hose "a monster in human form" who had killed Crawford at his dinner table and then raped Crawford's wife in the presence of her husband's corpse. A frenzied mob of 2,000 men and women, some of whom arrived on a special excursion train, exulted as their leaders cut off Hose's ears, fingers, and genitals, before skinning his face and burning him alive. As Hose's eyes burst out of their sockets, he suffered such agony that he almost broke his bonds. The crowd scrambled for Hose's body parts as souvenirs. After the spectacle, Crawford's wife reported that Hose had killed her husband in self-defense and had not assaulted her. The Hose lynching was preceded and followed by mass lynchings of other Afro-Americans.[49]
The Hose lynching, while spectacular, was not unusual. NAACP official Walter White explained that lynching was a spectator sport, providing relief from "the endless routine of drab working hours and a more drab home life." A Mississippi mob (1904) slowly dismembered Luther Holbert and, for good measure, his wife as well; a corkscrew was inserted into both victims, "the spirals tearing out big pieces of raw, quivering flesh every time it was withdrawn." Two other blacks, mistaken for Holbert, had been previously killed. A Georgia mob (1918) lynched Mr. Turner; when his wife, eight months pregnant, complained in court, the mob burned her alive. Using a hog butcher knife, they split her belly open; when the baby emerged alive, a white crushed the infant under his heel. (In a similar and much later incident, a fetus was taken by the heel and smashed against a wall.) After the lynching of Thomas Brooks (1915), a Tennessee paper reported that "hundreds of kodaks clicked all morning at the scene of the lynching. People in automobiles and carriages came from miles around to view the corpse dangling from the end of a rope.... Picture card photographers installed a portable printing plant at the bridge and reaped a harvest in selling postcards showing a photograph of the lynched Negro. Women and children were there by the score. At a number of county schools the day's routine was delayed until boy and girl pupils could get back from viewing the lynched man."[50]
Most Afro-Americans recognized that a ritualized death by slow torture could easily befall them, with or without warning, for the slightest indiscretion or for none at all. Whites, one black observed, recognized "that one Negro swinging from a tree will serve as well as another to terrorize the [black] community." Indeed, whites often boasted of the ritualized murder-by-torture of blacks not even accused of any offense. Family members of the "suspect" were routinely murdered, often while the accused watched and awaited his or her turn. Laura Nelson was raped and lynched, and her teenage son killed, for a crime she had allegedly committed. In Georgia (1915) Daniel Barber was forced to watch the lynching of his wife and two married daughters before meeting his own gruesome death. An Atlanta paper observed (1904) that if hanging the alleged criminal did not deter other blacks, "we will hang two, three, or four of the Negroes nearest to the crime..." A white youth informed a Northern visitor: "You don't understand how we feel down here; when there is a row, we feel like killing a nigger whether he has done anything or not." In a similar vein, a Mississippi man told a visitor that "It is about time to have another lynching. When the niggers get so that they are not afraid of being lynched, it is time to put the fear in them."[51]
Booker Washington urged that blacks work hard, accumulate property, and mollify whites, promising that "the man who is intelligent and virtuous, and owns and cultivates the largest farm in his county" would receive "proper respect and consideration.... The Negro merchant who owns the largest store in town will not be lynched." The reality, however, was exactly the opposite. Whites so feared, envied, and resented successful African Americans that they targeted them for special violence and abuse. Anthony Crawford was one such successful South Carolina landowner, victimized by a particularly egregious white atrocity. In 1916 Crawford was tortured, dragged through the Negro district of town, and hung, his mutilated body then repeatedly shot. A leading paper explained that "Crawford was worth about $20,000 and that's more than most white farmers are worth down here. Property ownership always makes the Negro more assertive, more independent, and the cracker can't stand it." Another resident commented that "I reckon the crowd wouldn't have been so bloodthirsty, only it's been three years since they had any fun with the niggers, and it seems though they jest have to have a lynching every so often." According to a local paper, Crawford's "wealth and coddling from the white men desiring his trade, emboldened him to assume an equality that whites will not tolerate.... Due to chest inflation from wealth, [the lynching] was inevitable and RACIALLY JUSTIFIABLE." The 1892 lynching of Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell and Henry Stewart, the owners of the People's Grocery Company in Memphis, shocked black journalist Ida B. Wells out of her complacency; until then she had believed white shibboleths about black rape of white women. Appalled by the mass murder of her friends, she became one of Afro-America's foremost crusaders against lynching--a decision that cost Wells her press, and almost her life.[52]
White terrorism against prosperous blacks was so pervasive it earned its own specialized moniker, "whitecapping." In 1913 a Mississippi black complained that "if we own a good farm or horse, or cow, or bird-dog, or yoke of oxen, we are harassed until we are bound to sell, give away, or run away, before we can have any peace in our lives." Whites concurred. A decade earlier a former governor of North Carolina had asserted that "the negro is going to fare best and be happiest when his position is most subordinate. Financial and industrial equality is as bad in the eyes of the whites as social equality.... In plain English, [for a black] to get above his ordained station in life is, generally speaking, to invite assassination." Another observer noted simply that "the more rapid the progress, the more frightful the mortality." Successful blacks were well aware that their survival depended on the whims of every member of the white community. Educator and author Benjamin Mays stated that "the more a Negro owned, the more humble he had to act in order to keep in the good graces of white people."[53] Successful blacks, therefore, arguably betrayed their race by their very existence. Not only were they necessarily sycophants who kowtowed to whites as a condition of survival; even worse, they propounded and embodied as seemingly realistic a virtually impossible goal. White and black leaders alike used the tiny number of prosperous blacks as evidence that the vast majority mired in squalor and debt had only themselves to blame.
Lynching was a celebratory and communal ritual which bound whites together literally in the blood of blacks. Lynchings were, in Litwack's words, "a public ritual, a collective experience.... public theatre, often a festive affair, a participatory ritual of torture and death." Workers and schoolchildren received time off for lynchings. In 1909 a Mississippi newspaper reported that ladies were present among a crowd of 3000; "a few were nursing infants who tugged at the mother's breasts, while the mother kept her eyes on the gallows. She didn't want to lose any part of the program she had come miles to see, and to tell to the neighbors at home." White children even acted out lynchings in a game called Salisbury. A black woman reported that she had seen "very small white children hanging their black dolls. It is not the child's fault, he is simply an apt pupil."[54]
Lynchings, particularly of prosperous blacks, crucially enforced white stereotypes and severely penalized any Afro-American who defied them. In 1909 an Afro-American attorney in Louisville complained: "Thirty years ago the prejudice was against the ignorant, shiftless and thriftless black; now it is against the thrifty and industrious, the refined and the cultured--against those, in a word, who come into competition with the middle-class white." Another observer noted, "So long as negroes will drink common whiskey, dance jigs, and make apes of themselves, the mass of white men in the Southern States applaud them as good fellows; but so soon as one becomes a bank president, a property owner, and a gentleman, he becomes offensive to society."[55]
Southern elites sometimes criticized lynching on the grounds that it hurt business, scared field hands away, encouraged lawlessness that might eventually be directed at prominent whites (often resented by the poor), and generated unfavorable publicity. "It ruins the worth of our investments," one leader complained. Another businessman said that because blacks spent all they earned they were "commercially.... a very valuable asset. It is not good business to kill them."[56] Yet elite whites not only indirectly encouraged lynchings by dehumanizing, demonizing, and segregating blacks; they actively praised the torturers for fulfilling their traditional ideal of white masculinity.
Community leaders, politicians, newspaper editors, and businessmen incited lynchers and often enough personally led the festivities. The papers announced important lynchings in advance and, after the event, printed graphic stories recounting every lurid detail. One Mississippi newspaper approvingly described the lynching of Elmer Curl (1910) as "a most orderly affair, conducted by the bankers, lawyers, farmers, and merchants of that county. The best people of the county, as good as there are anywhere, simply met there and hanged Curl without a sign of rowdyism. There was no drinking, no shooting, no yelling, and not even any loud talking." A South Carolina paper smugly announced that a lynching by a mob including the local state representative was performed in the "most approved and up-to-date fashion." These self-motivated and eager executioners were ordinary men, church members and idealists who were, as one paper said, "foremost in all works of public and private good." Thomas Watson, a popular white leader, heralded lynchings as proof "that a sense of justice yet lives among the people."[57]
Although mass murder---both ritualized and orgiastic--was enjoyed by all classes of whites, rich and poor sometimes lynched for contradictory reasons. Planters wanted a docile labor supply, and valued lynching because it intimidated blacks. White sharecroppers and tenant farmers, whose very survival depended on access to the land of rich planters, sometimes found that landowners preferred black serfs because they could be paid less, worked harder, and abused with impunity. Poor whites, therefore, sometimes lynched in order to terrify blacks and drive them from the region--a motive incompatible with that of the planters. The precise motive, however, mattered little to the victims. In a wry comment with very wide applicability, Litwack observes that "To endorse lynching was to dwell on the sexual depravity of blacks, to raise the specter of the black beast seized by uncontrollable savage sexual passions that were inherent in the race. That is, the inhumanity, depravity, bestiality, and savagery practiced by white participants in lynchings would be justified in the name of humanity, morality, justice, civilization, and Christianity."[58]
White violence pervaded black lives, rigidly circumscribing every thought, gesture, word, and action. Richard Wright, who came of age in the 1920s, acquired "a dread of white people" by the time he was ten years old. Said Wright:
Nothing challenged the totality of my personality so much as this pressure of hate and threat that stemmed from the invisible whites. I would stand for hours on the doorsteps of neighbors' houses listening to their talk, learning how a white woman had slapped a black woman, how a white man had killed a black man. It filled me with awe, wonder, and fear.... Tension would set in at the mere mention of whites and a vast complex of emotions, involving the whole of my personality, would be aroused. It was as though I was continually reacting to the threat of some natural force whose hostile behavior could not be predicted.... [Although I had not yet been victimized by whites myself] I had already become as conditioned to their existence as though I had been the victim of a thousand lynchings.[59]
Wright spoke of the "sustained expectation of violence" that caused "a paralysis of will and impulse.... The penalty of death awaited me if I made a false move and I wondered if it was worthwhile to make any move at all. The things that influenced my conduct as a Negro did not have to happen to me directly; I needed but to hear of them to feel their full effects in the deepest layers of my consciousness. Indeed, the white brutality that I had not seen was a more effective control of my behavior than that which I knew."[60]
Beaten because he forgot to address a white man as "sir," Wright recognized that whenever dealing with whites he must "observe their every fleeting expression, [and note] how to interpret what was said and what left unsaid." A friend, frustrated at Wright's rebelliousness, warned: "Dick, look, you're black, black, see? Can't you understand that.... When you're in front of white people think before you act, think before you speak." Wright said that he "could not make subservience an automatic part of my behavior. I had to feel and think out each tiny item of racial experience in the light of the whole race problem, and to each item I brought the whole of my life. While standing before a white man I had to figure out how to perform each act and how to say each word." More gifted than most people, Wright eventually escaped the South and the United States, having imbibed from his Southern boyhood "a conception of life that no experience would ever erase... a notion as to what life meant that no education could ever alter, a conviction that the meaning of living came only when one was struggling to wring a meaning out of meaningless suffering."[61]
Whites kept blacks perpetually on guard not only out of policy, but because white demands differed from white to white, locale to locale, and moment to moment. The black's place in the South, Benjamin Mays recalled, "was whatever any white man's whim dictated at any given time." The horrible fate of a young man named Ulysses vividly illustrates this. Accosted by a policeman in a Georgia town and asked his name, the hapless youth volunteered it. When the lawman asked his partner how it was spelled, Ulysses helpfully said "I know how to spell it. Let me write it for you." For this impudence (knowing something a white policeman did not), Ulysses was beaten and knocked down; the next day he was fined $25 for addressing "disrespectful and insulting remarks to an officer while in the discharge of his duty." Because his family could not pay the fine, Ulysses disappeared into the gulag archipelago of chain gangs. "I never saw him again," a friend recounted. Ulysses was likely murdered by sadistic guards or tortured to death by the chain-gang regime. As Mays ruefully observed, "it was always the Negro's responsibility to find ways and means to get along with white people, never need white people concern themselves with getting along with Negroes." A perceptive white remarked, "by long and close association with the white man, the Negro was learned all his ways, and can read at a glance his innermost thoughts, and can now size him up and classify him just as accurately as a cotton buyer does the different grades of cotton, and can do it much quicker."[62]
Cringing and subservience, while generally prudent, might not save any particular black on any specific occasion. If carried too far, it might arouse white suspicion and anger; if acted out with insufficient zeal, it might evoke instant death. As Litwack states, "acquiescence by itself was not always sufficient; it had to be cheerfully and convincingly given.... [Whites] insisted on more than a forced obedience; they demanded a ritualized compliance, not only deference but a demonstrated, grinning deference--acquiescence by inflection, gesture and demeanor.... The grinning, laughing, obsequious black person comforted whites, reinforcing both their racial assumptions and their self-esteem." Ralph Ellison remembered that assiduous self-repression in thought and emotion, as well as deed, was a crucial survival skill. Parents, Ellison said, must "adjust the child to the Southern milieu" and "protect him from those unknown forces within himself which might urge him to reach out for that social and human equality which the white South says he cannot have. Rather than throw himself against the charged wires of his prison, he annihilates the impulses within him."[63]
Blacks endured isolation from one another, even within their families, because they could not protect each other from white terrorism. Ubiquitous white violence intruded into, and distorted, the intimacies of black family life, even in black households from which the white physical presence was absent. One of the traumas endured by black youths was helplessly watching the humiliation, degradation, abuse, and even torture and murder, of relatives, while their parents and elders looked on, unable to intervene and unwilling to explain their seeming acquiescence and cowardice. When Ester Mae Scott, a young girl living in Vicksburg, came across the charred, unrecognizable bodies of some black men in a street, she received neither explanation nor guidance. "We dare not talk about it, we dare not say anything. It was just there...." Similarly, when Richard Wright's Uncle Hoskins was murdered by whites who coveted his saloon, there was no funeral, no discussion, and no claiming of the deceased man's assets. Wright later remembered that "there were only silence, quiet weeping, whispers, and fear.... Uncle Hoskins had simply been plucked from our midst" by "that white-hot face of terror that we knew loomed somewhere above us." When Richard asked his mother for an explanation, "the fear that was in her made her slap me into silence."[64]
Black children would themselves suffer from white abuse, but receive neither protection nor even explanation from their parents. A nine-year old Tennessee boy was taunted with the epithet "nigger"; when he asked his mother what it meant, she, for the first time ever, would not answer his query. Sleepless, he asked himself "why should I be called a nigger? It must be very bad to be a nigger.... What could a nigger be and why should God make a nigger?" His mother threatened him with a beating if he persisted in seeking an answer, finally exploding that "we are all nigger and there is nothing wrong about it"--an explanation that only further bewildered the boy. In a similar incident the young Mary Church Terrell was evicted from a railroad car, but received no satisfaction from her father: "I could think of nothing that I had done wrong. I could get no satisfaction from Father, however, for he refused to talk about the affair and forbade me to do so."[65] Merely discussing white atrocities might provoke trouble, especially if such discussion generated a bitterness even slightly apparent in expression, tone of voice, or action.
Parents, therefore, could protect neither their children nor themselves. Indeed, they would sometimes beat their children for fights which some white youth had started, hoping that such parental discipline would avert Caucasian wrath while socializing their children in fear of whites. "Within black families," Litwack remarks, "conflicts were bound to emerge over how to reconcile the harsh demands of white domination with the desire to instill in their children individual self-worth and racial pride." Zora Neale Hurston experienced just such family dissension as a child. Her mother, she said, urged that Zora "jump at de sun" so she would at least get off the ground; her father, however, fearing that her independence and high spirits would evoke white savagery, "was always trying to break [my spirit] or kill me in the attempt." Zora's father predicted that "I was going to be hung before I got grown. Mama was going to suck sorrow for not beating my temper out of me before it was too late." Shame at the seeming acquiescence of their parents in degrading and humiliating treatment was commonplace among young blacks.[66]
In these ways white racism divided blacks within their families, and even more outside of them. Most African Americans realized that any intervention on behalf of family, friend, or stranger could evoke vicious white retaliation. "Praise the bridge that carries you over," regardless of the fate of the next person, one elder warned his friends. Benjamin Mays said that intra-black violence was so common because blacks "were taking out on other blacks what they really wanted but feared to take out on whites."[67] The demoralized and angry black underclass, then as today, most often victimized members of their own race.
African Americans confronted not only individual and group atrocities, but wholesale slaughters, euphemistically called "race riots." Such "riots" were primarily an urban phenomenon, the prototype of which was perhaps the New York "draft riot" of 1863, in which many blacks were killed, and black residences and a black orphanage torched.[68] Most pogroms were preceded by extreme white vituperation of blacks, and by frenzied calls for extermination or at least forcible deportation; although usually precipitated by some real or imagined incident, the massacres expressed deep and widespread white attitudes. In Wilmington, North Carolina, one of the last places in the South where blacks still retained some political influence, exterminationist white rhetoric accompanied the election campaign of 1898; a Democratic leader who tried to inflame white racist sentiment discovered that the whites "were already willing to kill all of the office holders and all the negroes." Another orator advised his audience to "Go to the polls tomorrow and if you find the negro out voting, tell him to leave the polls, and if he refuses kill him, shoot him down in his tracks. We shall win tomorrow if we have to do it with arms." Whites stole the election by intimidation and fraud, and then, emboldened, massacred unresisting blacks, mostly prosperous ones. As 1500 Negroes fled the city (some, including children, died of exposure) opportunistic whites ransacked their property. The mob's leaders were community leaders, one of which was elected mayor.[69]
The Atlanta slaughter of 1906 was even worse, involving ten thousand whites of all classes, many shouting "Save our women! Kill the niggers!" The massacre was accompanied by the usual howls for genocide and mutilation of black corpses. United States soldiers joined the pogrom, chanting "We are rough, we are tough, we kill niggers and never get enough." The massacre left 25 blacks (all proclaimed model citizens by a subsequent investigation) dead and over two hundred mutilated or seriously wounded; hundreds more black victims were arrested. Souvenir hunters scrambled for fingers and toes as looters carted off property. Much of black Atlanta was torched. Once again, prosperous blacks, and their homes and businesses, were especially targeted for destruction.[70]
Many survivors fled the city. President Theodore Roosevelt, putatively an ally of blacks, remained silent. One Atlanta native, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, regretted missing the festivities. "Had my financial condition been a little better I would certainly have come and so also would some of my friends. No warfare ever waged was more righteous than this defense of home, family, and posterity.... The negroes killed in Atlanta was the result of an effort to protect those whom God has ordained we must protect, an effort that cannot be legally justified but has its ground and justification in a law that is higher than laws made by man.... Vengeance must have her fullest satiation until our white brethren the world over will aid us in deporting this black savage again to his native jungle." After the riot, white Atlanta made some token reforms, and even punished a few whites. Yet blacks realistically felt no more secure than before.[71] Although organized mass murders were primarily urban phenomena, the merest rumor of black self-assertion or organizing could precipitate a rural massacre, as at Elaine, Arkansas (1919) where dozens of blacks were slaughtered, and roughly a hundred more convicted of serious crimes.[72]
As the twentieth century progressed, organized slaughters occurred increasingly often in Northern cities. The 1908 pogrom in Springfield, Illinois, was a harbinger of riots to come, especially because blacks fought back, sometimes with firearms. The riot started when vigilantes tried to lynch a black man held in the local jail for allegedly assaulting a white woman. Unable to kill him, the mob murdered two other blacks instead, and then rioted on a grand scale. Hundreds of blacks were rendered homeless. The mob's intended victim, it turned out, had been wrongly identified, and was released from custody.[73]
Whites justified their monstrosities with racist arguments resembling those stigmatizing other racial groups, immigrants, and foreign populations victimized by American imperialism. Many whites simply hated blacks and spoke of them with a virulence foreshadowing Nazi abuse of Jews--stigmatizing them as inherently lustful, criminal, lazy, and intellectually inferior. These whites advocated outright extermination (or at least violent deportation) of blacks, as their compatriots did of Native Americans, Asians, and radical labor unionists. What Daniel Goldhagan has called "eliminationist" attitudes were common throughout the South. A wide spectrum of whites--illiterate sharecroppers, "cultured" planters, and eminent scientists--somewhat more mildly claimed merely that blacks were inherently inferior and would naturally disappear in the struggle for existence; this result, many asserted, was inevitable and desirable. Concocted "scientific" versions of racism "proved" the inferiority of blacks (and immigrants, women, and many ethnic groups today categorized as "white") by mis-measuring skulls, giving fraudulent "IQ tests," and other mechanisms. Other whites, however, more "benevolently" asserted that blacks, being naturally inferior and destined for extinction if exposed to white competition, should be segregated and disfranchised for their own protection. If herded apart from whites, and denied a vote they could use only for their detriment, they would survive in their divinely appointed (and inferior) place. Still other whites conceded that blacks were potentially equal to whites, but claimed that they were presently uncivilized and in need of white tutelage. After centuries of white control and supervision, they might become equal citizens. Proponents of this view justified Jim Crow, disfranchisement, and lynching (as they previously had slavery) as methods of racial control and even uplift. All these versions of racism justified white oppression of blacks--in practical terms, for all eternity. Almost no whites accepted blacks as equals, or could imagine doing so; even those who claimed that blacks might someday become coequal citizens justified and practiced a systematic racist oppression that destroyed all semblance of equal opportunity.[74]
Racist and white supremacist ideologies and practices, therefore, came in superficially differing varieties, but shared one goal: the dispossession of African Americans. Different versions of racism proved serviceable at different times and for various segments of the master race, depending on exactly how the victims were to be degraded and expropriated. All versions of white supremacy justified aggression against blacks, and all enhanced the wealth, power, and prestige (at least in its own eyes) of the dominant race. Racism was generated by white pathologies and lust for dominion; blacks were almost irrelevant to its etiology and changing forms.
