Okay, so today I'm going to talk a little bit about the beginnings of and the origins of the Jim Crow South and segregation in the world that it creates. Naturally, of course, this can be a pretty unpleasant topic to discuss and address and learn about. But nonetheless, this is American history, so I will... Consider this your warning that this may be an unpleasant topic, but I think that it's my job to tell you the truth as best I am able to and as best I can understand it, and also to at least bring you partially to face with the legacy of American racism in the South.
So. We're going to start with a story about Sam Hose, also named Samuel Wilkes in 1899. Now Sam Hose was a sharecropper in Georgia, and what... He got into a dispute with his landlord and master over the fact that his mother was sick and he wanted to go visit her. And the landlord refused to allow this.
and going off of the fact that Sam Ho's was in debt, tried to prevent him from leaving, in which case Sam Ho's insisted that the master didn't have the right to do this. the master responded by getting out a gun and threatening to and trying perhaps it's a little unclear exactly what happened but most certainly threatening to shoot Sam hose Sam in fear of his life picked up a nearby axe and threw it at the master and killed him and then promptly ran now what happens after the fact is going to be I think a pretty illustrative example of how American racism and particularly the practice of lynching that would play out in the deep south. So Hose having run after killing his landlord was initially put sort of put on watch or given a charge for arrest in relation to the death of landlord. Hose is captured and arrested and he's held in jail. But while he was in jail, several rumors circulate.
The first of which was that Sam Hose had tried to, in some ways, or perhaps even successfully, assaulted the master's wife sexually. And also that he had, and there were rumors at least flying about, that he had also tried to do something similar to their infant child. So while Sam Hose was in jail, in a small southern jail in a town on the side of Atlanta, a mob descended on the jail, forced the deputies inside into the jail cell, broke Sam Hose out.
and brought him to the center of town where they proceeded to torture, burn, cut off various parts of his body, and then lynch him in the public square. A crowd of an estimated 2,500 to 3,000 people were there and witnessed and participated in this act. W.E.B. Du Bois, the famous African American intellectual who had attended Harvard, came down to Atlanta to sort of investigate the story more fully.
Well, this is a sort of urban... legend or rumor about Du Bois. And while on the way there, after he got off the train, he passed a shop that was selling Sam Hose's knuckle bones. And at that point, he realized that the situation probably wasn't very safe for someone like him, so he turned around and went back to the north.
Now the case of Sam Hose tells us a couple of things about lynching. The first of which, and American racism in the South, the first of which is the standard trope that African American men, in particular, are sexually violent and have to be contained or curtailed or watched in relation to their capacity for sexual violence. The second of which, and this is quite, I think, interesting, is that the practice of lynching, was overwhelmingly extrajudicial. It often flew in the face of standing southern elected officials and their own desires. More often than not, southern elected officials would tolerate this process more than they desired or liked it, as was the case in which the deputies were overwhelmed and of course then no trial was held for Sam Hodes himself.
The third of which was the extreme brutality and public display of the practice of lynching. This was deliberate and intentional, and of course designed both to sow fear, and also to demonstrate that, and the way in which in particular it attempted to sow fear, I would say, was by demonstrating that this could be done out in the open, where anyone could watch. and that the authorities would not stop it or protect you in any capacity. All of these things have become sort of staples of American Southern racism, public displays of violence, the auctioning off or memorabilia or almost celebration of lynching as communal public events, and the extrajudicial nature of it in which African Americans are constantly being abused and abused.
publicly humiliated, shamed, and brutally, in some cases, tortured. Now, segregation in and of itself emerges out of the limitations, or arguably failures, of Reconstruction. It comes as a response to the idea of the Redeemers and their way of returning order to itself in one capacity to another.
It's also, though, a product of economic decline and economic failure. It's a product of class and race anxiety. Some of this is ideological.
Some of this, some scholars argue, is also economic. The plantation system in the South is failing. It's failing after the Civil War for a variety of reasons, the first of which is that smaller farming tends, sometimes, is not as effective on global markets as big, large-scale... operations such as the plantation system the second of which is that the price of of international cotton that had made the American market so successful adjusted during the lack of production at the in the process of the American Civil War from 1861 1865 and other sources of global cotton filled that gap so that once American cotton reproduction begins to ramp back up and it takes time because the devastation law by the Civil War, the market is not the same.
The price that one can get is not the same. And the investment opportunities both in cotton, in land, and in slaves themselves were very very lucrative investment properties all collapsed in the context of this. So the southern economy is really kind of in ruins.
And then finally also pretty significant decline in state funding. Because the system is not functioning as well, the economic system is not functioning as well, states cut back their budgets, which limits their capacity to address economic and social concerns that affect people on the daily. And also the failure of southern political power, the failure of the populist movement in the south.