Disfranchisement
Disfranchisement of most Afro-Americans (and of many poor whites) constituted another pillar of white supremacy. Southern whites disfranchised blacks by murder, fraud, and, starting in Mississippi in 1890, constitutional enactments. A former state official from Alabama summarized the process with engaging honesty: "At first, we used to kill [blacks] to keep them from voting; when we got sick of doing that we began to steal their ballots; and when stealing their ballots got to troubling our consciences we decided to handle the matter legally, fixing it so they couldn't vote." Senator Ben "Pitchfork" Tillman of South Carolina told the United States Senate that "we took the government away. We stuffed the ballot box. We shot them. We are not ashamed of it." Accurately depicting Northern white racist attitudes, Tillman taunted that a Wisconsin Senator "would have done the same thing. I see it in his eye right now. He would have done it." Tillman also reminded his Northern auditors that "you shoot Negroes in Illinois, when they come into competition with your labor, as we shoot them in South Carolina when they come in competition with us in the matter of elections. You do not love them any better than we do. You used to pretend that you did, but you no longer pretend it, except to get their votes."[75]
Henry Grady, the "racially moderate" New South proponent, exclaimed (in 1887, just before the drive for legal disfranchisement) that "the supremacy of the white race of the South must be maintained forever, and the domination of the negro race resisted at all points and at all hazards--because the white race is the superior race. This is the declaration of no new truth. It has abided in the marrow of our bones, and shall run forever with the blood that feeds Anglo-Saxon hearts." One North Carolina registrar boasted that he disqualified blacks on any technicality: "We're bound to keep the nigger down; it's all that saves us." Vardaman exclaimed that neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Fifteenth Amendment applied to "wild animals and niggers." A more complacent voice declared that blacks as voters resembled "mules and oxen"; stealing Negro votes was as justified as would be depriving farm animals of suffrage had a Caligula-like Republican Congress granted them the vote.[76]
Legal disfranchisement, therefore, was not aimed at black political power, which had long since evaporated under the pressures of open fraud bolstered by murder. Rather, it further degraded and humiliated African Americans, impressed upon them a sense of their powerlessness, and undermined whatever ambition and self-respect blacks might nurture. As an ex-planter from Mississippi exclaimed, whites would associate with Negroes "provided it be upon terms which contain no suggestion of equality of personal status." Voting conferred such equality, or at least its temporary illusion. As Vardaman proclaimed: "Shut the door of political equality, and you close the door of social equality in the face of the black man; shut the door of social equality and you smother in his native savage breast the fury of his passion, which is but the blind craving of his soul to be [the] equal of the white man, and the partner of the white man." Another white agreed that "political equality breeds ambition for social equality. The negro thus asserts himself, and his sense of his own importance, which was quiescent and pacific so long as he was kept in political and social subordination, becomes often offensively and insolently inflated." A Georgia newspaper beneficently proclaimed that disfranchisement would aid the Negro by reminding him that "the white man is of the superior race, always has been and always will be and that social equality, in the sleeping car or elsewhere, is an impossibility, absolutely so, and in perpetuity."[77]
Whites frequently asserted that equality in voting encouraged black rape of helpless white women. Others, however, even while demanding disfranchisement, Jim Crow, and other degradations of blacks, lamented that oppressing African-American men incited rape-as-revenge. A prominent white Alabama attorney epitomized this latter attitude when he claimed that "to criminal tendency is added race animosity, and this in the brute with passions of the lowest order, incites to the assault on women of the other race. He will triumph over the other race in the person of a woman of that race." An aristocratic white historian alleged that the black rapist was "not content merely with the consummation of his purpose, but takes that fiendish delight in the degradation of his victim which he always shows when he can reek his vengeance upon one whom he has hitherto been compelled to fear; and here, the white woman in his power is, for the time being, the representative of that race which has always overawed him."[78] Such sentiments summarized with uncanny accuracy the attitudes and practices of white males, whose rape of black women stemmed from both unbridled lust and racial conquest. (Southern males, by insisting what white women were passionless, also deprived themselves of guilt-free coitus with their wives. In effect considering themselves rapists, Southern males tormented themselves with a guilt that they may have displaced onto black men, who they then destroyed.)[79] Such attitudes, as usual, left blacks with no exit. Black voting allegedly encouraged the pride and self-assertion that generated rape; disfranchised black men would purportedly rape as racial revenge.
White elites apparently did not disfranchise blacks out of fear of an inter-racial, class-based alliance of the poor, as Marxist historians claim. Rather, they worried that poor whites destabilized the social order and frightened Northern and foreign capital by terrorizing blacks in a disorderly manner. Legal disfranchisement dispensed with the assiduous effort required for extra-legal terrorism and fraud. Litwack says that "the white laboring classes responded favorably to the racist demagoguery of this period" because that rhetoric "reflected their feelings of insecurity and perceived loss of power and status." The ruling class in the South recognized that it could compensate poor whites for their real degradation and poverty with the empty sop of an illusory racial superiority. A Georgia corporate lawyer (Woodrow Wilson later appointed him judge), observed that "with the lower classes and the lower order of whites, the prospect of having Negroes better educated, richer and better equipped for the struggle of life, menaces their social standing, while Negro suffrage obliterates that distinction which, before the war, made the poorest white man a citizen in a sense that the richest free Negro could never become his political equal." Nedd Cobb, a black man, accurately summarized ruling-class strategies. Although all classes of whites collaborated in degrading and disfranchising the blacks, "the little [whites] thought they had a voice, but they only had a voice to this extent: they could speak against the nigger and the big man was happy for em to do it. But they didn't have no more voice than a cat against the big man of their own color."[80]
Although Southern constitutions disfranchised Afro-Americans in race-neutral language as a fig-leaf gesture towards a complaisant Supreme Court, Southern leaders did not conceal their aims. Vardaman exclaimed that "I am just as much opposed to Booker Washington as a voter, with all his Anglo-Saxon reinforcements, as I am to the coconut-headed, chocolate-colored, typical little coon, Andy Dotson, who blacks my shoes every morning. Neither is fit to perform the supreme function of citizenship." Vardaman openly taunted the North, which would have preferred a discreet silence, proclaiming that "there is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter.... Mississippi's constitutional convention of 1890 was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the nigger from politics; not the 'ignorant and vicious,' as some of those apologists would have you believe, but the nigger.... Let the world know it just as it is." In that same year a newspaper proclaimed that "if every negro in Mississippi was a graduate of Harvard, and had been elected as class orator... he would not be as well fitted to exercise the right of suffrage as the Anglo-Saxon farm laborer.... whose course 'X' mark... means force and intellect, and manhood--virtus." Another paper admitted that whites "do not object to negroes voting on account of ignorance, but on account of color." The Mississippi disfranchisement convention of 1890 removed blacks from politics, its proponents gloated, "as absolutely as if the negroes had been deported to Liberia." Disfranchisement was not merely an end, but also a means towards the denial of black property rights, educational opportunities, and freedom of contract--and indeed the right to life. As a black New Orleans newspaper, confuting Booker Washington, said in 1906: "Robbed of political power, the right [of blacks] to hold property, the right of contract, educational privileges, and the security of life count for but little."[81]
Despite everything, some African Americans retained and exercised the right of suffrage. Yet blacks who voted faced not only violence and the loss of their jobs and residences, but a lack of political parties which offered a real choice and of candidates who would benefit them. One black epitomized his race's dilemma: "I used to vote Republican. They claimed it made times better for my race. I found out better." The chairman of the Colored People's Convention in Richmond in 1890 (before Virginia legally disfranchised blacks) lamented that "the colored people are consumers. The Republicans have deserted them and undertaken to protect the capitalist and manufacturer of the North." Neither party "cares a tinker for the poor man. They are run in the interest of capital, monopoly and repression." Some black leaders urged that their compatriots cast their votes for a third party. Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, however, experienced at first hand the problems with this approach. In 1896, referring to the teapot tempest over gold versus silver currency, he exclaimed that "what time has the fool Negro to bother with the gold or silver side either, while he is lynched, burnt, flayed, imprisoned, etc., two-thirds of the time for nothing. Vote any way in your power to overthrow, destroy, ruin... and fragmentize this nation, until it learns to deal justly with the black man." In 1900, however, Turner felt compelled to vote for the disgusting racist William Jennings Bryan as an alternative to William McKinley, another white supremacist who was exterminating peoples of color in the Philippines. In the face of such hopelessness, some blacks sold their votes on the ground that only by so doing could they secure any benefit from them. "I didn't seen no use doin' nothin' else," one black said, "case de white folks goin' to do what they wants anyhow." As late as the eve of World War II, a leader of the tiny coterie of black Republican voters in Mississippi admitted that at election time "we proselytize these few score Negroes to vote... and, after the pocketing the handouts from the party slush fund... we put our committee back in moth balls to await another presidential election.... Hell, naw! We got no local program. We are doctors and preachers and barbers. We make enough money to buy liquor to wash the inconveniences of being a nigger out of our brains."[82]
Criminal Justice
African-American exclusion from the justice system was a horrible oppression that facilitated even worse ones. After Reconstruction, Afro-Americans were arrested by all-white police forces, tried before all-white juries and exclusively white judges, and sentenced in accordance with white-made law. In Virginia v. Rives (1880) the Supreme Court ruled that black exclusion from juries, even if pervasive and blatant, did not itself violate the Fourteenth Amendment as long as race was not explicitly mentioned in the relevant statutes or state constitutional provisions. This disgraceful ruling, so typical of the Court for almost a century, emboldened Southern whites to disfranchise blacks without explicitly mentioning race. Poll taxes and literacy tests (with their infamous "grandfather clauses") were among the mechanisms devised to achieve this.
White juries almost unanimously rejected black testimony which conflicted with that of any white. The result was predictable: whites could violate and outrage almost any black with impunity, whereas any black accused of any crime against a white (most emphatically including self-defense against white violence) was almost certainly convicted. That almost non-existent species, a conscientious white sheriff, lamented (South Carolina, 1889) the acquittal of a white man who had murdered an Afro-American: "I have never heard of a clearer case in my life... but it is the height of folly to try to convict a white man for killing a poor negro. A certain class thinks it is something to be proud of." The murderers "had a perfect ovation." A white justice of the peace frankly told a black woman that he knew of "no law to punish a white man for beating a negro woman." When a black Alabamian resisted a conductor who struck him, the judge fined the victim $10 (a huge sum at the time), saying "I fine you that much to teach you that you must respect white folks." Another black who quit work was beaten into unconsciousness by his irate employer; when he complained in court he was told that he was lucky to be alive and would be incarcerated in the state work farm if the judge found him in court again. Blacks were placed on chain gangs (often a death sentence) by police courts, without even the usual rigged jury trial, for minor infractions such as vagrancy, or for none at all. During labor shortages, employers requisitioned workers through the "justice" system; blacks were simply rounded up and sold for the time of their sentence to private contractors or placed on government-operated chain gangs.[83] The criminal justice system of the South bolstered public and private slavery, torture, and murder.
Ironically, a black required for labor might escape judicial punishment for a misdemeanor; his boss might whip him instead of dragging him into court. Alternately, if the black was fined, his boss might pay the fine and thus secure virtual ownership of the hapless worker (who must then work until he repaid the fine and its exorbitantly increasing interest charges). In general, crimes against blacks were seldom prosecuted if committed by a white, and considered of little importance if perpetrated by a black. Governor Cole Blease of South Carolina pardoned Negro and white rapists of black women, saying that he harbored "very serious doubt as to whether the crime of rape can be committed upon a negro." The alleged utterance of a police chief aptly summarized the white man's justice: "If a nigger kills a white man, that's murder. If a white man kills a nigger, that's justified homicide. If a nigger kills another nigger, that's one less nigger."[84]
Negroes were sometimes spared the death penalty for killing another black; a plea-bargained life sentence would save the expense of a trial and secure another convict-slave for the state government. Cole Blease commuted the sentence of one black murderer to life imprisonment at the state penitentiary. Governor Blease explained that "this defendant was convicted of killing another negro. I am naturally against electrocuting or hanging one negro for killing another, because, if a man had two fine mules running loose in a lot and one went mad and killed the other, he certainly would not take his gun and shoot the other mule, but would take that mule and work it and try to get another mule; therefore, I believe that when one negro kills another, he should be put in the Penitentiary and made to work for the state." On at least one occasion Blease pardoned a genuinely innocent black, Sam Gaskins, unjustly convicted of murdering his fiancée. Admitting that no white would have been convicted on the evidence marshalled against Gaskins, Blease philosophized: "It seems to have been a very sad accident; however, after a second thought, possibly it was for the good of humanity, for had they married, no doubt they would have brought forth more negroes to the future detriment of the State."[85]
Trials of blacks accused of crimes against whites were quick, and the brutal verdicts were speedily executed. Hangings, like lynchings, were public spectacles. Litwack comments that since many public hangings required two or three attempts, speculation over the level and duration of the victim's agony replaced the obsession with other forms of torture that characterized mob lynchings. Vendors selling ice cream and lemonade made their way through the large crowd in Oxford, Mississippi, that had come to watch the hanging of George Walton, a "one-legged darky." Only on the third attempt did the hanging succeed, with Walton "kicking in the air and suffering untold agony".[86]
These legal lynchings perpetrated by white courts upon often innocent blacks were sometimes justified on the pretext that only a sudden and brutal execution would forestall a mob lynching. Even that rare bird, a Negro acquitted of a crime against a white, was not safe. One white attorney advised that his black client, so obviously innocent that he was found not guilty, leave town. "Sell what you got and get away from here.... Stay a while, then come back when it blow over," the attorney eloquently advised. The Negro returned twenty years later, at which point two whites castrated him and sauntered off laughing.[87]
The Promised Land
Fleeing these "Southern Horrors," blacks escaped wherever and whenever possible. Thousands of "Exodusters" left the South for Kansas in the late 1870s, although white racism and lack of capital gravely limited the success of this spontaneous mass movement. Driven by the need for income and jobs, most blacks moved within the South, often into newly-developed regions where the population was overwhelmingly black, whites were particularly hysterical, and lynchings were rampant. In the two decades 1890-1910 the number of blacks moving North doubled from the previous twenty years, but most of these emigrated from nearby border states, where news of Northern job opportunities percolated. Hardly any deep-South blacks moved North during this period. Large corporations sometimes imported Afro-Americans as scabs (often without informing the blacks that a strike was in progress), but the vast majority of African Americans outside the South worked as domestic servants, porters, or laborers. By 1910, however, 300,000 blacks lived in Northern cities.
The first "great migration" northward occurred during World War I. Floods and boll weevil infestations in the South (1915-1916) devastated poor blacks, as landlords jettisoned tenants and cultivated food crops requiring less labor. Fortuitously, the Great War opened unprecedented opportunities in Northern industrial centers. Millions of workers were conscripted for war; foreign immigration virtually ceased; and the exigencies of military production generated increased demand for labor at the very time the supply plummeted. Labor recruiters flooded the South, sometimes helping blacks escape from the clutches of vigilant plantation owners; Northern black newspapers, especially the Chicago Defender, extolled opportunities in "the promised land"; and newcomers wrote home with glowing reports of high wages and relatively egalitarian treatment.[88]
Blacks in the North possessed basic civil rights--men could vote (women were enfranchised in 1920) and serve on juries, and both sexes could hope for a fair trial (according to the abysmally low standards of the time) if accused of a crime. However, blacks found themselves victimized by segregation, discrimination, and violence that differed more in degree than in kind from the injustices inflicted upon them in the South. Indeed, blacks found themselves differentiated from whites by law and custom in employment, residential opportunities, and social respect.
Crucially, most capitalists (often colluding with racist workers and unions) rejected black workers except at the most dangerous, dirty, and degrading jobs. Such jobs, of course, reinforced white stereotypes of blacks as degraded and unclean. For example, Chicago packinghouses hired black workers in large numbers during World War I. Blacks, however, were excluded from white neighborhoods near the plants, and were denied use of showers and changing rooms at work; therefore, when they rode home on public transportation, they seemingly validated white prejudices about black dirt and filth. Many capitalists also hired blacks as scabs when white workers struck. Desperate and antiunion blacks readily accepted such work, and, when retained after the strike had ended, secured a niche in some industries. This, of course, inflamed white workers, already virulently racist. Capitalist preference for immigrant labor meant that blacks, unlike other impoverished groups, did not benefit from immigration. On the contrary, new arrivals often displaced blacks from their precarious toeholds in selected industries and trades. Immigrants and blacks, therefore, directly competed for jobs.[89]
Working-class whites competed with blacks for housing as well as livelihoods. Realtors and landlords usually refused to sell or rent housing to blacks in neighborhoods not already black. The first black "great migration" North during World War I generated conflict because Afro-American neighborhoods could not accommodate the new arrivals. Few neighborhoods tolerated blacks, so Afro-Americans paid exorbitant rents for substandard housing. This benefited landlords while hurting poor whites, who felt driven out when the first blacks moved in. (Actually, of course, their own panicky white flight and the monstrous behavior of racist and profiteering real estate agents were to blame). Some landlords and realtors made enormous profits by "blockbusting"--moving black families into white neighborhoods, inciting white hysteria and flight, buying the property of fleeing whites on the cheap, and selling or renting it to blacks (who had few options) at exorbitant prices. Municipal governments North and South routinely denied black neighborhoods proper lighting, water, sewage, and garbage pickup services. In 1900 Harper's Weekly commented:
Property is not rented to negroes in New York until white people will no longer have it. Then rents are put up thirty to fifty per cent, and negroes are permitted to take a street or sometimes a neighborhood.... [Landlords] charge enormous rentals for very inferior houses and tenements, which yield more when the negroes have taken possession than they did in time of seemingly greater prosperity.... Moreover, they make no repairs, and the property usually goes to rack and ruin.... As a rule.... negroes in New York are not beholden to the property owners for anything except discomfort and extortion.[90] High rents for inferior facilities necessitated crowding. Whites, seeing many Afro-Americans crammed into small apartments, associated squalor and filth with the habits of an "inferior race."
Capitalist politicians, newspapers, and motion picture companies stigmatized, calumniated, and stereotyped blacks in the North as well as the South. Working-class whites, therefore, experienced as overwhelming reality the difference of blacks, rather than the similarities of condition and commonalities of interest stressed by radicals of both races. This was particularly true because of the status, needs, and desires of the white workers, who not only needed jobs and housing, but craved social respectability and acceptance.
White workers were themselves victimized by a reign of terrorism, violence, and social devaluation resembling that visited upon Afro-Americans. In particular, immigrants were often demeaned and stereotyped by capitalist politicians and the mass media, much as were blacks. Indeed, many immigrant groups, including Jews, Italians, and Greeks, were categorized as "nonwhite" upon arrival in the United States; part of the process of becoming white consisted of adopting vituperative and condescending attitudes toward blacks. Striking workers were routinely murdered by police, corporate thugs, and officially sanctioned vigilante terrorists, after which the union leaders might face arrest and imprisonment for murder. The injunction, yellow-dog contract, blacklist, corporate spy, and agent provocateur terrorized workers and destroyed unions, while de-skilling, unemployment, the constant reorganization of production, and new waves of immigration left workers perpetually insecure. Many factories and tenements were virtual death camps, killing millions of workers per decade, often by the slow torture of overwork, starvation, exposure, and preventable disease.[91] Under such conditions, white workers--especially immigrants--sought shelter in their own ethnic communities on the one hand and assimilation into mainstream American society on the other. Both options excluded blacks.
Workers victimized by death-camp conditions at work and at home, and degraded by the multifarious "hidden injuries of class," eagerly sought acceptance by mainstream, respectable society. Almost all unions feared competition from blacks, desperately sought the patina of respectability in a racist and antilabor society, and included multitudes of whites whose own self-respect rested upon the denigration of racial "inferiors"; such unions excluded blacks openly or by subterfuge. This, of course, generated antiunion and scabbing sentiments among blacks, which in turn further fueled white racism. A similar phenomenon occurred when blacks moved into previously white neighborhoods. As James Weldon Johnson noted:
In the eyes of the whites who were antagonistic, the whole movement took on the aspect of an "invasion"--an invasion of both their economic and their social rights. They felt that Negroes as neighbors not only lowered the value of their property, but also lowered their social status.... They ran amuck. Their conduct could be compared to that of a community in the Middle Ages fleeing before an epidemic of the black plague, except that the reasons were not so sound. But these people did not stop to reason.... The presence of a single coloured family in a block... was a signal for precipitate flight. The stampeded whites actually deserted house after house and block after block.[92]
White flight exacerbated both white racism (as whites "lost" their property or their neighborhoods), and black resentment. Competition for both jobs and housing generated an endless spiral of intensifying racism on the part of the whites, which then justified black suspicion of and hostility towards white workers.
Denied entry into mainstream white institutions, African Americans generated their own cultural centers in the rural and urban South and in the segregated districts of Northern cities. Blacks created their own churches, newspapers, civic organizations, social institutions, and clubs. However necessary, this further distanced the races, making blacks seem indeed a race apart. Such communities and institutions did provide a necessary platform for the limited autonomy possible for blacks in the United States. By 1915, Harlem, swelled by immigration from the South and from the West Indies, had become the most famous and influential African-American community. The major radical Afro-American organizations and publications discussed in this book were, although national and occasionally international in membership and influence, headquartered in New York.
The racial caste system of South and North also fundamentally deformed mainstream American politics by creating a one-party South overtly based upon terrorism and violence. The Democratic party, long controlled by Southern whites, was becoming also the party of the ethnic, immigrant, Northern working class, the constituency most favoring social welfare legislation. Yet Southern whites (especially agricultural and industrial capitalists) dominated the national Democratic party. Southern politicians feared that a strong national government might undermine the South's racial customs and relentlessly pro-capitalist legislation, both of which enriched them. They stridently opposed any extension of federal power on behalf of the dispossessed of either race. (Prohibition and union-busting were, of course, desirable). The Republicans who dominated the North, meanwhile, aided and abetted by the Democrats, oppressed and murdered white workers with impunity.
In these many ways the apparatus of white supremacy, erected and maintained by unremitting terrorism and violence which was countenanced, encouraged, and practiced by elites (even if less privileged whites performed their share of the dirty work), alienated the races from each other by creating, exacerbating, and emphasizing difference. Even those many aspects of white working-class experience that resembled that of African Americans--capitalist terrorism and violence, death-camp factories and tenements, social devaluation--ironically ensured that whites, in their desperate quest for social respectability, frantically distanced themselves from blacks. Capitalist terrorism against unions, moreover, reinforced black suspicions that allying with the employers, rather than with their fellow workers, promised social mobility and acceptance.
White racist terrorism not only undermined Afro-American confidence in putatively sympathetic whites; it also, paradoxically, subverted black confidence in themselves and their own institutions. Blacks, as other Americans, desperately sought acceptance and respectability, which in a racist society translated into the assimilation of white folkways and norms. Terrorism, segregation, disfranchisement, substandard education, legal oppression, and economic exploitation all created the conditions for an ideology of black economic, political, and cultural nationalism; but they also combined with white control of the economic, political, and military apparatus to undermine the appeal of racial separatism among blacks. Looking back over the radical decades in the late 1930s, McKay echoed a common black complaint when he lamented that "Negro institutions in general are developed only perfunctorily and by compulsion, because Negroes have no abiding faith in them.[93]
Overwhelming and pervasive ruling-class terrorism and violence against both Afro-Americans and white workers generated and reinforced cultural conservatisms (including racism on the part of whites, and a distinctive racial identity on the part of blacks) that militated against a trans-race, class-based alliance of the working population against capitalism. Both Afro-Americans and white workers confronted a veritable force-field of violence that permeated every aspect of their respective lives, and molded their innermost thoughts and desires as well as their external and social actions. In this way, capitalist violence against all-white unions severely impacted blacks by inculcating in white workers a desperate psychology of survival and accommodation; white terrorism against rural blacks who had never encountered labor unions severely vitiated the American Federation of Labor and, even more, the Industrial Workers of the World and the Socialist party. When Wobblies and Socialists asserted that black and white workers were in essence similar, with identical needs and interests, such claims seemed (in the eyes of workers of both races) obviously repudiated by everyday experience. The races palpably were distinct; how could anyone argue otherwise? In this way, capitalist terrorism and violence generated an insidious capitalist hegemony: a cultural conservatism of the working class, black and white, which undermined any attempt at interracial unity. Cultural revolution within the working class, essential for any fundamental social reform, proved impossible.
Confronting such problems, Afro-Americans by the eve of the Great War evolved a wide variety of ideologies and strategies. In the middle and late nineteenth century, Frederick Douglass embodied the tradition of militant protest, political and judicial action, and use of moral suasion; W.E.B. Du Bois revived this strategy in his Niagara Movement and later in the NAACP. Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute seized upon a tradition of self-help, economic development, and conciliation of whites. Throughout the nineteenth century prominent Afro-American intellectuals advocated emigration to Africa, an idea that Marcus Garvey revived. Other blacks advised migration West or North within the United States. Many Afro-Americans advocated armed self-defense against white terrorism and violence. In 1884 black leader and editor T. Thomas Fortune presciently advocated a trans-race alliance of the working classes. Fortune called "industrial slavery... more excruciating in its exactions, [and] more irresponsible in its machinations, than any other slavery." He proclaimed that "the revolution is upon us, and since we are largely of the laboring population, it is very natural that we should take sides with the labor forces in their fight for a juster distribution of the results of labor."[94]
Fortune soon abandoned this stance, wildly unrealistic in an era of unremitting white racism and black accommodationism. His class-based strategy, however impractical at the time, assumed new urgency in the early twentieth century. Afro-Americans migrated North and joined the industrial proletariat in unprecedented numbers, just as a minority of white workers fashioned radical unions and parties that challenged capitalism. As Afro-Americans moved North, these organizations (primarily the IWW and the SP) recruited blacks and addressed their needs. The Great War inspired massive democratic movements among workers, blacks, and women, even as its denouement discredited Washington's accommodationism and Du Bois's moral suasion alike. By 1915, blacks possessed an infrastructure of churches, businesses, colleges, and militant organizations that provided a base for protest and activism; they had also created a select core of largely self-educated leaders. These men elaborated a wide array of sophisticated philosopies and strategies aimed at overcoming black oppression.
Notes:
[1] ibid., 411.
[2] Of the hundreds of books written on the economics of neo-slavery, I have relied primarily on four (in addition to Litwack). These are: Gerald David Jaynes, Branches Without Roots: Genesis of the Black Working Class in the American South, 1862-1882 (Oxford, 1986); Pete Daniel, The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901-1969 (Urbana, 1990); Alex Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South; (New York, 1996); and David M. Oshinsky, "Worse Than Slavery": Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York, 1996).
[3] Daniel 29-30, 41.
[4] ibid., 67, 65-81, 180-183.
[5] ibid., 3-18.
[6] ibid., 132-6, 109.
[7] ibid., 94-95
[8] ibid., 149-169. Herbert Hoover and Robert Moton (Booker T. Washington's successor at Tuskegee) collaborated in a massive cover-up of those appalling conditions. Hoover himself, however, used the phrase "concentration camp" when describing U.S. camps for flood victims.
[9] ibid., 138.
[10] ibid., 11-15, 103-107.
[11] Oshinsky, 35-36, 56-57.
[12] ibid., 31-84, especially 35, 60, 79.
[13] ibid., 43-44.
[14] ibid., 44-46, 77.
[15] ibid., 46-47, 60, 50, 79.
[16] ibid., 58-59.
[17] ibid., 58-64.
[18] ibid., 76-79. The last remark specifically concerned Alabama, but equally described other Southern states.
[19] ibid., 74-75. TC covered the Tabert case at the time.
[20] ibid., 82. Conditions at Brushy Mountain were somewhat better than on private slave camps. This, however, says very little.
[21] ibid., 139 and passim.
[22] Lichtenstein, 166-169, 180-182.
[23] ibid., 183.
[24] ibid., 184.
[25] ibid., 5, 13, 70-72.
[26] ibid., 43.
[27] ibid., 81-84.
[28] ibid., xvi-xviii, 16.
[29] ibid., 188-189. A few pages later (192-193) Lichtenstein reflects on how today's prisons also reflect underlying socio-economic realities:
"Modern prison life, in the South now as in the rest of the United States, is defined by a numbing, brutal inactivity, an 'enforced idleness'... worse than the forced labor [formerly] prevalent on the southern chain gangs....
"Rather than 'hard labor,' today's prisoners do 'hard time.' But this, too, like its predecessors, reflects some fundamental facts about race and political economy in America.... When race was associated with compulsion, punishment emphasized compulsory labor and proletarianization; when it is associated with idleness, punishment means restraint and control of a de-proletarianized lumpen class. For today, when structural unemployment, deindustrialization, and social dislocation have their most dramatic impact on the African-American community, incarceration is often the fate reserved to the so-called 'black underclass,' the chronically disemployed who populate the nation's penal colony....
"The expansion of the 'prison-industrial complex' provides jobs for the rural unemployed even while it siphons off the urban 'underclass' from America's terminally ill cities. If and when the prison boom proves too costly, a new movement is afoot in this post-welfare-state era: the privatization of punishment."
[30] Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, From Slavery to the Present (New York, 1986).
[31] Howard N. Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (New York, 1978). The conditions described by Rabinowitz persisted throughout the period covered by this book.
[32] Litwack, 218, 232.
[33] ibid., 245, 215-216.
[34] ibid., 217.
[35] ibid., 217-218.
[36] Rabinowitz, 97, 115-124.
[37] ibid., 237-239.
[38] ibid., 333-334.
[39] ibid., 64, 107-108.
[40] ibid., 85, 90-91.
[41] ibid., 84-86, 98.
[42] ibid., 91-96.
[43] ibid., 92-101.
[44] ibid., 60.
[45] ibid., 1-7.
[46] ibid., 6-7.
[47] ibid., 57-60.
[48] ibid., 286.
[49] ibid., 280-283.
[50] ibid., 286-289.
[51] ibid., 290-291, 301, 309.
[52] ibid., 148, 308-311, 150-163. For Wells's own account of the lynching of the People's Grocery proprietors, which she said "changed the whole course of my life," see Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice (Chicago, 1970), 47-59. Wells died in 1931; her autobiography was edited and posthumously published by her daughter.
[53] Litwack, 158.
[54] ibid., 285-288.
[55] ibid., 160-161.
[56] ibid., 311-312, 292-294, 301.
[57] ibid., 311-312, 292-294, 301.
[58] ibid., 302.
[59] ibid., 11-12.
[60] ibid., 415-416.
[61] ibid., 48.
[62] ibid., 41-47, 264, 413.
[63] ibid., 35-38
[64] ibid., 23, 29.
[65] ibid., 20-21, 9.
[66] ibid., 39.
[67] ibid., 416, 12.
[68] The initial target of white homicidal anger in this case was the newly-enacted draft law, which exempted rich men who could purchase a substitute or buy an exemption; blacks, however, soon became the concrete target. Previous pogroms had killed mostly slaves; the New York riot of 1863 killed and injured free blacks.
[69] Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the South Since Emancipation (New York, 1984), 189-201; Herbert Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery (Amherst, 1988), 64-80; Litwack, 312-315.
[70] Litwack, 315-319; Williamson, 209-223; Shapiro, 96-104.
[71] ibid.
[72] The NAACP investigated this atrocity and publicized it in TC and elsewhere. Its efforts on behalf of the black survivors sentenced to death by an all-white court actually resulted in a Supreme Court decision voiding their convictions (Moore v. Dempsey, 1923).
[73] Shapiro, 103-104.
[74] Williamson and Litwack discuss these racist arguments at length. The literature on white construction of black identity--and that of other groups--is voluminous. Two early and influential treatments of this are George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Identity, 1817-1914 (Hanover, New Hampshire, 1971), and Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York, 1981). Hundreds of books have subsequently expanded on their analysis of the social construction of race, and applied their insights to Native Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, women, workers, the poor, peoples of color subjugated by the US empire, and whites themselves.
[75] Litwack, 227, 206.
[76] ibid., 218, 226, 245-246.
[77] ibid., 219-220.
[78] ibid., 212-214.
[79] Williamson especially stresses this point. Ironically, marital rape was legal throughout the United States.
[80] Litwack, 221-222, 363-364. The corporate lawyer was referring to the Civil War.
[81] ibid., 222-225, 368.
[82] ibid., 365-371.
[83] ibid., 254-257.
[84] ibid., 265, 269-271.
[85] ibid., 265, 269-269.
[86] ibid., 267.
[87] ibid., 267, 258.
[88] William M. Tuttle, Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (New York, 1984), 74-107.
[89] Tuttle, passim.
[90] Anderson, 11.
[91] The best short contemporary source for information on the plight of the American working class during this era remains the "Summary of Conclusions and Recommendations," Commission on Industrial Relations, Final Report and Testimony, (Washington, D.C., 1916)), Volume I.
[92] JWJ, Black Manhattan (New York, 1975), 150. Johnson described the process of white flight in somewhat less colorful language in "Harlem: The Cultural Capital," in AL, ed., The New Negro (New York 1925), 303-311. On that occasion Johnson even resorted to military language, asking could blacks "hold Harlem?" With characteristic optimism he claimed that remaining whites had fully accepted Negroes: "I know of no place in the country where the feeling between races is so cordial and at the same time so matter-of-fact and taken for granted."
[93] CM, LWFH, 351.
[94] Black strategies of resistance are discussed at length in Meier, Harlan, Lewis, Litwack, and Wilson Jeremiah Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism (New York, 1978). T. Thomas Fortune is quoted in Meier, 46-47.
owned the land, the law, the police, the courts, the government, the armed forces, and the press. The political system denied blacks a voice; the educational system denied them equal access and adequate resources; popular culture mocked their lives and aspirations; the economic system left them little room for ambition or hope; and the law and the courts functioned effectively at every level to protect, reinforce, and deepen their political powerlessness, economic dependence, and social degradation..... The terror inflicted by white mobs was far more spectacular, but scores of blacks who had never witnessed a lynching or a riot fell victim to the quiet violence practiced by whites who rigidly controlled their daily lives. From their personal experiences, most blacks knew how the landlord, the merchant, the banker, the judge, the sheriff, and the local politicians interacted to make certain the machinery of domination functioned effectively. This kind of violence devastated lives by depriving people of choices, dramatizing how little black men and women could do to make changes in their lives.[1]
The Economics of Neo-Slavery
In the decades surrounding World War I, the vast majority of Afro-Americans lived in the rural South as tenant farmers, sharecroppers, or landless day laborers. The laborers lacked even the security of employment and the basic necessities afforded those who cultivated a landlord's fields, usually on one-year contracts. Tenant farmers and sharecroppers cultivated a plot of land under the close supervision of the white owner. For this privilege, they paid exorbitant rents. Tenant farmers paid a fixed amount, while sharecroppers forfeited a portion of their crop; but in both cases the landlord confiscated between a third and half of the product. Tenant farmers and sharecroppers also paid astronomical interest (often 60% per year) on the seeds, supplies, and food advanced them by the "furnishing merchant" (often the landlord). Under the system known as the crop lien, the owner of the land and/or the furnishing merchant legally owned the crop. The tenant or sharecropper received only what remained after paying all debts; this residue was usually little, nothing, or less than nothing. At "settling time" black families (and, increasingly, white ones) often learned that an entire year's backbreaking work left them only further in debt. Landlords and merchants often concealed the price of tools, food, and supplies, and the amount credited for cotton; only after the harvest would the hapless serfs learn the extent of their debt. Because many African Americans could neither read nor calculate (and those who could risked expulsion, torture, or murder if they challenged the boss's figures) fraud was widespread.
Other laws besides the crop lien securely locked the chains of servitude around black necks. Many Afro-Americans were coerced by state law, local custom, or planter terrorism into signing year-long contracts at the beginning of each season; they would then be arrested if they left before the contract expired. Vagrancy and loitering laws criminalized blacks who lacked employment or a contract, while anti-enticement laws kept other employers from offering better conditions. Together, these laws almost reintroduced slavery.