Now segregation doesn't happen right away. It's something that emerges kind of gradually. But one of the biggest decisions was the overturning of American civil rights laws that were passed during Reconstruction in 1883. The civil rights law of 1883 had prohibited discrimination in restaurants, hotels, and railroads. But when this is overturned, it allows private establishments to refuse service to African Americans on the basis of race if they wish. Of course, many in the South take this up.
It also is an attempt to further distinguish things. So, and this takes on kind of a structural attitude. Let's say you as a person, right, you as a business owner, let's say, even by chance, of course this would have been pretty unlikely, but even by chance you were not racist or as racist against African Americans as some of your other people living in your community, and you would have had no problem serving them in... your hotel or restaurant or on the railroad or allowing them access to first class carriages for instance well what happens is that the wealthy people around you won't go to your restaurant or the hotel or the railroad and you're sort of automatically relegated to a low-scale hotel if you start serving black people. The culture has a way of conforming these habits often unofficially, not through legal means, not through elected means, but through just simple everyday choices, conscious and unconscious, that people make about where they're going to do everyday activities and who they're going to associate and with what.
And this eventually gets us to The landmark 1896 case that becomes the backdrop of segregation in the South, Plessy versus Ferguson, which lays out the now infamous claim that it is perfectly fine for state and government institutions. Notice that this is state and government institutions, not private entities. The big thing about the civil rights law is that it overturns private entities, but no, this is in reference to state discrimination.
It's the state cannot refuse service to African Americans, but they can create services that are distinctly for African Americans and separate them from services that are distinctly for whites. This is how you get the fierce partition in schools between white and black schools. It's not the only way in which this occurs, but it's the major legal mechanism through which this is enforced. And the idea behind Plessy versus Ferguson is that it was supposed to be equal funding. course as I suspect many of us know or realize and there was no such thing as equal funding between black and white institutions and schools and but nonetheless this was this was the official Supreme Court decision in 1896 that becomes the backdrop for what ends up producing the legal qualities of Jim Crow laws and you know maybe I'll stick with this for a second more.
So what's going to happen then is a combination of often local laws that will create a racially tiered society, often subtly, often socially, but through a variety of mechanisms that will, you know, involve things as simple as, you know, who gets served, what entrance you can go into when you enter into a place of business. or who gets served first or where or how and in general there is an attempt to recreate the sort of system or the cultural system that had emerged in and around American slavery and this is common not just of American slavery but I would say in slavery systems in general The central difference between American slavery and other slavery systems is that this is firmly based on racial identity. The first concept I would suggest to you to try to understand is the idea of cultural deference and racial divide and how this functions within southern societies. So if you're not familiar with the word deference, it means to sort of defer to or to give credence to someone, typically someone who is higher up on a hierarchy or a social ladder than you. So for example, it might be considered proper to have a cultural deference.
or it might be a good idea to defer to someone's expertise on a particular topic or subject if they have more experience than you. So, you know, let's say you're a chef and you're not sure how to make a particular dish. What would you do? But, you know, someone who you work with who's been there for an extra 10 years than you, they say they know how to do it. You would defer to them.
and this is a submission, right? It's a recognition that they are higher than you in a hierarchy. You defer to them and let them call the shots, and you do what they wanted you to do, right?
So this is something that we... Well, this is something that was often practiced much more carefully than it is today in social circumstances. So let me illustrate what I mean in a more direct manner as it relates to... the Jim Crow South.
So let's take an example. Let's say there is a black man walking down the streets of Charleston, South Carolina and as he's walking down the street he's going to pass a variety of people. The first kind of person who passes is a white worker. In this case what he would probably do is keep his head down and not make eye contact and keep walking. I think we've all probably had moments in which we've done something similar when we've passed someone we're not particularly comfortable with on the subway or something such in New York.
You know you just keep your head down, you don't draw attention to yourself, you keep walking. Maybe you do it when you want to pretend you didn't see your ex, so you just keep your head down, you turn the other way, and you keep walking so you don't have to say hi to them. This is kind of the idea. But notably in this case the black man can kind of keep keep walking past them.
Now, let's take a different example. A white man and his wife, they're of the social elite, they're walking down the city on a Sunday morning, and they're dressed in their finest for church, and they pass that same black man. Now, the expectation is still that the black man kind of keep his head down, but more than likely he would in fact kind of step off the sidewalk and into the street to avoid them, so that he He doesn't get in their way.
This is an act of deference. And often when he was doing this, he was quite literally stepping into some kind of excrement in the street itself to let them pass. And he most certainly would not look up at the lady in any capacity. Now this is very different.
From how the white man might acknowledge or might act, and neither of them would most likely look at him either, how they might acknowledge or how they might act if they passed another gentleman, right? If they passed another gentleman and his wife, they would tip their hats to one another, they might shake hands, they might say hello, they might acknowledge one another, but they would keep walking and they would walk as equals. But notice the difference in just social behavior, in cultural behavior.