Northern capitalists, and Southern landlords and poor whites, deliberately kept blacks in this state of bound labor. After the Civil War the United States government bestowed hundreds of millions of acres of land upon railroad companies, and levied high tariffs (paid by consumers) on imported manufactured goods. But it denied Afro-Americans the land they needed for economic self-sufficiency, and which they had earned by centuries of unrequited toil (and, often enough, by service in the armed forces during the Great Rebellion). Northern capitalists profited from black servitude: they required cotton for their textile mills and for the export trade, and they further enriched themselves by financing and transporting the crop. White capitalists were well aware that African Americans, given the choice, would have supported themselves on largely self-sufficient yeoman farms, rather than producing cotton for the national and international markets. Such self-sufficient homesteads, while allowing their black owners maximum freedom and economic independence, would have generated no rent, dividends, or interest for whites of either section. Instead, they would have partly liberated Afro-Americans from white control and substantially raised their living standards. Either from ideological conviction or fear of community retaliation, white landowners often refused to sell high-quality land to blacks who somehow accumulated the purchase price. White capitalists also denied blacks employment in the Southern textile mills; such jobs placated poor whites driven from the land, while black exclusion ensured a permanent black rural proletariat.[2]
The combination of law, custom, lack of employment opportunities, and outright terrorism ensured that both tenant farming and sharecropping shaded over into peonage, or debt slavery. Planters kept blacks forcibly at work on the grounds that the blacks owed money and could not leave the plantation until they had paid it. Peons were often sold, with their families and debts, to planters or other capitalists (especially timber or turpentine barons and railroad builders). They were beaten, tortured, chained, locked in stockades, starved, worked under the gun, and sometimes murdered. Escapees were tracked by dogs and hunted down by armed men. In 1917 a peon testified that whites "took a colored man out last night and tied him to a tree and blindfolded him and they beat him until the blood run down on the ground and they shot they guns till the people thought war had begun and the people went today and looked at where the blood soaked in the ground, and I am afraid my time next I cant sleep at night when I go to bed....." Pete Daniel, a historian of peonage, states that "the violence that attended peonage sent tentacles of dread throughout the entire black community.... It was the fear that a beating or death was the reward for leaving a plantation that kept many laborers quietly at work." One official investigating peonage at a railroad camp found that local whites would not fish in the river, because too many Negro corpses were dumped there.[3] Peonage kept the Southern rural economy alive; in 1907 one authority stated that one-third of the medium and large planters in Mississippi, Georgia, and Alabama operated peon farms. On those rare occasions when planters faced federal investigation, they usually claimed--no doubt sincerely--that they had no idea they were violating U.S. law. Everyone, it seemed, worked peons.
Peonage was legally sanctioned in many Southern states. An Alabama law not only allowed debt enslavement, but expressedly forbad testimony by the accused debtor. Even accommodationist Booker T. Washington complained that "any white man, who cares to charge that a Colored man has promised to work for him and has not done so, or who has gotten money from him and not paid it back, can have the Colored man sent to the chain gang." Although the Supreme Court struck down this law (Bailey v. Alabama, 1911) Georgia and Florida enforced almost identical statues until Pearl Harbor and beyond. More important, peonage was backed by white terrorism and violence even when it lacked statutory authority. Local sheriffs would arrest blacks on spurious charges, fine them, and then release them to a local planter or other capitalist who paid his fine. In 1914 the Supreme Court outlawed this practice (United States v. Reynolds), but with little effect. White landowners and other capitalists staged private, mock trials in which the black was seemingly convicted of a crime.[4] A white man who tracked down a black, alleging an unpaid debt, encountered no opposition from public officials or ordinary white citizens.
Although the United States had outlawed peonage in 1867, it rarely prosecuted its practitioners. When it did, it secured few convictions. In Clyatt v. the United States (1905), the Supreme Court exonerated a peonage driver who had crossed state lines and, with the cooperation of local law enforcement officials, openly kidnapped black laborers at gunpoint, claiming that the men owed him money and had fled from his turpentine camp. The blacks' main witnesses quickly disappeared--almost certainly murdered--so the Court decided that debt peonage remained unproven. Nor were the perpetrators prosecuted for their other atrocities, such as kidnapping or assault (crimes that remained under local jurisdiction). Timber barons and turpentine operators had joined forces after Clyatt's indictment and raised a $90,000 war-chest, claiming, in the words of a U.S. attorney, that unless they could "control their labor as they saw fit, without any interference from the federal authorities, they would be unable to carry on the saw mill business."[5]
Similarly, in Georgia (1920), the local sheriff asked for a three-day postponement of a peonage trial; in the interim, the black peon witness was murdered, his corpse dumped in a river, and his skull torn off to prevent identification by dental records. The foreman of the coroner's jury investigating this death (who, unsurprisingly, had himself previously been convicted of peonage), had sold the victim to his killer. The all-white jury, predictably, declared the murderer innocent. The prosecutor accused the judge of bias and lamented that "peonage in this State is practiced chiefly by people who stand high socially and politically and who are people of wealth and influence." Furthermore, black victims, knowing they would soon find themselves back in the clutches of their tormentors, were afraid to testify. In 1911 another U.S. attorney lamented that "negroes will be compelled to work out labor contracts even if a few of them have to be lynched in order to terrorize the remaining ones into complying with these iniquitous contracts."[6]
Peonage remained endemic because the beneficiaries--rich Southern planters and other capitalists--controlled the local sheriffs, courts, and governments. They routinely used terrorism, murder, and torture as instruments of compliance, with the almost complete acquiescence of the United States. (The U.S. did, on the other hand, prosecute Southern whites who enslaved Italian immigrants, after the Italian government complained).[7] Indeed, during the calamitous Mississippi River flood of 1927, blacks were impressed into slave labor on the crumbling levees; hundreds were killed when the levees broke. U.S. troops placed the survivors in concentration camps under armed guard, and kept them prisoner until their de facto owners (the lords of the plantations on which they toiled) claimed them.[8] Daniel concludes that "the decisions of the Supreme Court... simply did not touch the Southern peonage farms, and the custom of peonage had become so entrenched that even poor neighbors whom it affected economically would seldom complain. The race issue proved more than just a valuable tool to move the masses at election time; it also blinded them to the economic possibility of successfully competing with peon labor.... The South had changed little since antebellum slavery days."[9]
Ironically, the U.S. had no law penalizing outright slavery--the kidnapping, imprisonment, and coercion of workers when no debt was claimed. One capitalist accused of peonage admitted that he practiced slavery (which was not penalized by Congressional enactment); another, accused of slavery, admitted to peonage (a crime with which he was not charged). Both were ultimately acquitted. As Daniel remarks, "individuals acting on their own volition could hold laborers in slavery, for there was no state or federal statute that prohibited it." The U.S. Attorney General asked vainly for such federal legislation in 1911.[10]
Peonage was itself buttressed by convict leasing, a form of state-sponsored exploitation, torture, and murder. Blacks were routinely arrested for petty or nonexistent crimes, fined a sum they could not pay, and sold for their debt to agricultural or industrial capitalists who could work them to death with impunity. Because capitalists rented convicts for a set time period, they could starve, beat, and work their property to death and then procure a free replacement from the government. Historian David Oshinksy, who chronicles the horrors of the convict lease, states that Black prisoners would suffer and die under conditions far worse than anything they had ever experienced as slaves.... They would serve their sentences in the coal mines, sawmills, railroad camps, and cotton fields of the emerging New South.... From its beginnings in Mississippi in the late 1860s until its abolition in Alabama in the late 1920s, convict leasing would serve to undermine legal equality, harden racial stereotypes, spur industrial development, intimidate free workers, and breed open contempt for the law. It would turn a few men into millionaires and crush thousands of ordinary lives.... In a region where dark skin and forced labor went hand in hand, leasing would become a functional replacement for slavery, a human bridge between the Old South and the New.[11] Oshinsky concludes that "the South's economic development can be traced by the blood of its prisoners.... The convict lease had become a huge operation, supplying bodies like the slave trade of old."[12]
Convict leasing served multiple purposes. It profited state and local governments (the latter were largely financed by court costs), intimidated African-American workers, and provided cheap labor for capitalists. Corrupt alliances between local businessmen and politicians enriched both at the expense of mutilated black lives. In a statement applicable to other states, Oshinsky says that "the exclusive right to lease state convicts quickly became Mississippi's most prized political contract, coveted by planters, businessmen, and speculators across the board." Many capitalists rented convicts at bargain rates and then sold them to others at prices far above what they had paid; such middlemen were "a latter-day version of the slave broker who supplied fettered Africans to the great plantations of the antebellum South.... The convict now found himself laboring for the profits of three separate parties: the sublessee, the lessee, and the state.... If the convict died or escaped, his employer lost nothing."[13]
Leased convicts worked at a pace and at tasks that free labor abhorred. One railroad company's convicts worked chained in knee-deep pools of muck, "their thirst driving them to drink the water in which they were compelled to deposit their excrement." Many others were starved, served food crawling with vermin, and bunked, often naked, on bare ground. Some had a metal spur riveted in their foot. Convicts died of every possible disease, including shackle poisoning. They were beaten and tortured and, if too sick to work, sometimes killed. Those familiar with convict camps frequently complained of the stench, filth, and vermin. An Alabama warden (1882) said that convicts "breathed and drank their bodily exhalation and excrement." Three years later a visitor, echoing common complaints, described Alabama inmates as clothed "in filthy rags, with vile odors and the clanking of shackles." Plantation and corporate doctors seldom tended the sick; rather, they certified which convicts were too sick to work and signed death certificates.[14] In Mississippi in the 1880s the annual mortality rate of the convicts was between 9 and 16%, not counting the sick and maimed convicts released in expectation of imminent death. (At least one in four convicts was an adolescent or child; some, sentenced for stealing a hat or some change, were as young as six or eight.) In Alabama in 1870 over 40% of the convicts perished; a South Carolina railroad killed 45% of its convict workers between 1877 and 1879. Convicts were routinely beaten by sadistic guards and left to die covered with vermin and filth. In Mississippi, white newspaper editors who exposed similar evils were killed. "Nobody was surprised," Oshinsky comments; "crusading editors in Mississippi did not often die in their sleep."[15]
Convict leasing became endemic throughout the South in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Convicts inhabited a wide-ranging gulag and were exploited with the efficiency and thoroughness of abattoirs that proverbially used "every part of a pig except the squeal." Tennessee convicts laid track and mined coal; Oshinsky says that "each morning their urine was collected and sold to local tanneries by the barrel," while the Medical School at Nashville purchased their unclaimed corpses for dissection. Convicts laid most North Carolina railroad track in the 1870s and 1880s because, as a railroad official said, "if [the convict] dies it is a small loss, and we can make him work here, while we cannot get free men to do the same kind of labor for, say, six times as much as the convict costs." Oshinksy reports that the convicts, living in an 8x8x15 rolling iron cage in which twenty slept and were transported to work, "slept side by side, shackled together, on narrow wooden slabs. They relieved themselves in a single bucket and bathed in the same filthy tub of water. With no screens on the cages, insects swarmed everywhere.... A year or two on the Western North Carolina Railroad was akin to a death sentence."[16]
Conditions in other states were similar. Oshinsky says that "on the Great Northern Railroad, Texas convicts were starved, whipped, beaten with tree limbs, and hung naked in wooded stocks. At the prison camps of the Greenville and Augusta Railroad, convicts were used up faster than South Carolina authorities could supply them.... As the railroads expanded, new industries followed in their path. The South's economic development can be traced by the blood of its prisoners." On Texas convict-labor farms, nightly screams so disturbed the bucolic serenity of the neighboring farmers that camp officials gagged the prisoners "to muffle their cries." A legislative committee admitted that "as a rule, the life of a convict is not as valuable in the eyes of the sergeants and guards and contractors as that of a dog.... [Convicts are routinely] whipped into unconsciousness.... shot down upon the least provocation.... [and worked] until they drop dead in their tracks." One prisoner died a lingering death after having been whipped, sprinkled with sand, whipped again, and forced to climb an ant-infested tree. "Incidents like this tarnished convict leasing but failed to drag it down," Oshinsky says. "For one thing, the major lessees in Texas were bank presidents and railroad builders, cattle barons and cotton planters, merchants and politicians--all competing for the labor of shackled men." When Joseph Brown, owner of the Dade Coal Mine in Georgia, was accused of operating a death-camp, he casually replied that "We make some profit at the Dade Coal Mines, and there we use convict labor. Is it a crime for a citizen to put his money into the development of mineral interests, especially if he should succeed in making money by his energy and enterprise?" In some places, recalcitrant convicts were tortured in tin sweatboxes, which had a small hole for the convict's nose; when the box was placed in the broiling sun, the convict's body swelled and sometimes bled.[17] Many of these tortures were performed openly, near cities. Albert S. Burleson, Woodrow Wilson's Postmaster General (who mercilessly suppressed radical publications during World War I) operated a convict-labor torture chamber.
In most Southern states, blacks needed for labor were simply rounded up and accused of crimes. In 1907 a journalist described how a local sheriff and turpentine operator made a list of eighty healthy blacks; within three weeks all eighty were arrested and sent to the turpentine camps. Elsewhere, Oshinsky says, convict "numbers ebbed and flowed according to the labor needs of the coal companies and the revenue needs of the coal companies and the state. When times were tight, local police would sweep the streets for vagrants, drunks, and thieves." Capitalists "routinely worked county convicts beyond their scheduled release dates."[18] Because convicts required no investment on the part of the capitalist, they were indeed treated worse than slaves.
Convict leasing by the states had died out in most places by the time of World War I. By 1915 only Florida and Alabama allowed the leasing of state convicts. However, equally horrible forms of forced labor replaced it. Florida ended state convict leasing in 1919, but this only resulted in a massive increase in blacks arrested and sentenced for petty or non-existent crimes by the counties. White capitalists still demanded black laborers for the turpentine camps (some of which were owned by Northerners). The death-knell of convict leasing occurred only in 1922, when Martin Tabert, a white from North Dakota who hitched a ride on a freight train, was tortured to death in a lumber camp. Because Tabert was white, his murder generated a national uproar. The Florida legislature investigated and found, Oshinsky says, that "Tabert had been put to work in a poison swamp, shovelling mud in hip-deep water for fifteen hours a day. When he could no longer keep the pace, he had been flogged with a seven-pound strap until his back 'was all scabs and cuts from his shoulder to his knees.'" The whipping boss had laid on dozens of lashes, dragging the strap through sugar and sand "to increase its sting and weight." Tabert died and was unceremoniously buried in the old clothes of a black convict. The lumber company unctuously wrote his family that "the boy was given a Christian burial in a cemetery near here and had a minister officiate in same.... Please accept our sympathy in your bereavement."[19]
Florida ended county convict leasing because adverse publicity generated Northern boycotts and hurt tourism. "Yet the abolition of convict leasing did little to disturb the brutal turpentine culture of the north Florida woods," Oshinsky concludes. Tabert's murderer, acquitted on all charges, soon killed again--this time murdering a "free" turpentine worker. Only the end of the turpentine boom after World War II ended these horrors. The end of convict labor elsewhere had similar results. Tennessee abolished the system in 1896, after the "Tennessee Convict War" in which free coal miners forcibly liberated the convicts who undermined their wages. The state government, burdened with the high cost of guarding the convicts with troops, ended convict labor because it no longer paid. "But the end of convict leasing in Tennessee did not mean a new beginning for the prisoners who had suffered under it," Oshinksy says. "Instead of mining coal for a private corporation, the bulk of them were shipped to Brushy Mountain and forced to mine coal for the state."[20]
The abolition of convict labor in Mississippi similarly kept black prisoners in virtual slavery. Governor James Vardaman, virulently racist even by Southern standards, abolished convict leasing because it primarily benefited rich whites. Demanding that all white Mississippians share the profits of enslaved black workers, Vardaman created Parchman State Penitentiary, a massive state-run slave labor camp. Parchman was self-sufficient by 1915, producing most items needed by the inmates and huge profits (almost half the state education budget) besides. Oshinsky says that Parchman "resembled an antebellum slave plantation with convicts in place of slaves. Both systems used captive labor to grow the same crops in identical ways. Both relied on a small staff of rural, lower-class whites to supervise the black labor gangs." The white sergeants had absolute power; gun-toting inmate trustees were chosen from the most brutal and depraved criminals, who were pardoned if they killed an escapee. Inmates were fed rancid food, crowded into squalid barracks, and publicly whipped by sadistic guards. Homosexual rape of young convicts was common. The main goal of Parchman was crop production, not rehabilitation (not in any case needed for the mostly innocent prisoners) or even punishment.[21] Parchman was a durable institution; as late as the 1960s, the Kennedy administration helped Mississippi incarcerate Freedom Riders, who had peaceably integrated interstate busses in accordance with federal law, in Parchman, an institution described by Oshinsky as "worse than slavery."
Other Southwestern states built penitentiaries such as Parchman, but the former slave states of the Southeast replaced convict labor with the chain gang, used mostly for constructing and improving roads. Southern Progressives viewed the chain gang as a modernizing reform that placed convicts under the direct supervision of the state while employing them on projects benefiting all whites rather than a few rich capitalists. As one reformer gushed, "the convict is as much the property of the state as the slave before the war was the property of the slave owner. The state is his real master and as such is not only responsible for his well-being, but for the productivity of his labor to the end that the community at large may be served." In fact, chain-gang slaves were driven as relentlessly as convict leasees; economic production remained paramount. Alex Lichtenstein, who has analyzed the transition from the convict lease to the chain gang, comments that "the most ambitious pre-New Deal effort to nationalize and modernize the isolated rural South depended on one of the region's most viciously racist local institutions. For Progressive Era chain gangs had their origins in some of the worst prison camps found during the era of leasing, those reserved for petty criminals sentenced in county or municipal courts for misdemeanors.... With such an overwhelming emphasis on the economic benefits of forced labor it should come as no surprise that for the convicts themselves the difference between the chain gang and the convict lease proved negligible."[22] Tales of horror abounded in the new, "progressive" chain gangs:
Convicts labored, ate, and slept with chains riveted around their ankles. Work was done "under the gun" from sun-up to sundown, shoveling dirt at fourteen shovelfuls a minute. Food was bug-infested, rotten, and unvarying; "rest" was taken in unwashed bedding, often in wheeled cages nine feet wide by twenty feet long containing eighteen beds. Medical treatment and bathing facilities were unsanitary, if available at all. And above all, corporal punishment and outright torture--casual blows from rifle butts or clubs, whipping with a leather strap, confinement in a "sweat-box" under the southern sun, and hanging from stocks or bars--was meted out for the most insignificant transgressions, particularly to African Americans who remained the majority of the chain gang prisoners.[23]
Progress of a sort did occur: in at least one camp the whipping bosses roamed in automobiles, and studded their whips with brass nails. One observer claimed that chain-gang inmates often invited the whip-master's bullet as ending their sufferings. All of this was accompanied by pious exhalations about reforming inmates through wholesome work in the great outdoors. Racist arguments were also freely employed: whites asserted that blacks would not work except under the lash.
Convict labor, the chain gang, and the state penitentiaries bolstered both capitalism and white supremacy in many ways. First, by primarily victimizing African Americans, they radically differentiated blacks from whites, who perceived blacks as both degraded and as dangerous economic competitors. Second, they terrorized planation blacks into docility. A Georgia road engineer exulted in 1912 that "the most striking effect of the convict camp on the roads is its effect on free labor in producing abundance of labor on the plantations. The prompt arrests for loitering, gambling and other petty offenses with a short sentence on the chain gang has a wholesome effect on a race that are not noted for either industry or thrift."[24] Third, coerced labor provided an indispensable subsidy for capitalists who built railroads, mined coal, harvested timber and turpentine, and in general fostered the economic modernization of the South. The convict lease and the chain gang recruited toilers for industrial and extractive-industry capitalists without competing for plantation labor or creating a free, mobile Afro-American proletariat. Lichtenstein says:
Above all, convict labor made modern economic development of the South's resources compatible with the maintenance of racial domination.... New South capitalists in Georgia and elsewhere... [used] the state to recruit and discipline a convict labor force, and thus... [developed] their states' resources without creating a wage labor force, and without undermining planters' control of black labor. In fact quite the opposite: the penal system could be used as a powerful sanction against rural blacks who challenged the racial order upon which agricultural labor control relied.... Since it reinforced, rather than disrupted, the forms of social control necessary for extreme labor exploitation in the South's plantation districts, this was a form of "modernization" acceptable to planter and industrialist alike.... Strict laws against breaking contracts and harsh sentences for petty theft served the dual purpose of disciplining rural labor and increasing the pool of convicts for Georgia's coal mines, brickyards, lumber mills, and railroad camps.... Thus the legal mechanisms of social and racial control devoted to the perpetuation of plantation society could also channel forced black labor into a developing, industrial section.... What anti-enticement laws, crop-liens, and vagrancy statutes were to the planters, the convict lease was to an emerging class of industrial entrepreneurs, in Georgia and elsewhere.[25]
Lichtenstein concludes that "if the labor contract stood as the sine qua non of Reconstruction agricultural production, the convict lease provided a ready means of recruitment for the heavy labor of grading railroads," mining coal, harvesting timber, and extracting turpentine.[26] Some of these functions--building railroads and roads, mining coal, and making pig iron--undergirded economic development generally; others, such as timber and turpentine harvesting, benefited specific sectors.
Enslaved black labor also helped reduce free white wages, break strikes, and discourage unionization. This effect was especially pronounced in the coal mines, where free white workers competed with convict labor. In 1886 a U.S. Bureau of Labor agent reported that Alabama mine owners claimed that "they could not work at a profit without the lowering effect in wages of convict-labor competition." Six years later a former president of the massive Tennessee Coal and Iron Company boasted that "we were right in calculating that the free laborers would be loath to enter upon strikes when they saw that the company was amply provided with convict labor." This particular boast was ill-timed, coming just before the Tennessee Convict War which ended convict leasing in that state. Yet convict coal miners helped break the regional coal strike of 1894. At other times and places surviving convicts remained on the job after their term expired; convict leasing was therefore a method of "state-sponsored proletarianization." Convict miners continued working during economic downturns, and fostered the systemized production of coal, coke, and iron. Capitalists in a region where free labor was sporadic and unreliable valued the dependability, even more than the cheapness, of slave labor.[27]
Lichtenstein places the new forms of black slavery at the very heart of the new political economy of the industrializing South. Convict labor constituted a relation of production suited to modernization while maintaining a commitment to a restrictive racial order.... The use of the penal system to recruit and control black labor stood at the cutting edge of southern politics and economic development, not in its dark corners. Far from representing a lag in southern modernity, convict labor was a central component in the region's modernization. The chain gangs which built the roads of the twentieth-century South became an enduring symbol of southern backwardness, brutality, and racism; in fact, they were the embodiment of the Progressive ideals of southern modernization, penal reform, and racial moderation. In this duality the southern chain gang replicated the most significant feature of the convict lease system it had superseded.[28]
Lichtenstein reminds us that "this continual correspondence between the forces of modernization and the perpetuation of bound labor was no anomaly. Even chattel slavery in the Americas was a crucial component in the development of capitalism.... Rather than constituting an 'archaic' obstacle to capitalist development, destined to be swept away by modernity, unfree labor has frequently been an essential element in the accumulation process that made that development possible." Convict labor, the chain gang, and the state penitentiary built the railroads, mines, timber camps, and roads of the South; they drew their advocates "not from those who yearned for the social and economic order of the slave South, but from the region's most ardent advocates of progress, who sought to reconcile modernization with the racial caste system."[29] Forced labor undergirded the Southern economy at least until World War II.
City and town life in the South was equally lethal for blacks. Denied justice and economic opportunity in the countryside, blacks fled to Southern cities whenever they could. But the men were denied all but the most menial, difficult, dirty, intermittent, and dangerous jobs; and by the 1920s they were being driven out of even those few niches (such as barbering) where they had predominated. Black women could find work mainly as personal servants of various kinds, such as washerwomen, cooks, and nursemaids. Most urban black women worked long and backbreaking hours in white households, and were often so busy raising white children that they had scant time for their own. In addition, black women were the sexual prey of their white employers. However exploited and low-paid (the "service pan," table scraps left after the whites had eaten, was a significant portion of the pay) servants at least had some income. However, female employment in an economy that denied men jobs undermined the position of black men, who could not fulfill the socially-proscribed male role of supporting their families. Black male unemployment, of course, impoverished black families. Black men, like whites in the same circumstances, often considered themselves a burden, and deserted families they could not help feed. Others took their impotent rage out on their wives and children.[30]
In addition, urban blacks usually resided in shantytowns on the outskirts of town, or in horrible, squalid sections denied city services such as sanitation and water. Some urban blacks lived in old slave quarters, or in housing designed for cattle. Historian Howard Rabinowitz concludes that blacks "occupied land considered unfit for white habitation," and lived "in unkempt alleyways, on low-lying ground near contaminated streams, or near slaughterhouses, flour mills, or other industrial sites.... [Black neighborhoods] were filthy narrow places, often open sewers, and the breeding grounds of disease and crime.... Poor living conditions not only took their yearly toll of deaths from the constant companions of consumption and pneumonia, but periodically the black areas were ravished by epidemics of cholera, smallpox, and, to a lesser extent, yellow fever." Whites worried only that the white-imposed filth and disease of the black sections might spread through white neighborhoods.[31]
Apartheid
African Americans suffered not only from government-enforced poverty and semi-enslavement, but from state-mandated apartheid. American apartheid consisted of a pervasive, legally-enforced subordination actively imposed by the federal government as well as by state and local authorities. After the collapse of Reconstruction, Congress and Presidents, regardless of party, bolstered white supremacy North and South. In 1883 the Supreme Court struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875; in 1896 it legitimated segregation (Plessy v. Ferguson), thereby placing its imprimatur upon apartheid just as it had previously fostered slavery. Jim Crow ostensibly enforced a rigid separation of the races, but its actual purpose was not segregation but degradation and subordination. Jim Crow designedly humiliated Americans of African descent, even as the Southern social system integrated the most intimate aspects of private and public life.
African Americans were allotted separate drinking fountains, waiting rooms, telephone booths, hospitals, windows in banks, cemeteries, elevators (often that "for freight and niggers"), and Bibles on which they swore in court. Black travellers were forced into dirty and decrepit railroad cars, often the "smoker" in which the most vulgar, abusive, and tobacco-spitting white men congregated. (When a black woman objected that a white entered the so-called Negro car, the conductor replied that "the law was made to keep you in your place, not the white people.") Afro-Americans were confined in designated sections (often separated from the white area by a moveable screen) on streetcars; if the white area filled up, blacks had to stand so that boarding whites could sit. Blacks were usually relegated to the back of the streetcar or bus, but in Birmingham they sat in the front. Explaining this anomaly, one white epitomized the logic and purpose of Jim Crow. "After all," he said, "it is not important which end of the car is given to the nigger. The main point is that he must sit where he is told." Afro-Americans were completely excluded from many libraries and parks ("Negroes and Dogs Not Allowed" was a commonplace sign), and from almost all restaurants and hotels except those exclusively catering to blacks. When served in public facilities such as ticket offices or restaurants (at a side window for take-out), blacks were forced to wait until all whites were served.[32]
Justifying these laws and customs and the assiduous terrorism which enforced them, whites vilified African Americans much as Nazis demonized Jews, constantly using the imagery of vermin, disease, infection, viruses, toxicity, and filth. One white woman told a Northern visitor: "If anything would make me kill my children, it would be the possibility that niggers might sometime eat at the same table and associate with them as equals. That's the way we feel about it, and you might as well root up that big tree in front of the house and stand it the other way up and expect it to grow as to think we can feel any different." Vardaman, in his usual inimitable way, said that he would gladly countenance the extermination of "every Ethiop of the earth to preserve unsullied the honor of one Caucasian home." Admitting that this would kill the good as well as the bad, Vardaman admonished his listeners that "the good are few, the bad are many, and it is impossible to tell what ones are... dangerous to the honor of the dominant race until the damage is done.... We do not stop when we see a wolf to find it if will kill sheep before disposing of it."[33]
The result was continual insult, humiliation, and degradation for blacks, who could never forget their inferior status. As activist and writer Pauli Murray remembered, "We came to know that whatever we had was always inferior. We came to understand that no matter how neat and clean, how law abiding, submissive and polite, how studious in school, how churchgoing and moral, how scrupulous in paying our bills and taxes we were, it made no essential difference in our place."[34] Many streetcar conductors, ticket agents, elevator operators, clerks, and other (themselves lowly) personnel took sadistic delight in humiliating blacks who inadvertently stepped over the line--a line that was differently drawn depending on time, place, and the mood of the officiating white. In 1904 in Alabama, a black woman sat in the wrong section of a streetcar; the conductor rudely exclaimed that "niggers don't sit with white folks down here." White passengers sneered at the hapless woman and applauded the conductor. The woman later wrote:
Not one of them thought that I was embarrassed, wounded and outraged by the loud, brutal talk of the conductor and the sneering, contemptuous expressions on their own faces.... I have been humiliated often, but I never get used to it; it is new each time, and stings and hurts more and more.... I dread to see my children grow. I know not their fate.... It does not matter how good or wise my children may be, they are colored.[35]
Blacks were also segregated in separate neighborhoods, especially in newly built cities or the expanding sections of older urban areas. As a North Carolina white said, "In this white man's town when an African proposed to 'move into' a white section, he was given to understand that it wouldn't do. And if he had moved in he would have moved out a great deal quicker--and a pile of ashes would have marked the house. That is what the White Man will do, law or no law, and that is understood." Black neighborhoods were often in death-trap lowland areas, and were denied the elementary city services provided for whites; this contributed to the extraordinary death rate among blacks.[36]
Although Jim Crow ostensibly separated the races and preserved whites from the contamination of blacks, whites and blacks actually mingled with the greatest possible intimacy throughout the South. White children suckled at the breasts of black women, who often raised white children as well as nursing them. Blacks also performed much of the cooking and serving of food, and washing of clothes, for white families throughout the South. Jim Crow enforced subordination, not separation. As a black South Carolina newspaper said (1889), "the blackest hands can cook the food for prejudiced throats; the blackest, dirtiest arms can hold the whitest, cleanest baby; the blackest, most illiterate man can sit on the same seat, even with a lady, as driver; but the angry passions rise when a well-dressed, educated, refined negro pays his own fare and seats himself quietly in a public conveyance." A house servant in Georgia agreed: "everything was all right, so long as I was in the white man's part of the street car or in the white man's coach as a servant--a slave--but as soon as I did not present myself as a menial, and the relationship of master and servant was abolished by my not having the white children with me, I would be forthwith assigned to the 'nigger' seats of the 'colored people's coach.'" Parks which otherwise banned blacks did allow Negro servants. A white Episcopal minister in Louisiana aptly summed up the intent and impact of Jim Crow: "The black nurse with a white baby in her arms, the black valet looking after the comfort of the white invalid have the label of their inferiority conspicuously upon them; they understand themselves, everybody understands them, to be servants, enjoying certain privileges for the sake of the person served. Almost anything the Negro may do in the South, and anywhere he may go, provided the manner of his doing and going is that of an inferior. Such is the premium put upon his inferiority; such his inducement to maintain it."[37]
The motive of degradation, humiliation, and subordination were clearly revealed in "linguistic Jim Crow." Blacks under compulsion addressed any adult white with a courtesy title (Mr, Mrs, or Miss) followed by his or her last name; whites called blacks of whatever age by their first name, by the epithet "boy" or "nigger", or, for older blacks, "Aunt" or "Uncle." Any Negro who addressed another black with a courtesy title risked violence as surely as one who dropped the title when addressing whites. Christopher Brooks of Wilmington was fined and then incarcerated in the workhouse for regularly calling Negroes by a courtesy title; another well-regarded black was run out of town for politely asking that he be called Mr. Foster rather than Dick, even though he quickly apologized for his indiscretion. Such grotesque, if often lethal, absurdities reached their apogee in the case of the founder of Tuskegee, regarding whom a white man said: "Now I admire Booker Washington. I regard him as a great man, and yet I couldn't call him Mr. Washington. We were all in a quandary until a doctor's degree was given him. That saved our lives! We call him 'Dr.' Washington now."[38]
Schooling for Slavery
African Americans were also segregated in their own distinct schools, which--in addition to stigmatizing blacks as inferior and unworthy--were starved for funds even by Southern criteria. In 1927, black schools received less than 10% as much per pupil as white schools in South Carolina and Alabama, roughly 25% as much in Georgia and Mississippi, and about 50% as much in Tennessee and Arkansas. Such figures--which starkly revealed the fatuousness of the Supreme Court's "separate but equal" doctrine and the travesty of Booker Washington's gospel of uplift through education--affected black children at every stage in the educational process. African-American school buildings were often dilapidated shacks with gaping holes in the roof and walls; some schools convened in mule stables, warehouses, churches, or private homes. The most rudimentary supplies were often lacking. The school year was greatly shortened for black children because white planters exploited them in the fields, and black parents often depended on the tiny incomes their young children could provide. Afro-American teachers were paid much less than their white counterparts, often collecting their wages "in kind" as potatoes, eggs, or chickens. At the insistence of white officials, many black teachers were scarcely educated themselves, while Northern whites who taught Southern blacks suffered from social ostracism, the denial of credit at local stores, and difficulty in finding lodging. If their black pupils greeted them on the street, the teacher, the student, or both might suffer instant death. In 1913 a white North Carolina official denounced his state's schools for blacks as a blot on civilization. "To one who does not know our history," he said, "these schoolhouses, though mute, would tell in unmistaken terms a story of injustice, inhumanity and neglect on the part of our white people." Pauli Murray sadly remembered that "it was never the hardship which hurt so much, as the contrast between what we had and what the white children had.... Our seedy run-down school told us that if we had any place at all in the scheme of things it was a separate place, marked off, proscribed and unwanted by the white people."[39]
Horrible facilities and unequal expenditures were only part of the problem, however. When African Americans attended school, they imbibed the same white-supremacist historical lies pounded into white children. The Horatio Alger/capitalist illusion that promised success for those who worked hard also falsified the Afro-American (and poor white) situation; however, it was fervently inculcated, even though blacks who followed its precepts often met death at the hands of outraged and humiliated whites. The black-run Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical College's motto, "Work is the Measure of Worth" pleased elite whites who battened on black toil. One African American critic charged that a prominent black college president had reassured whites that the aim of his institution "was not so much to lift the Negroes socially but to make better cooks, nurse maids, mechanics and share farmers of them. Thus the real benefit would come to whites." Similarly, a black Texan complained that the chief lessons taught at Negro schools were cowardice and cringing. Many whites agreed, though from their opposite perspective. A white Mississippian praised Lawrence Jones, Afro-American head of the Piney Woods School. Jones "says he ain't gwine to teach 'em so much book larning, but he wants to learn 'em to do more and better work, so when we wants good work done we can git it. That nigger seems like a good nigger. I like him." A white Maryland paper advocating Negro education urged that schooling inculcate deference to whites and respect for manual toil. "What the negro needs is to be taught and shown that labor is his salvation--not books. The state appropriation is intended to encourage that teaching."[40]
White demands on black educators were murderously contradictory, depending on time, place, and whim. A senior class in North Carolina endangered their school's very existence by choosing a Latin motto, which local whites deemed far above the proper station of a race divinely ordained for menial labor. Ironically, however, the main state-supported black school in Virginia taught the classics but steadfastly eschewed courses in scientific agriculture. Latin and Greek had no practical value; modern farming techniques might liberate some blacks by giving them the knowledge and motivation necessary to acquire their own land.[41]
Despite the uses of education in bolstering white supremacy, many whites opposed all forms of Afro-American schooling. Such racists believed that education ruined blacks for labor, raised their expectations, ambitions, and self-esteem, and generated discontent. A white South Carolinian lamented that "after a fellow has learned to wear a clean shirt at college, he is not going into the cotton patch." One Montgomery attorney frankly stated: "It's a question of who will do the dirty work. In this country the white man won't; the Negro must. There's got to be a mudsill somewhere. If you educate the Negroes they won't stay where they belong; and you must consider them as a race, because if you let a few rise it makes the others discontented." A Baptist teacher likewise argued that "if a man is engaged in work below his education, he feels degraded by it, and that sense of degradation compels him to do inferior work.... The bootblack is not a better bootblack, but a worse one, the ditcher is not a better ditcher but a worse one, if he can also calculate a solar eclipse or read with a critic's ken the choral odes of the Greek dramatists.... The cook, that must read the daily newspaper will spoil your beef and your bread; the sable pickaninny, that has to do his grammar and arithmetic, will leave your boots unblacked and your horse uncurried.... To invite the negro from those pursuits which require firm muscles and little intelligence to those callings which demand less muscle and higher intelligence, is to invite him to his sure extermination."[42]
Whites feared retaliatory violence from educated African Americans, and therefore justified pre-emptive terrorism against such people. In 1904 a Charleston newspaper stated: "Let us be frank and honest. The great mass of the white people of the South have no idea of educating the Negro to be a citizen--their equal, either social or political. They want him to be the white man's help, and if he is not willing to occupy a subordinate position in this country, the sooner he leaves it, or the southern part of it at least, the better for all concerned." The editor of the Atlanta Constitution avowed that "Education brings light, and light perception, and with quickened faculties the negro sees the difference between his real and his constitutional status in the republic. He sees that neither worth nor merit nor attainment can overcome the world-wide revulsion of type and color; and seeing this, he is moved to rebellious protest and sometimes to violent revenge." Whites feared that educated Afro-Americans would register and vote, or, even worse, demand social equality. "Ambition in the negro is consecrated in lust," proclaimed one Mississippi politician; another white asserted that educating the Negro resembled "placing a loaded magazine rifle in the arms of a chimpanzee." Whites repeatedly claimed that educated blacks committed the vast majority of crimes. But as Du Bois perceived, whites feared that educated, successful African Americans would earn and demand higher wages, home ownership, and their own farms or businesses. Atlanta whites, he said, overwhelmingly preferred "cringing vagrants and criminals" over industrious property owners not because they wanted Negro crime but because "they fear Negro ambition and success more. They can deal with crime by chain gang and lynch law, or at least they think they can, but the South can conceive neither machinery nor place for the educated, self-reliant, self-assertive black man."[43]
White fears of successful Negroes evoked savage retaliation against those few blacks who, surmounting all odds, partly escaped from white control by owning their own farms, businesses, or homes. Prosperous African Americans often found their property torched or otherwise destroyed, while they themselves often suffered torture and/or murder. Some blacks highly valued literacy and numeracy as checks upon the landlord's and furnishing merchant's account books. Many others, however, found that merely asking whites for information on their debts and credits (much more contesting it) evoked instant, barbaric violence. Henry Kirkland asked that his educated son Emmet keep his own set of books, and at settling time questioned his employer's figures; the insulted (and doubtless thieving) white murdered Henry and seriously injured his son, who soon fled North.[44]
The sad story of Charles Holcombe, a North Carolina sharecropper, similarly epitomized the situation of many educated blacks in the South. Mr. Holcombe worked for a lifetime in hopes of owning his own land; repeatedly cheated by his landlord, he placed his hopes on his eldest son, Willie. Willie's college education, however, merely embittered him because he could find no outlet for his skills or ambitions; soon Willie was mauled and killed by a white whose payment for the tobacco crop he had disputed. Mr. Holcomb had learned his lesson. Arriving at the scene of the murder (perpetrated in full public view), Mr. Holcomb said:
I knowd he wad dead de minute I seed him.... Right den I knowed dey wan't no use to ax for no he'p and dat I was jist a pore nigger in trouble.... Dey was tears funnin' down my cheeks and droppin' on his face and I couldn't he'p it... For a long time after that I couldn't seem to git goin', and dey was a big chunk in de bottom o' my stummick dat jist wouldn't go away. I would go out at night and set under de pine by Willie's grave, and listen to de win' swishin' in de needles, and I'd do a lot o' thinkin.... I knowed [that Willie]... had stepped outen his place when he got dat eddycation. If I'd kept him here on de farm he woulda been all right. Niggers has got to l'arn that dey ain't like white folks, and never will be, and no amount o' eddycation can make 'em be, and dat when dey gits outen dere place dere is gonna be trouble.... Niggers is built for service, like a mule, and dey needn't 'spect nothin' else.... God made a nigger like a mule to be close to nature and git his livin' by de sweat o' his brow like de Good Book says.[45]