This is not a law. There's nothing that forces people to do this necessarily legally, but because of the culture that emerges, if the black man were to look up and try to acknowledge the white man as an equal, particularly if he was a white gentleman, this might be seen as a challenge to the white man's social status or position. It might be seen as an insult, and of course, this is, as we talked about in the lynching example in the beginning.
If you were to look up at the white woman, this might be construed as a potential sexually aggressive act. Now, note a couple of other things that are kind of coming around this, right? What has to be protected?
White woman's sexual purity. How is this protected? Well it's protected by dividing them socially from their social inferiors. This is the idea of a cult of gentility. How does one establish their position as a social elite?
Well you're expected to act and dress in a certain way. You're expected to be hospitable. You're expected to be kind.
You're expected to show proper respect to people in authority. And this is, you know, not exclusively, and I'm not saying that this is a bad thing or I'm trying to pick on people from the South. but this is partially from where this idea of southern hospitality comes from. That you have to be kind and gentle and generous to one another because it's going to inform your social position.
So having manners, knowing how to dress, inviting people into your home, this is all part of the cultural process that builds up and surrounds American racial racism in the South. And in part, one of the reasons why this develops is because it's meant to fiercely distinguish those who are at the top of the social hierarchy white men, particularly successful white men, and those who are at the bottom of the social hierarchy, black men, or any black person at all. So, this kind of comes into being.
And then what happens, right, is that this system gets enforced, sometimes, explicitly sometimes. implicitly through groups like the KKK who will terrorize black people particularly black people who who are successful particularly black people who attain a measure of status and degree why well because if a black person can start to emulate or come close to the practices of a white gentleman that disrupts the hierarchy. And it disrupts the hierarchy not just for the white gentleman, but especially for the poor white farmer who can't tolerate and often will not tolerate this kind of thing. And you'll see this. you know if you watch the if if you watch the Jim Crow video the attacks on the black middle class are overwhelmingly directed because of this sort of thing KKK is also then going to marginalize black politics most people when they think of the marginalization of black politics in the South they think of things through southern uh...
southern uh... race uh... sorry uh...
voting laws that that will prevent you from voting uh... based on landowners status based on the access to property uh... based on you whether under tax based on literacy rates et cetera et cetera and but but this is this whole this whole system is only goes for nation is underrated by this uh...
cultural and uh... extrajudicial violence that we talked about the future Now there will be over 5,000 lynchings between 1880 and 1914. This may not seem like a lot to you, but remember that when they're done, they're done in this public fashion. They're done in this public capacity with large crowds, with souvenirs sold, with newspaper coverage, both positive in the south and negative in the north, often, and etc.
So... This is important. However, despite all of this, we have to, I think as historians remember, that things are not staying the same for the African American community. This is not the same thing as slavery. There are significant differences that are between the Jim Crow South and the slavery system.
Notably, the black family, in a lot of respects, and black communities are still autonomous to some degree. Yes, they are discriminating. Excuse me, they're discriminated against.
They have to deal with a level of racism that most of us really can't possibly imagine or can't possibly have never experienced in any capacity, some of us perhaps, but most of us most likely not. They are constantly in threat of violence. They are constantly enduring insults. They are constantly forced to practice this cultural deference. But it was still possible.
for African Americans to achieve greater stability, greater communal growth. And the black community during the Jim Crow period really, really becomes very strong. And there will be multiple sort of factors that will lead into the strength and the growing and the cultural effects this community will have on the country in general. We have a tendency, I think, in American history to sort of partition out. black history and American history but this really doesn't make sense because there is no black history and white history.
The culture of deference can't exist without the presence of African Americans and the system that's built around them and just vice versa, right? So that means the two things are together and just vice versa you can't have things like the black church unless you also have at the same time the practice of American racism. So all of these things are a combination of one another. So I think this is worth thinking about.
But you will have this formulation in a new black professional class. We are still going to have our historic black colleges that are forming during Reconstruction. They still stay active. They're not funded very well. They deal with all kinds of difficulties.
But they're still active. They're still in existence. You're going to have the black church, which will be the center of black community life.
African Americans, I think as I've mentioned before, African Americans are the most active participants. of religion in the United States today. Everyone likes to talk about white evangelicals in the context of Donald Trump, but it's actually black Protestants in particular that are the most active participants in religion.
So this is important. We can see the legacy, directly see the legacy of the effects of this and the power of these communal organizations that are autonomous. There are still black neighborhoods.
Those black neighborhoods are governed and run mostly. almost exclusively by black people. They're calling their own jobs.
And then there will eventually be things that will start to shift the forces that maintain the segregation system. One of the biggest of which is the first great migration during the First World War when... The beginnings of the war create a massive need for factory jobs in the North, and many African Americans are going to pick up and migrate to the North. We'll talk more about this later.
This is how you get things like the Harlem Renaissance, for instance. But in general, this is kind of an overview of the Jim Crow South, the system, and the cultural forces that make it. And I hope you found this useful.
Thank you.