Mr. Holcombe ensured that none of his other children attended college. Instead, they lived nearby on the land, and helped him in his old age (a duty that educated children with opportunities elsewhere might neglect). "Dey don't hab much, but dey is happy," Mr. Holcomb said.[46] No wonder that another black man admonished his grandson: "School don't mean anything to a nigger. What do they have to do except work like hell from morning till night year in and year out, and do what the white man tells them to do, and it don't take no education to do that." Many black parents lived on the edge of starvation and needed their children in "the cotton patch and corn-field school" for family survival. For these reasons, some black leaders opposed education, believing, in the words of one businessman, that education made a Negro "dissatisfied with his position.... And then you have a dangerous situation." For similar reasons, many black pupils regarded excelling at school as "acting white," a betrayal of the racial group. Southern blacks almost unanimously abandoned hopes for integrated schools, instead advocating (just as hopelessly) equal resources for black schools.[47]
Terrorism
Extralegal terrorism and violence--pervasive, ubiquitous, and inescapable--undergirded the entire white supremacist system. The ritualized murder and torture of Afro-Americans constituted both a foundation and capstone of forced labor, Jim Crow, disfranchisement, inadequate and pernicious education, and criminal justice. Virtually any white could publicly insult, rob, assault, mutilate, torture, or murder almost any Afro-American at any time, for any reason or no reason, in full public view or in private, without fear of punishment. At least three thousand blacks were lynched between 1890 and World War I, and uncounted others murdered secretly by individuals or officially by law-enforcement personnel conducting authorized "nigger hunts". As Litwack reports:
The story of a lynching, then, is more than the simple fact of a black man or woman hanged by the neck. It is the story of slow, methodical, sadistic, often highly inventive forms of torture and mutilation. If executed by fire, it is the red-hot poker applied to the eyes and genitals and the stench of burning flesh as the body slowly roasts over the flames and the blood sizzles in the heat. If executed by hanging, it is the convulsive movement of the limbs. Whether by fire or rope, it is the dismemberment and distribution of severed body parts as favors and souvenirs to participants and the crowd: teeth, ears, toes, fingers, nails, kneecaps, bits of charred skin and bones. Such human trophies might reappear as watch fobs or be displayed conspicuously for public viewing. The severed knuckles of Sam Hose, for example, would be prominently displayed in the windows of a grocery store in Atlanta.[48]
The Sam Hose lynching (1899) epitomized the apotheosis of murder-by-torture as public spectacle. Hose had argued with his employer, Alfred Crawford, about his pay and his hope to visit his sick mother. The next day, while Hose was chopping wood, Crawford renewed the argument, drew his gun, and threatened Hose with death. In self-defense, Hose threw the axe at Crawford, killing him instantly. Within two days, the Atlanta papers were branding Hose "a monster in human form" who had killed Crawford at his dinner table and then raped Crawford's wife in the presence of her husband's corpse. A frenzied mob of 2,000 men and women, some of whom arrived on a special excursion train, exulted as their leaders cut off Hose's ears, fingers, and genitals, before skinning his face and burning him alive. As Hose's eyes burst out of their sockets, he suffered such agony that he almost broke his bonds. The crowd scrambled for Hose's body parts as souvenirs. After the spectacle, Crawford's wife reported that Hose had killed her husband in self-defense and had not assaulted her. The Hose lynching was preceded and followed by mass lynchings of other Afro-Americans.[49]
The Hose lynching, while spectacular, was not unusual. NAACP official Walter White explained that lynching was a spectator sport, providing relief from "the endless routine of drab working hours and a more drab home life." A Mississippi mob (1904) slowly dismembered Luther Holbert and, for good measure, his wife as well; a corkscrew was inserted into both victims, "the spirals tearing out big pieces of raw, quivering flesh every time it was withdrawn." Two other blacks, mistaken for Holbert, had been previously killed. A Georgia mob (1918) lynched Mr. Turner; when his wife, eight months pregnant, complained in court, the mob burned her alive. Using a hog butcher knife, they split her belly open; when the baby emerged alive, a white crushed the infant under his heel. (In a similar and much later incident, a fetus was taken by the heel and smashed against a wall.) After the lynching of Thomas Brooks (1915), a Tennessee paper reported that "hundreds of kodaks clicked all morning at the scene of the lynching. People in automobiles and carriages came from miles around to view the corpse dangling from the end of a rope.... Picture card photographers installed a portable printing plant at the bridge and reaped a harvest in selling postcards showing a photograph of the lynched Negro. Women and children were there by the score. At a number of county schools the day's routine was delayed until boy and girl pupils could get back from viewing the lynched man."[50]
Most Afro-Americans recognized that a ritualized death by slow torture could easily befall them, with or without warning, for the slightest indiscretion or for none at all. Whites, one black observed, recognized "that one Negro swinging from a tree will serve as well as another to terrorize the [black] community." Indeed, whites often boasted of the ritualized murder-by-torture of blacks not even accused of any offense. Family members of the "suspect" were routinely murdered, often while the accused watched and awaited his or her turn. Laura Nelson was raped and lynched, and her teenage son killed, for a crime she had allegedly committed. In Georgia (1915) Daniel Barber was forced to watch the lynching of his wife and two married daughters before meeting his own gruesome death. An Atlanta paper observed (1904) that if hanging the alleged criminal did not deter other blacks, "we will hang two, three, or four of the Negroes nearest to the crime..." A white youth informed a Northern visitor: "You don't understand how we feel down here; when there is a row, we feel like killing a nigger whether he has done anything or not." In a similar vein, a Mississippi man told a visitor that "It is about time to have another lynching. When the niggers get so that they are not afraid of being lynched, it is time to put the fear in them."[51]
Booker Washington urged that blacks work hard, accumulate property, and mollify whites, promising that "the man who is intelligent and virtuous, and owns and cultivates the largest farm in his county" would receive "proper respect and consideration.... The Negro merchant who owns the largest store in town will not be lynched." The reality, however, was exactly the opposite. Whites so feared, envied, and resented successful African Americans that they targeted them for special violence and abuse. Anthony Crawford was one such successful South Carolina landowner, victimized by a particularly egregious white atrocity. In 1916 Crawford was tortured, dragged through the Negro district of town, and hung, his mutilated body then repeatedly shot. A leading paper explained that "Crawford was worth about $20,000 and that's more than most white farmers are worth down here. Property ownership always makes the Negro more assertive, more independent, and the cracker can't stand it." Another resident commented that "I reckon the crowd wouldn't have been so bloodthirsty, only it's been three years since they had any fun with the niggers, and it seems though they jest have to have a lynching every so often." According to a local paper, Crawford's "wealth and coddling from the white men desiring his trade, emboldened him to assume an equality that whites will not tolerate.... Due to chest inflation from wealth, [the lynching] was inevitable and RACIALLY JUSTIFIABLE." The 1892 lynching of Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell and Henry Stewart, the owners of the People's Grocery Company in Memphis, shocked black journalist Ida B. Wells out of her complacency; until then she had believed white shibboleths about black rape of white women. Appalled by the mass murder of her friends, she became one of Afro-America's foremost crusaders against lynching--a decision that cost Wells her press, and almost her life.[52]
White terrorism against prosperous blacks was so pervasive it earned its own specialized moniker, "whitecapping." In 1913 a Mississippi black complained that "if we own a good farm or horse, or cow, or bird-dog, or yoke of oxen, we are harassed until we are bound to sell, give away, or run away, before we can have any peace in our lives." Whites concurred. A decade earlier a former governor of North Carolina had asserted that "the negro is going to fare best and be happiest when his position is most subordinate. Financial and industrial equality is as bad in the eyes of the whites as social equality.... In plain English, [for a black] to get above his ordained station in life is, generally speaking, to invite assassination." Another observer noted simply that "the more rapid the progress, the more frightful the mortality." Successful blacks were well aware that their survival depended on the whims of every member of the white community. Educator and author Benjamin Mays stated that "the more a Negro owned, the more humble he had to act in order to keep in the good graces of white people."[53] Successful blacks, therefore, arguably betrayed their race by their very existence. Not only were they necessarily sycophants who kowtowed to whites as a condition of survival; even worse, they propounded and embodied as seemingly realistic a virtually impossible goal. White and black leaders alike used the tiny number of prosperous blacks as evidence that the vast majority mired in squalor and debt had only themselves to blame.
Lynching was a celebratory and communal ritual which bound whites together literally in the blood of blacks. Lynchings were, in Litwack's words, "a public ritual, a collective experience.... public theatre, often a festive affair, a participatory ritual of torture and death." Workers and schoolchildren received time off for lynchings. In 1909 a Mississippi newspaper reported that ladies were present among a crowd of 3000; "a few were nursing infants who tugged at the mother's breasts, while the mother kept her eyes on the gallows. She didn't want to lose any part of the program she had come miles to see, and to tell to the neighbors at home." White children even acted out lynchings in a game called Salisbury. A black woman reported that she had seen "very small white children hanging their black dolls. It is not the child's fault, he is simply an apt pupil."[54]
Lynchings, particularly of prosperous blacks, crucially enforced white stereotypes and severely penalized any Afro-American who defied them. In 1909 an Afro-American attorney in Louisville complained: "Thirty years ago the prejudice was against the ignorant, shiftless and thriftless black; now it is against the thrifty and industrious, the refined and the cultured--against those, in a word, who come into competition with the middle-class white." Another observer noted, "So long as negroes will drink common whiskey, dance jigs, and make apes of themselves, the mass of white men in the Southern States applaud them as good fellows; but so soon as one becomes a bank president, a property owner, and a gentleman, he becomes offensive to society."[55]
Southern elites sometimes criticized lynching on the grounds that it hurt business, scared field hands away, encouraged lawlessness that might eventually be directed at prominent whites (often resented by the poor), and generated unfavorable publicity. "It ruins the worth of our investments," one leader complained. Another businessman said that because blacks spent all they earned they were "commercially.... a very valuable asset. It is not good business to kill them."[56] Yet elite whites not only indirectly encouraged lynchings by dehumanizing, demonizing, and segregating blacks; they actively praised the torturers for fulfilling their traditional ideal of white masculinity.
Community leaders, politicians, newspaper editors, and businessmen incited lynchers and often enough personally led the festivities. The papers announced important lynchings in advance and, after the event, printed graphic stories recounting every lurid detail. One Mississippi newspaper approvingly described the lynching of Elmer Curl (1910) as "a most orderly affair, conducted by the bankers, lawyers, farmers, and merchants of that county. The best people of the county, as good as there are anywhere, simply met there and hanged Curl without a sign of rowdyism. There was no drinking, no shooting, no yelling, and not even any loud talking." A South Carolina paper smugly announced that a lynching by a mob including the local state representative was performed in the "most approved and up-to-date fashion." These self-motivated and eager executioners were ordinary men, church members and idealists who were, as one paper said, "foremost in all works of public and private good." Thomas Watson, a popular white leader, heralded lynchings as proof "that a sense of justice yet lives among the people."[57]
Although mass murder---both ritualized and orgiastic--was enjoyed by all classes of whites, rich and poor sometimes lynched for contradictory reasons. Planters wanted a docile labor supply, and valued lynching because it intimidated blacks. White sharecroppers and tenant farmers, whose very survival depended on access to the land of rich planters, sometimes found that landowners preferred black serfs because they could be paid less, worked harder, and abused with impunity. Poor whites, therefore, sometimes lynched in order to terrify blacks and drive them from the region--a motive incompatible with that of the planters. The precise motive, however, mattered little to the victims. In a wry comment with very wide applicability, Litwack observes that "To endorse lynching was to dwell on the sexual depravity of blacks, to raise the specter of the black beast seized by uncontrollable savage sexual passions that were inherent in the race. That is, the inhumanity, depravity, bestiality, and savagery practiced by white participants in lynchings would be justified in the name of humanity, morality, justice, civilization, and Christianity."[58]
White violence pervaded black lives, rigidly circumscribing every thought, gesture, word, and action. Richard Wright, who came of age in the 1920s, acquired "a dread of white people" by the time he was ten years old. Said Wright:
Nothing challenged the totality of my personality so much as this pressure of hate and threat that stemmed from the invisible whites. I would stand for hours on the doorsteps of neighbors' houses listening to their talk, learning how a white woman had slapped a black woman, how a white man had killed a black man. It filled me with awe, wonder, and fear.... Tension would set in at the mere mention of whites and a vast complex of emotions, involving the whole of my personality, would be aroused. It was as though I was continually reacting to the threat of some natural force whose hostile behavior could not be predicted.... [Although I had not yet been victimized by whites myself] I had already become as conditioned to their existence as though I had been the victim of a thousand lynchings.[59]
Wright spoke of the "sustained expectation of violence" that caused "a paralysis of will and impulse.... The penalty of death awaited me if I made a false move and I wondered if it was worthwhile to make any move at all. The things that influenced my conduct as a Negro did not have to happen to me directly; I needed but to hear of them to feel their full effects in the deepest layers of my consciousness. Indeed, the white brutality that I had not seen was a more effective control of my behavior than that which I knew."[60]
Beaten because he forgot to address a white man as "sir," Wright recognized that whenever dealing with whites he must "observe their every fleeting expression, [and note] how to interpret what was said and what left unsaid." A friend, frustrated at Wright's rebelliousness, warned: "Dick, look, you're black, black, see? Can't you understand that.... When you're in front of white people think before you act, think before you speak." Wright said that he "could not make subservience an automatic part of my behavior. I had to feel and think out each tiny item of racial experience in the light of the whole race problem, and to each item I brought the whole of my life. While standing before a white man I had to figure out how to perform each act and how to say each word." More gifted than most people, Wright eventually escaped the South and the United States, having imbibed from his Southern boyhood "a conception of life that no experience would ever erase... a notion as to what life meant that no education could ever alter, a conviction that the meaning of living came only when one was struggling to wring a meaning out of meaningless suffering."[61]
Whites kept blacks perpetually on guard not only out of policy, but because white demands differed from white to white, locale to locale, and moment to moment. The black's place in the South, Benjamin Mays recalled, "was whatever any white man's whim dictated at any given time." The horrible fate of a young man named Ulysses vividly illustrates this. Accosted by a policeman in a Georgia town and asked his name, the hapless youth volunteered it. When the lawman asked his partner how it was spelled, Ulysses helpfully said "I know how to spell it. Let me write it for you." For this impudence (knowing something a white policeman did not), Ulysses was beaten and knocked down; the next day he was fined $25 for addressing "disrespectful and insulting remarks to an officer while in the discharge of his duty." Because his family could not pay the fine, Ulysses disappeared into the gulag archipelago of chain gangs. "I never saw him again," a friend recounted. Ulysses was likely murdered by sadistic guards or tortured to death by the chain-gang regime. As Mays ruefully observed, "it was always the Negro's responsibility to find ways and means to get along with white people, never need white people concern themselves with getting along with Negroes." A perceptive white remarked, "by long and close association with the white man, the Negro was learned all his ways, and can read at a glance his innermost thoughts, and can now size him up and classify him just as accurately as a cotton buyer does the different grades of cotton, and can do it much quicker."[62]
Cringing and subservience, while generally prudent, might not save any particular black on any specific occasion. If carried too far, it might arouse white suspicion and anger; if acted out with insufficient zeal, it might evoke instant death. As Litwack states, "acquiescence by itself was not always sufficient; it had to be cheerfully and convincingly given.... [Whites] insisted on more than a forced obedience; they demanded a ritualized compliance, not only deference but a demonstrated, grinning deference--acquiescence by inflection, gesture and demeanor.... The grinning, laughing, obsequious black person comforted whites, reinforcing both their racial assumptions and their self-esteem." Ralph Ellison remembered that assiduous self-repression in thought and emotion, as well as deed, was a crucial survival skill. Parents, Ellison said, must "adjust the child to the Southern milieu" and "protect him from those unknown forces within himself which might urge him to reach out for that social and human equality which the white South says he cannot have. Rather than throw himself against the charged wires of his prison, he annihilates the impulses within him."[63]
Blacks endured isolation from one another, even within their families, because they could not protect each other from white terrorism. Ubiquitous white violence intruded into, and distorted, the intimacies of black family life, even in black households from which the white physical presence was absent. One of the traumas endured by black youths was helplessly watching the humiliation, degradation, abuse, and even torture and murder, of relatives, while their parents and elders looked on, unable to intervene and unwilling to explain their seeming acquiescence and cowardice. When Ester Mae Scott, a young girl living in Vicksburg, came across the charred, unrecognizable bodies of some black men in a street, she received neither explanation nor guidance. "We dare not talk about it, we dare not say anything. It was just there...." Similarly, when Richard Wright's Uncle Hoskins was murdered by whites who coveted his saloon, there was no funeral, no discussion, and no claiming of the deceased man's assets. Wright later remembered that "there were only silence, quiet weeping, whispers, and fear.... Uncle Hoskins had simply been plucked from our midst" by "that white-hot face of terror that we knew loomed somewhere above us." When Richard asked his mother for an explanation, "the fear that was in her made her slap me into silence."[64]
Black children would themselves suffer from white abuse, but receive neither protection nor even explanation from their parents. A nine-year old Tennessee boy was taunted with the epithet "nigger"; when he asked his mother what it meant, she, for the first time ever, would not answer his query. Sleepless, he asked himself "why should I be called a nigger? It must be very bad to be a nigger.... What could a nigger be and why should God make a nigger?" His mother threatened him with a beating if he persisted in seeking an answer, finally exploding that "we are all nigger and there is nothing wrong about it"--an explanation that only further bewildered the boy. In a similar incident the young Mary Church Terrell was evicted from a railroad car, but received no satisfaction from her father: "I could think of nothing that I had done wrong. I could get no satisfaction from Father, however, for he refused to talk about the affair and forbade me to do so."[65] Merely discussing white atrocities might provoke trouble, especially if such discussion generated a bitterness even slightly apparent in expression, tone of voice, or action.
Parents, therefore, could protect neither their children nor themselves. Indeed, they would sometimes beat their children for fights which some white youth had started, hoping that such parental discipline would avert Caucasian wrath while socializing their children in fear of whites. "Within black families," Litwack remarks, "conflicts were bound to emerge over how to reconcile the harsh demands of white domination with the desire to instill in their children individual self-worth and racial pride." Zora Neale Hurston experienced just such family dissension as a child. Her mother, she said, urged that Zora "jump at de sun" so she would at least get off the ground; her father, however, fearing that her independence and high spirits would evoke white savagery, "was always trying to break [my spirit] or kill me in the attempt." Zora's father predicted that "I was going to be hung before I got grown. Mama was going to suck sorrow for not beating my temper out of me before it was too late." Shame at the seeming acquiescence of their parents in degrading and humiliating treatment was commonplace among young blacks.[66]
In these ways white racism divided blacks within their families, and even more outside of them. Most African Americans realized that any intervention on behalf of family, friend, or stranger could evoke vicious white retaliation. "Praise the bridge that carries you over," regardless of the fate of the next person, one elder warned his friends. Benjamin Mays said that intra-black violence was so common because blacks "were taking out on other blacks what they really wanted but feared to take out on whites."[67] The demoralized and angry black underclass, then as today, most often victimized members of their own race.
African Americans confronted not only individual and group atrocities, but wholesale slaughters, euphemistically called "race riots." Such "riots" were primarily an urban phenomenon, the prototype of which was perhaps the New York "draft riot" of 1863, in which many blacks were killed, and black residences and a black orphanage torched.[68] Most pogroms were preceded by extreme white vituperation of blacks, and by frenzied calls for extermination or at least forcible deportation; although usually precipitated by some real or imagined incident, the massacres expressed deep and widespread white attitudes. In Wilmington, North Carolina, one of the last places in the South where blacks still retained some political influence, exterminationist white rhetoric accompanied the election campaign of 1898; a Democratic leader who tried to inflame white racist sentiment discovered that the whites "were already willing to kill all of the office holders and all the negroes." Another orator advised his audience to "Go to the polls tomorrow and if you find the negro out voting, tell him to leave the polls, and if he refuses kill him, shoot him down in his tracks. We shall win tomorrow if we have to do it with arms." Whites stole the election by intimidation and fraud, and then, emboldened, massacred unresisting blacks, mostly prosperous ones. As 1500 Negroes fled the city (some, including children, died of exposure) opportunistic whites ransacked their property. The mob's leaders were community leaders, one of which was elected mayor.[69]
The Atlanta slaughter of 1906 was even worse, involving ten thousand whites of all classes, many shouting "Save our women! Kill the niggers!" The massacre was accompanied by the usual howls for genocide and mutilation of black corpses. United States soldiers joined the pogrom, chanting "We are rough, we are tough, we kill niggers and never get enough." The massacre left 25 blacks (all proclaimed model citizens by a subsequent investigation) dead and over two hundred mutilated or seriously wounded; hundreds more black victims were arrested. Souvenir hunters scrambled for fingers and toes as looters carted off property. Much of black Atlanta was torched. Once again, prosperous blacks, and their homes and businesses, were especially targeted for destruction.[70]
Many survivors fled the city. President Theodore Roosevelt, putatively an ally of blacks, remained silent. One Atlanta native, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, regretted missing the festivities. "Had my financial condition been a little better I would certainly have come and so also would some of my friends. No warfare ever waged was more righteous than this defense of home, family, and posterity.... The negroes killed in Atlanta was the result of an effort to protect those whom God has ordained we must protect, an effort that cannot be legally justified but has its ground and justification in a law that is higher than laws made by man.... Vengeance must have her fullest satiation until our white brethren the world over will aid us in deporting this black savage again to his native jungle." After the riot, white Atlanta made some token reforms, and even punished a few whites. Yet blacks realistically felt no more secure than before.[71] Although organized mass murders were primarily urban phenomena, the merest rumor of black self-assertion or organizing could precipitate a rural massacre, as at Elaine, Arkansas (1919) where dozens of blacks were slaughtered, and roughly a hundred more convicted of serious crimes.[72]
As the twentieth century progressed, organized slaughters occurred increasingly often in Northern cities. The 1908 pogrom in Springfield, Illinois, was a harbinger of riots to come, especially because blacks fought back, sometimes with firearms. The riot started when vigilantes tried to lynch a black man held in the local jail for allegedly assaulting a white woman. Unable to kill him, the mob murdered two other blacks instead, and then rioted on a grand scale. Hundreds of blacks were rendered homeless. The mob's intended victim, it turned out, had been wrongly identified, and was released from custody.[73]
Whites justified their monstrosities with racist arguments resembling those stigmatizing other racial groups, immigrants, and foreign populations victimized by American imperialism. Many whites simply hated blacks and spoke of them with a virulence foreshadowing Nazi abuse of Jews--stigmatizing them as inherently lustful, criminal, lazy, and intellectually inferior. These whites advocated outright extermination (or at least violent deportation) of blacks, as their compatriots did of Native Americans, Asians, and radical labor unionists. What Daniel Goldhagan has called "eliminationist" attitudes were common throughout the South. A wide spectrum of whites--illiterate sharecroppers, "cultured" planters, and eminent scientists--somewhat more mildly claimed merely that blacks were inherently inferior and would naturally disappear in the struggle for existence; this result, many asserted, was inevitable and desirable. Concocted "scientific" versions of racism "proved" the inferiority of blacks (and immigrants, women, and many ethnic groups today categorized as "white") by mis-measuring skulls, giving fraudulent "IQ tests," and other mechanisms. Other whites, however, more "benevolently" asserted that blacks, being naturally inferior and destined for extinction if exposed to white competition, should be segregated and disfranchised for their own protection. If herded apart from whites, and denied a vote they could use only for their detriment, they would survive in their divinely appointed (and inferior) place. Still other whites conceded that blacks were potentially equal to whites, but claimed that they were presently uncivilized and in need of white tutelage. After centuries of white control and supervision, they might become equal citizens. Proponents of this view justified Jim Crow, disfranchisement, and lynching (as they previously had slavery) as methods of racial control and even uplift. All these versions of racism justified white oppression of blacks--in practical terms, for all eternity. Almost no whites accepted blacks as equals, or could imagine doing so; even those who claimed that blacks might someday become coequal citizens justified and practiced a systematic racist oppression that destroyed all semblance of equal opportunity.[74]
Racist and white supremacist ideologies and practices, therefore, came in superficially differing varieties, but shared one goal: the dispossession of African Americans. Different versions of racism proved serviceable at different times and for various segments of the master race, depending on exactly how the victims were to be degraded and expropriated. All versions of white supremacy justified aggression against blacks, and all enhanced the wealth, power, and prestige (at least in its own eyes) of the dominant race. Racism was generated by white pathologies and lust for dominion; blacks were almost irrelevant to its etiology and changing forms.
Disfranchisement
Disfranchisement of most Afro-Americans (and of many poor whites) constituted another pillar of white supremacy. Southern whites disfranchised blacks by murder, fraud, and, starting in Mississippi in 1890, constitutional enactments. A former state official from Alabama summarized the process with engaging honesty: "At first, we used to kill [blacks] to keep them from voting; when we got sick of doing that we began to steal their ballots; and when stealing their ballots got to troubling our consciences we decided to handle the matter legally, fixing it so they couldn't vote." Senator Ben "Pitchfork" Tillman of South Carolina told the United States Senate that "we took the government away. We stuffed the ballot box. We shot them. We are not ashamed of it." Accurately depicting Northern white racist attitudes, Tillman taunted that a Wisconsin Senator "would have done the same thing. I see it in his eye right now. He would have done it." Tillman also reminded his Northern auditors that "you shoot Negroes in Illinois, when they come into competition with your labor, as we shoot them in South Carolina when they come in competition with us in the matter of elections. You do not love them any better than we do. You used to pretend that you did, but you no longer pretend it, except to get their votes."[75]
Henry Grady, the "racially moderate" New South proponent, exclaimed (in 1887, just before the drive for legal disfranchisement) that "the supremacy of the white race of the South must be maintained forever, and the domination of the negro race resisted at all points and at all hazards--because the white race is the superior race. This is the declaration of no new truth. It has abided in the marrow of our bones, and shall run forever with the blood that feeds Anglo-Saxon hearts." One North Carolina registrar boasted that he disqualified blacks on any technicality: "We're bound to keep the nigger down; it's all that saves us." Vardaman exclaimed that neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Fifteenth Amendment applied to "wild animals and niggers." A more complacent voice declared that blacks as voters resembled "mules and oxen"; stealing Negro votes was as justified as would be depriving farm animals of suffrage had a Caligula-like Republican Congress granted them the vote.[76]
Legal disfranchisement, therefore, was not aimed at black political power, which had long since evaporated under the pressures of open fraud bolstered by murder. Rather, it further degraded and humiliated African Americans, impressed upon them a sense of their powerlessness, and undermined whatever ambition and self-respect blacks might nurture. As an ex-planter from Mississippi exclaimed, whites would associate with Negroes "provided it be upon terms which contain no suggestion of equality of personal status." Voting conferred such equality, or at least its temporary illusion. As Vardaman proclaimed: "Shut the door of political equality, and you close the door of social equality in the face of the black man; shut the door of social equality and you smother in his native savage breast the fury of his passion, which is but the blind craving of his soul to be [the] equal of the white man, and the partner of the white man." Another white agreed that "political equality breeds ambition for social equality. The negro thus asserts himself, and his sense of his own importance, which was quiescent and pacific so long as he was kept in political and social subordination, becomes often offensively and insolently inflated." A Georgia newspaper beneficently proclaimed that disfranchisement would aid the Negro by reminding him that "the white man is of the superior race, always has been and always will be and that social equality, in the sleeping car or elsewhere, is an impossibility, absolutely so, and in perpetuity."[77]
Whites frequently asserted that equality in voting encouraged black rape of helpless white women. Others, however, even while demanding disfranchisement, Jim Crow, and other degradations of blacks, lamented that oppressing African-American men incited rape-as-revenge. A prominent white Alabama attorney epitomized this latter attitude when he claimed that "to criminal tendency is added race animosity, and this in the brute with passions of the lowest order, incites to the assault on women of the other race. He will triumph over the other race in the person of a woman of that race." An aristocratic white historian alleged that the black rapist was "not content merely with the consummation of his purpose, but takes that fiendish delight in the degradation of his victim which he always shows when he can reek his vengeance upon one whom he has hitherto been compelled to fear; and here, the white woman in his power is, for the time being, the representative of that race which has always overawed him."[78] Such sentiments summarized with uncanny accuracy the attitudes and practices of white males, whose rape of black women stemmed from both unbridled lust and racial conquest. (Southern males, by insisting what white women were passionless, also deprived themselves of guilt-free coitus with their wives. In effect considering themselves rapists, Southern males tormented themselves with a guilt that they may have displaced onto black men, who they then destroyed.)[79] Such attitudes, as usual, left blacks with no exit. Black voting allegedly encouraged the pride and self-assertion that generated rape; disfranchised black men would purportedly rape as racial revenge.
White elites apparently did not disfranchise blacks out of fear of an inter-racial, class-based alliance of the poor, as Marxist historians claim. Rather, they worried that poor whites destabilized the social order and frightened Northern and foreign capital by terrorizing blacks in a disorderly manner. Legal disfranchisement dispensed with the assiduous effort required for extra-legal terrorism and fraud. Litwack says that "the white laboring classes responded favorably to the racist demagoguery of this period" because that rhetoric "reflected their feelings of insecurity and perceived loss of power and status." The ruling class in the South recognized that it could compensate poor whites for their real degradation and poverty with the empty sop of an illusory racial superiority. A Georgia corporate lawyer (Woodrow Wilson later appointed him judge), observed that "with the lower classes and the lower order of whites, the prospect of having Negroes better educated, richer and better equipped for the struggle of life, menaces their social standing, while Negro suffrage obliterates that distinction which, before the war, made the poorest white man a citizen in a sense that the richest free Negro could never become his political equal." Nedd Cobb, a black man, accurately summarized ruling-class strategies. Although all classes of whites collaborated in degrading and disfranchising the blacks, "the little [whites] thought they had a voice, but they only had a voice to this extent: they could speak against the nigger and the big man was happy for em to do it. But they didn't have no more voice than a cat against the big man of their own color."[80]
Although Southern constitutions disfranchised Afro-Americans in race-neutral language as a fig-leaf gesture towards a complaisant Supreme Court, Southern leaders did not conceal their aims. Vardaman exclaimed that "I am just as much opposed to Booker Washington as a voter, with all his Anglo-Saxon reinforcements, as I am to the coconut-headed, chocolate-colored, typical little coon, Andy Dotson, who blacks my shoes every morning. Neither is fit to perform the supreme function of citizenship." Vardaman openly taunted the North, which would have preferred a discreet silence, proclaiming that "there is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter.... Mississippi's constitutional convention of 1890 was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the nigger from politics; not the 'ignorant and vicious,' as some of those apologists would have you believe, but the nigger.... Let the world know it just as it is." In that same year a newspaper proclaimed that "if every negro in Mississippi was a graduate of Harvard, and had been elected as class orator... he would not be as well fitted to exercise the right of suffrage as the Anglo-Saxon farm laborer.... whose course 'X' mark... means force and intellect, and manhood--virtus." Another paper admitted that whites "do not object to negroes voting on account of ignorance, but on account of color." The Mississippi disfranchisement convention of 1890 removed blacks from politics, its proponents gloated, "as absolutely as if the negroes had been deported to Liberia." Disfranchisement was not merely an end, but also a means towards the denial of black property rights, educational opportunities, and freedom of contract--and indeed the right to life. As a black New Orleans newspaper, confuting Booker Washington, said in 1906: "Robbed of political power, the right [of blacks] to hold property, the right of contract, educational privileges, and the security of life count for but little."[81]
Despite everything, some African Americans retained and exercised the right of suffrage. Yet blacks who voted faced not only violence and the loss of their jobs and residences, but a lack of political parties which offered a real choice and of candidates who would benefit them. One black epitomized his race's dilemma: "I used to vote Republican. They claimed it made times better for my race. I found out better." The chairman of the Colored People's Convention in Richmond in 1890 (before Virginia legally disfranchised blacks) lamented that "the colored people are consumers. The Republicans have deserted them and undertaken to protect the capitalist and manufacturer of the North." Neither party "cares a tinker for the poor man. They are run in the interest of capital, monopoly and repression." Some black leaders urged that their compatriots cast their votes for a third party. Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, however, experienced at first hand the problems with this approach. In 1896, referring to the teapot tempest over gold versus silver currency, he exclaimed that "what time has the fool Negro to bother with the gold or silver side either, while he is lynched, burnt, flayed, imprisoned, etc., two-thirds of the time for nothing. Vote any way in your power to overthrow, destroy, ruin... and fragmentize this nation, until it learns to deal justly with the black man." In 1900, however, Turner felt compelled to vote for the disgusting racist William Jennings Bryan as an alternative to William McKinley, another white supremacist who was exterminating peoples of color in the Philippines. In the face of such hopelessness, some blacks sold their votes on the ground that only by so doing could they secure any benefit from them. "I didn't seen no use doin' nothin' else," one black said, "case de white folks goin' to do what they wants anyhow." As late as the eve of World War II, a leader of the tiny coterie of black Republican voters in Mississippi admitted that at election time "we proselytize these few score Negroes to vote... and, after the pocketing the handouts from the party slush fund... we put our committee back in moth balls to await another presidential election.... Hell, naw! We got no local program. We are doctors and preachers and barbers. We make enough money to buy liquor to wash the inconveniences of being a nigger out of our brains."[82]
Criminal Justice
African-American exclusion from the justice system was a horrible oppression that facilitated even worse ones. After Reconstruction, Afro-Americans were arrested by all-white police forces, tried before all-white juries and exclusively white judges, and sentenced in accordance with white-made law. In Virginia v. Rives (1880) the Supreme Court ruled that black exclusion from juries, even if pervasive and blatant, did not itself violate the Fourteenth Amendment as long as race was not explicitly mentioned in the relevant statutes or state constitutional provisions. This disgraceful ruling, so typical of the Court for almost a century, emboldened Southern whites to disfranchise blacks without explicitly mentioning race. Poll taxes and literacy tests (with their infamous "grandfather clauses") were among the mechanisms devised to achieve this.
White juries almost unanimously rejected black testimony which conflicted with that of any white. The result was predictable: whites could violate and outrage almost any black with impunity, whereas any black accused of any crime against a white (most emphatically including self-defense against white violence) was almost certainly convicted. That almost non-existent species, a conscientious white sheriff, lamented (South Carolina, 1889) the acquittal of a white man who had murdered an Afro-American: "I have never heard of a clearer case in my life... but it is the height of folly to try to convict a white man for killing a poor negro. A certain class thinks it is something to be proud of." The murderers "had a perfect ovation." A white justice of the peace frankly told a black woman that he knew of "no law to punish a white man for beating a negro woman." When a black Alabamian resisted a conductor who struck him, the judge fined the victim $10 (a huge sum at the time), saying "I fine you that much to teach you that you must respect white folks." Another black who quit work was beaten into unconsciousness by his irate employer; when he complained in court he was told that he was lucky to be alive and would be incarcerated in the state work farm if the judge found him in court again. Blacks were placed on chain gangs (often a death sentence) by police courts, without even the usual rigged jury trial, for minor infractions such as vagrancy, or for none at all. During labor shortages, employers requisitioned workers through the "justice" system; blacks were simply rounded up and sold for the time of their sentence to private contractors or placed on government-operated chain gangs.[83] The criminal justice system of the South bolstered public and private slavery, torture, and murder.
Ironically, a black required for labor might escape judicial punishment for a misdemeanor; his boss might whip him instead of dragging him into court. Alternately, if the black was fined, his boss might pay the fine and thus secure virtual ownership of the hapless worker (who must then work until he repaid the fine and its exorbitantly increasing interest charges). In general, crimes against blacks were seldom prosecuted if committed by a white, and considered of little importance if perpetrated by a black. Governor Cole Blease of South Carolina pardoned Negro and white rapists of black women, saying that he harbored "very serious doubt as to whether the crime of rape can be committed upon a negro." The alleged utterance of a police chief aptly summarized the white man's justice: "If a nigger kills a white man, that's murder. If a white man kills a nigger, that's justified homicide. If a nigger kills another nigger, that's one less nigger."[84]
Negroes were sometimes spared the death penalty for killing another black; a plea-bargained life sentence would save the expense of a trial and secure another convict-slave for the state government. Cole Blease commuted the sentence of one black murderer to life imprisonment at the state penitentiary. Governor Blease explained that "this defendant was convicted of killing another negro. I am naturally against electrocuting or hanging one negro for killing another, because, if a man had two fine mules running loose in a lot and one went mad and killed the other, he certainly would not take his gun and shoot the other mule, but would take that mule and work it and try to get another mule; therefore, I believe that when one negro kills another, he should be put in the Penitentiary and made to work for the state." On at least one occasion Blease pardoned a genuinely innocent black, Sam Gaskins, unjustly convicted of murdering his fiancée. Admitting that no white would have been convicted on the evidence marshalled against Gaskins, Blease philosophized: "It seems to have been a very sad accident; however, after a second thought, possibly it was for the good of humanity, for had they married, no doubt they would have brought forth more negroes to the future detriment of the State."[85]
Trials of blacks accused of crimes against whites were quick, and the brutal verdicts were speedily executed. Hangings, like lynchings, were public spectacles. Litwack comments that since many public hangings required two or three attempts, speculation over the level and duration of the victim's agony replaced the obsession with other forms of torture that characterized mob lynchings. Vendors selling ice cream and lemonade made their way through the large crowd in Oxford, Mississippi, that had come to watch the hanging of George Walton, a "one-legged darky." Only on the third attempt did the hanging succeed, with Walton "kicking in the air and suffering untold agony".[86]
These legal lynchings perpetrated by white courts upon often innocent blacks were sometimes justified on the pretext that only a sudden and brutal execution would forestall a mob lynching. Even that rare bird, a Negro acquitted of a crime against a white, was not safe. One white attorney advised that his black client, so obviously innocent that he was found not guilty, leave town. "Sell what you got and get away from here.... Stay a while, then come back when it blow over," the attorney eloquently advised. The Negro returned twenty years later, at which point two whites castrated him and sauntered off laughing.[87]
The Promised Land
Fleeing these "Southern Horrors," blacks escaped wherever and whenever possible. Thousands of "Exodusters" left the South for Kansas in the late 1870s, although white racism and lack of capital gravely limited the success of this spontaneous mass movement. Driven by the need for income and jobs, most blacks moved within the South, often into newly-developed regions where the population was overwhelmingly black, whites were particularly hysterical, and lynchings were rampant. In the two decades 1890-1910 the number of blacks moving North doubled from the previous twenty years, but most of these emigrated from nearby border states, where news of Northern job opportunities percolated. Hardly any deep-South blacks moved North during this period. Large corporations sometimes imported Afro-Americans as scabs (often without informing the blacks that a strike was in progress), but the vast majority of African Americans outside the South worked as domestic servants, porters, or laborers. By 1910, however, 300,000 blacks lived in Northern cities.
The first "great migration" northward occurred during World War I. Floods and boll weevil infestations in the South (1915-1916) devastated poor blacks, as landlords jettisoned tenants and cultivated food crops requiring less labor. Fortuitously, the Great War opened unprecedented opportunities in Northern industrial centers. Millions of workers were conscripted for war; foreign immigration virtually ceased; and the exigencies of military production generated increased demand for labor at the very time the supply plummeted. Labor recruiters flooded the South, sometimes helping blacks escape from the clutches of vigilant plantation owners; Northern black newspapers, especially the Chicago Defender, extolled opportunities in "the promised land"; and newcomers wrote home with glowing reports of high wages and relatively egalitarian treatment.[88]
Blacks in the North possessed basic civil rights--men could vote (women were enfranchised in 1920) and serve on juries, and both sexes could hope for a fair trial (according to the abysmally low standards of the time) if accused of a crime. However, blacks found themselves victimized by segregation, discrimination, and violence that differed more in degree than in kind from the injustices inflicted upon them in the South. Indeed, blacks found themselves differentiated from whites by law and custom in employment, residential opportunities, and social respect.
Crucially, most capitalists (often colluding with racist workers and unions) rejected black workers except at the most dangerous, dirty, and degrading jobs. Such jobs, of course, reinforced white stereotypes of blacks as degraded and unclean. For example, Chicago packinghouses hired black workers in large numbers during World War I. Blacks, however, were excluded from white neighborhoods near the plants, and were denied use of showers and changing rooms at work; therefore, when they rode home on public transportation, they seemingly validated white prejudices about black dirt and filth. Many capitalists also hired blacks as scabs when white workers struck. Desperate and antiunion blacks readily accepted such work, and, when retained after the strike had ended, secured a niche in some industries. This, of course, inflamed white workers, already virulently racist. Capitalist preference for immigrant labor meant that blacks, unlike other impoverished groups, did not benefit from immigration. On the contrary, new arrivals often displaced blacks from their precarious toeholds in selected industries and trades. Immigrants and blacks, therefore, directly competed for jobs.[89]
Working-class whites competed with blacks for housing as well as livelihoods. Realtors and landlords usually refused to sell or rent housing to blacks in neighborhoods not already black. The first black "great migration" North during World War I generated conflict because Afro-American neighborhoods could not accommodate the new arrivals. Few neighborhoods tolerated blacks, so Afro-Americans paid exorbitant rents for substandard housing. This benefited landlords while hurting poor whites, who felt driven out when the first blacks moved in. (Actually, of course, their own panicky white flight and the monstrous behavior of racist and profiteering real estate agents were to blame). Some landlords and realtors made enormous profits by "blockbusting"--moving black families into white neighborhoods, inciting white hysteria and flight, buying the property of fleeing whites on the cheap, and selling or renting it to blacks (who had few options) at exorbitant prices. Municipal governments North and South routinely denied black neighborhoods proper lighting, water, sewage, and garbage pickup services. In 1900 Harper's Weekly commented:
Property is not rented to negroes in New York until white people will no longer have it. Then rents are put up thirty to fifty per cent, and negroes are permitted to take a street or sometimes a neighborhood.... [Landlords] charge enormous rentals for very inferior houses and tenements, which yield more when the negroes have taken possession than they did in time of seemingly greater prosperity.... Moreover, they make no repairs, and the property usually goes to rack and ruin.... As a rule.... negroes in New York are not beholden to the property owners for anything except discomfort and extortion.[90] High rents for inferior facilities necessitated crowding. Whites, seeing many Afro-Americans crammed into small apartments, associated squalor and filth with the habits of an "inferior race."
Capitalist politicians, newspapers, and motion picture companies stigmatized, calumniated, and stereotyped blacks in the North as well as the South. Working-class whites, therefore, experienced as overwhelming reality the difference of blacks, rather than the similarities of condition and commonalities of interest stressed by radicals of both races. This was particularly true because of the status, needs, and desires of the white workers, who not only needed jobs and housing, but craved social respectability and acceptance.
White workers were themselves victimized by a reign of terrorism, violence, and social devaluation resembling that visited upon Afro-Americans. In particular, immigrants were often demeaned and stereotyped by capitalist politicians and the mass media, much as were blacks. Indeed, many immigrant groups, including Jews, Italians, and Greeks, were categorized as "nonwhite" upon arrival in the United States; part of the process of becoming white consisted of adopting vituperative and condescending attitudes toward blacks. Striking workers were routinely murdered by police, corporate thugs, and officially sanctioned vigilante terrorists, after which the union leaders might face arrest and imprisonment for murder. The injunction, yellow-dog contract, blacklist, corporate spy, and agent provocateur terrorized workers and destroyed unions, while de-skilling, unemployment, the constant reorganization of production, and new waves of immigration left workers perpetually insecure. Many factories and tenements were virtual death camps, killing millions of workers per decade, often by the slow torture of overwork, starvation, exposure, and preventable disease.[91] Under such conditions, white workers--especially immigrants--sought shelter in their own ethnic communities on the one hand and assimilation into mainstream American society on the other. Both options excluded blacks.
Workers victimized by death-camp conditions at work and at home, and degraded by the multifarious "hidden injuries of class," eagerly sought acceptance by mainstream, respectable society. Almost all unions feared competition from blacks, desperately sought the patina of respectability in a racist and antilabor society, and included multitudes of whites whose own self-respect rested upon the denigration of racial "inferiors"; such unions excluded blacks openly or by subterfuge. This, of course, generated antiunion and scabbing sentiments among blacks, which in turn further fueled white racism. A similar phenomenon occurred when blacks moved into previously white neighborhoods. As James Weldon Johnson noted:
In the eyes of the whites who were antagonistic, the whole movement took on the aspect of an "invasion"--an invasion of both their economic and their social rights. They felt that Negroes as neighbors not only lowered the value of their property, but also lowered their social status.... They ran amuck. Their conduct could be compared to that of a community in the Middle Ages fleeing before an epidemic of the black plague, except that the reasons were not so sound. But these people did not stop to reason.... The presence of a single coloured family in a block... was a signal for precipitate flight. The stampeded whites actually deserted house after house and block after block.[92]
White flight exacerbated both white racism (as whites "lost" their property or their neighborhoods), and black resentment. Competition for both jobs and housing generated an endless spiral of intensifying racism on the part of the whites, which then justified black suspicion of and hostility towards white workers.
Denied entry into mainstream white institutions, African Americans generated their own cultural centers in the rural and urban South and in the segregated districts of Northern cities. Blacks created their own churches, newspapers, civic organizations, social institutions, and clubs. However necessary, this further distanced the races, making blacks seem indeed a race apart. Such communities and institutions did provide a necessary platform for the limited autonomy possible for blacks in the United States. By 1915, Harlem, swelled by immigration from the South and from the West Indies, had become the most famous and influential African-American community. The major radical Afro-American organizations and publications discussed in this book were, although national and occasionally international in membership and influence, headquartered in New York.
The racial caste system of South and North also fundamentally deformed mainstream American politics by creating a one-party South overtly based upon terrorism and violence. The Democratic party, long controlled by Southern whites, was becoming also the party of the ethnic, immigrant, Northern working class, the constituency most favoring social welfare legislation. Yet Southern whites (especially agricultural and industrial capitalists) dominated the national Democratic party. Southern politicians feared that a strong national government might undermine the South's racial customs and relentlessly pro-capitalist legislation, both of which enriched them. They stridently opposed any extension of federal power on behalf of the dispossessed of either race. (Prohibition and union-busting were, of course, desirable). The Republicans who dominated the North, meanwhile, aided and abetted by the Democrats, oppressed and murdered white workers with impunity.
In these many ways the apparatus of white supremacy, erected and maintained by unremitting terrorism and violence which was countenanced, encouraged, and practiced by elites (even if less privileged whites performed their share of the dirty work), alienated the races from each other by creating, exacerbating, and emphasizing difference. Even those many aspects of white working-class experience that resembled that of African Americans--capitalist terrorism and violence, death-camp factories and tenements, social devaluation--ironically ensured that whites, in their desperate quest for social respectability, frantically distanced themselves from blacks. Capitalist terrorism against unions, moreover, reinforced black suspicions that allying with the employers, rather than with their fellow workers, promised social mobility and acceptance.
White racist terrorism not only undermined Afro-American confidence in putatively sympathetic whites; it also, paradoxically, subverted black confidence in themselves and their own institutions. Blacks, as other Americans, desperately sought acceptance and respectability, which in a racist society translated into the assimilation of white folkways and norms. Terrorism, segregation, disfranchisement, substandard education, legal oppression, and economic exploitation all created the conditions for an ideology of black economic, political, and cultural nationalism; but they also combined with white control of the economic, political, and military apparatus to undermine the appeal of racial separatism among blacks. Looking back over the radical decades in the late 1930s, McKay echoed a common black complaint when he lamented that "Negro institutions in general are developed only perfunctorily and by compulsion, because Negroes have no abiding faith in them.[93]
Overwhelming and pervasive ruling-class terrorism and violence against both Afro-Americans and white workers generated and reinforced cultural conservatisms (including racism on the part of whites, and a distinctive racial identity on the part of blacks) that militated against a trans-race, class-based alliance of the working population against capitalism. Both Afro-Americans and white workers confronted a veritable force-field of violence that permeated every aspect of their respective lives, and molded their innermost thoughts and desires as well as their external and social actions. In this way, capitalist violence against all-white unions severely impacted blacks by inculcating in white workers a desperate psychology of survival and accommodation; white terrorism against rural blacks who had never encountered labor unions severely vitiated the American Federation of Labor and, even more, the Industrial Workers of the World and the Socialist party. When Wobblies and Socialists asserted that black and white workers were in essence similar, with identical needs and interests, such claims seemed (in the eyes of workers of both races) obviously repudiated by everyday experience. The races palpably were distinct; how could anyone argue otherwise? In this way, capitalist terrorism and violence generated an insidious capitalist hegemony: a cultural conservatism of the working class, black and white, which undermined any attempt at interracial unity. Cultural revolution within the working class, essential for any fundamental social reform, proved impossible.
Confronting such problems, Afro-Americans by the eve of the Great War evolved a wide variety of ideologies and strategies. In the middle and late nineteenth century, Frederick Douglass embodied the tradition of militant protest, political and judicial action, and use of moral suasion; W.E.B. Du Bois revived this strategy in his Niagara Movement and later in the NAACP. Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute seized upon a tradition of self-help, economic development, and conciliation of whites. Throughout the nineteenth century prominent Afro-American intellectuals advocated emigration to Africa, an idea that Marcus Garvey revived. Other blacks advised migration West or North within the United States. Many Afro-Americans advocated armed self-defense against white terrorism and violence. In 1884 black leader and editor T. Thomas Fortune presciently advocated a trans-race alliance of the working classes. Fortune called "industrial slavery... more excruciating in its exactions, [and] more irresponsible in its machinations, than any other slavery." He proclaimed that "the revolution is upon us, and since we are largely of the laboring population, it is very natural that we should take sides with the labor forces in their fight for a juster distribution of the results of labor."[94]
Fortune soon abandoned this stance, wildly unrealistic in an era of unremitting white racism and black accommodationism. His class-based strategy, however impractical at the time, assumed new urgency in the early twentieth century. Afro-Americans migrated North and joined the industrial proletariat in unprecedented numbers, just as a minority of white workers fashioned radical unions and parties that challenged capitalism. As Afro-Americans moved North, these organizations (primarily the IWW and the SP) recruited blacks and addressed their needs. The Great War inspired massive democratic movements among workers, blacks, and women, even as its denouement discredited Washington's accommodationism and Du Bois's moral suasion alike. By 1915, blacks possessed an infrastructure of churches, businesses, colleges, and militant organizations that provided a base for protest and activism; they had also created a select core of largely self-educated leaders. These men elaborated a wide array of sophisticated philosopies and strategies aimed at overcoming black oppression.
Notes:
[1] ibid., 411.
[2] Of the hundreds of books written on the economics of neo-slavery, I have relied primarily on four (in addition to Litwack). These are: Gerald David Jaynes, Branches Without Roots: Genesis of the Black Working Class in the American South, 1862-1882 (Oxford, 1986); Pete Daniel, The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901-1969 (Urbana, 1990); Alex Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South; (New York, 1996); and David M. Oshinsky, "Worse Than Slavery": Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York, 1996).
[3] Daniel 29-30, 41.
[4] ibid., 67, 65-81, 180-183.
[5] ibid., 3-18.
[6] ibid., 132-6, 109.
[7] ibid., 94-95
[8] ibid., 149-169. Herbert Hoover and Robert Moton (Booker T. Washington's successor at Tuskegee) collaborated in a massive cover-up of those appalling conditions. Hoover himself, however, used the phrase "concentration camp" when describing U.S. camps for flood victims.
[9] ibid., 138.
[10] ibid., 11-15, 103-107.
[11] Oshinsky, 35-36, 56-57.
[12] ibid., 31-84, especially 35, 60, 79.
[13] ibid., 43-44.
[14] ibid., 44-46, 77.
[15] ibid., 46-47, 60, 50, 79.
[16] ibid., 58-59.
[17] ibid., 58-64.
[18] ibid., 76-79. The last remark specifically concerned Alabama, but equally described other Southern states.
[19] ibid., 74-75. TC covered the Tabert case at the time.
[20] ibid., 82. Conditions at Brushy Mountain were somewhat better than on private slave camps. This, however, says very little.
[21] ibid., 139 and passim.
[22] Lichtenstein, 166-169, 180-182.
[23] ibid., 183.
[24] ibid., 184.
[25] ibid., 5, 13, 70-72.
[26] ibid., 43.
[27] ibid., 81-84.
[28] ibid., xvi-xviii, 16.
[29] ibid., 188-189. A few pages later (192-193) Lichtenstein reflects on how today's prisons also reflect underlying socio-economic realities:
"Modern prison life, in the South now as in the rest of the United States, is defined by a numbing, brutal inactivity, an 'enforced idleness'... worse than the forced labor [formerly] prevalent on the southern chain gangs....
"Rather than 'hard labor,' today's prisoners do 'hard time.' But this, too, like its predecessors, reflects some fundamental facts about race and political economy in America.... When race was associated with compulsion, punishment emphasized compulsory labor and proletarianization; when it is associated with idleness, punishment means restraint and control of a de-proletarianized lumpen class. For today, when structural unemployment, deindustrialization, and social dislocation have their most dramatic impact on the African-American community, incarceration is often the fate reserved to the so-called 'black underclass,' the chronically disemployed who populate the nation's penal colony....
"The expansion of the 'prison-industrial complex' provides jobs for the rural unemployed even while it siphons off the urban 'underclass' from America's terminally ill cities. If and when the prison boom proves too costly, a new movement is afoot in this post-welfare-state era: the privatization of punishment."
[30] Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, From Slavery to the Present (New York, 1986).
[31] Howard N. Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (New York, 1978). The conditions described by Rabinowitz persisted throughout the period covered by this book.
[32] Litwack, 218, 232.
[33] ibid., 245, 215-216.
[34] ibid., 217.
[35] ibid., 217-218.
[36] Rabinowitz, 97, 115-124.
[37] ibid., 237-239.
[38] ibid., 333-334.
[39] ibid., 64, 107-108.
[40] ibid., 85, 90-91.
[41] ibid., 84-86, 98.
[42] ibid., 91-96.
[43] ibid., 92-101.
[44] ibid., 60.
[45] ibid., 1-7.
[46] ibid., 6-7.
[47] ibid., 57-60.
[48] ibid., 286.
[49] ibid., 280-283.
[50] ibid., 286-289.
[51] ibid., 290-291, 301, 309.
[52] ibid., 148, 308-311, 150-163. For Wells's own account of the lynching of the People's Grocery proprietors, which she said "changed the whole course of my life," see Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice (Chicago, 1970), 47-59. Wells died in 1931; her autobiography was edited and posthumously published by her daughter.
[53] Litwack, 158.
[54] ibid., 285-288.
[55] ibid., 160-161.
[56] ibid., 311-312, 292-294, 301.
[57] ibid., 311-312, 292-294, 301.
[58] ibid., 302.
[59] ibid., 11-12.
[60] ibid., 415-416.
[61] ibid., 48.
[62] ibid., 41-47, 264, 413.
[63] ibid., 35-38
[64] ibid., 23, 29.
[65] ibid., 20-21, 9.
[66] ibid., 39.
[67] ibid., 416, 12.
[68] The initial target of white homicidal anger in this case was the newly-enacted draft law, which exempted rich men who could purchase a substitute or buy an exemption; blacks, however, soon became the concrete target. Previous pogroms had killed mostly slaves; the New York riot of 1863 killed and injured free blacks.
[69] Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the South Since Emancipation (New York, 1984), 189-201; Herbert Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery (Amherst, 1988), 64-80; Litwack, 312-315.
[70] Litwack, 315-319; Williamson, 209-223; Shapiro, 96-104.
[71] ibid.
[72] The NAACP investigated this atrocity and publicized it in TC and elsewhere. Its efforts on behalf of the black survivors sentenced to death by an all-white court actually resulted in a Supreme Court decision voiding their convictions (Moore v. Dempsey, 1923).
[73] Shapiro, 103-104.
[74] Williamson and Litwack discuss these racist arguments at length. The literature on white construction of black identity--and that of other groups--is voluminous. Two early and influential treatments of this are George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Identity, 1817-1914 (Hanover, New Hampshire, 1971), and Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York, 1981). Hundreds of books have subsequently expanded on their analysis of the social construction of race, and applied their insights to Native Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, women, workers, the poor, peoples of color subjugated by the US empire, and whites themselves.
[75] Litwack, 227, 206.
[76] ibid., 218, 226, 245-246.
[77] ibid., 219-220.
[78] ibid., 212-214.
[79] Williamson especially stresses this point. Ironically, marital rape was legal throughout the United States.
[80] Litwack, 221-222, 363-364. The corporate lawyer was referring to the Civil War.
[81] ibid., 222-225, 368.
[82] ibid., 365-371.
[83] ibid., 254-257.
[84] ibid., 265, 269-271.
[85] ibid., 265, 269-269.
[86] ibid., 267.
[87] ibid., 267, 258.
[88] William M. Tuttle, Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (New York, 1984), 74-107.
[89] Tuttle, passim.
[90] Anderson, 11.
[91] The best short contemporary source for information on the plight of the American working class during this era remains the "Summary of Conclusions and Recommendations," Commission on Industrial Relations, Final Report and Testimony, (Washington, D.C., 1916)), Volume I.
[92] JWJ, Black Manhattan (New York, 1975), 150. Johnson described the process of white flight in somewhat less colorful language in "Harlem: The Cultural Capital," in AL, ed., The New Negro (New York 1925), 303-311. On that occasion Johnson even resorted to military language, asking could blacks "hold Harlem?" With characteristic optimism he claimed that remaining whites had fully accepted Negroes: "I know of no place in the country where the feeling between races is so cordial and at the same time so matter-of-fact and taken for granted."
[93] CM, LWFH, 351.
[94] Black strategies of resistance are discussed at length in Meier, Harlan, Lewis, Litwack, and Wilson Jeremiah Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism (New York, 1978). T. Thomas Fortune is quoted in Meier, 46-47.