Well hey there and welcome back to Heimler’s History. WE’ve been going through Unit 6 of the AP U.S. History curriculum, and in this video it’s time to talk about the New South. So if you’re ready to get them brain cows milked, let’s get to it. In this video we’re trying to answer the following question: what were the various factors that contributed to continuity and change in the “New South” from 1877 to 1898. Now what in the world is the “New South?” I mean, if you’ve been following the curriculum since the beginning, you know all about the Old South, which is to say southern culture, politics, and economics before the Civil War. But that Old SOuth had its hindparts handed to it in the Civil War and now some folks were envisioning a new kind of South. One of those folks was Henry Grady who was the editor of a newspaper called The Atlanta Constitution. He’s the one who coined the phrase “New South” and laid out his vision in a dizzying array of editorials. Grady could see that one of the reasons the South suffered in the war was because the North was far more advanced industrially, so Grady envisioned a future for the south based on economic diversity, industrial growth, and laissez-faire capitalism. In other words, the South needed to be North-ified a little. And this vision actually caught on. Southern cities began growing along with industrial centers that were built within them. Along with this, southern states actually surpassed New England states as the top manufacturers of textiles. And the rate of growth in terms of population and miles of new railroads constructed equaled or surpassed that of any other place in the country. So baby, it looks like a new future for the South, all the past is left behind , and everything is… WELL< NOW HOLD YER BRITCHES, SON… Let’s not get crazy. It’s true. Despite all the gains made in service of this vision for the New South, it really only took hold in a few places in the southern states. So yes, there were definitely a few isolated cities that were transformed by industry, but mostly, the South remained agricultural as it had always been. And speaking of the way things always had been, that agricultural machine apparently didn’t like change all that much. The fields were still growing and that meant plantation owners still needed laborers to work the field. And that system of labor was known as sharecropping. Now I talked about this in the last video, so I’ll just summarize here what I said there. Sharecropping was a system by which folks without enough capital to buy or rent land of their own could sign on to work the fields of a plantation owner on the condition that a portion of the harvest was shared with the owner. Now, in theory, this could have been a good thing for newly emancipated black people and poor whites as well, but in reality it was really a new form of slavery since many sharecroppers remained indebted to the landowner. And the truth is, that wasn’t an accident. That’s how the southerners wanted it. Now another way that the South emphatically did NOT become new during this period was with respect to racial segregation. You may remember that at the end of Unit 5 we talked about the Compromise of 1877 which officially ended Reconstruction in the South, and one of the key provisions of that compromise was the removal of federal troops from the southern states. Now the troops were there to ensure that new laws and Constitutional amendments were upheld, and so once they left, racial segregation became the societal structure du jure. Now this insistence on the separation between the white and black races reached its climax in the landmark Supreme COurt case Plessy v Ferguson in 1896. The case came from Louisiana which had a law that required separate railcars for black and white passengers. In 1892 a man named Homer Plessy was tasked with challenging this law. Plessy, as it turned out, was seven-eighths white and one-eighth black, which meant, under Louisiana law, he was black. So he challenged the law by riding in a whites-only passenger car, and when he was asked to leave, he refused and was arrested. When the case reached the Supreme Court, the ruling went like this. Racial segregation was in fact constitutional just as long as the separate facilities are equal in kind and quality. This is where we get the phrase “separate but equal.” And in this way, southerners who held to the notion of white supremacy could plead innocence regarding the fourteenth amendment, which guaranteed equal protection under the law. And this decision was all Southerners needed to go ahead and segregate all of society. Now, it probably won’t surprise you that while the races were kept separate, the facilities were in no way equal. The result of this decision was a wave of laws, known as Jim Crow Laws, which segregated dang near every facet of society. Bathrooms were segregated. Water fountains were segregated. Public transportation was segregated. Any public facility that could be segregated was segregated. In addition to the demoralizing separation of the races, black people lost many of the gains they had made when Reconstruction had begun. During this time black people were forbidden to serve on juries or run for public office. And on a darker note, black people were often accused of crimes and not even given the dignity of a court appearance. Instead lynch mobs dealt out vigilante justice apart from the law. In fact, in the 1890s alone, more than a thousand black people were violently lynched in this way. Now, despite how dark these times were, it is always incumbent on us to remember that along with all this violence, came significant resistance as well. And while many reformers continued to fight for political and social equality for blacks, I’m only going to introduce you to three of them. First, Ida B. Wells. She was the editor of a black newspaper based in the South and in it she fiercely editorialized against lynching and Jim Crow Laws. And for her efforts, she received many death threats, and eventually her presses were destroyed by a mob. However, she fled to the North where she continued her crusade. Second, Henry Turner. He founded the International Migration Society in 1894 which facilitated the migration of black Americans to Africa, specifically, Liberia. Several thousand black AMericans made this trip, but in the end it wasn’t a sustainable venture since Liberian inhabitants often lacked economic opportunity and suffered pretty significantly from African diseases. The third resistor you should know about is Booker T. Washington. Now, Washington was a controversial figure in the fight for equality because his view was that black people did not in fact need to fight for their equality on a political level. Instead, Washington argued that black people needed to become self-sufficient economically and that would lead to power in the voting booth. As a former enslaved laborer, he had done this for himself and he went to great lengths to help others do it as well. However, since the political and economic dice were loaded against black people in the South, Washington’s vision was deemed impractical by many. Okay, that’s what you need to know about Unit 6 topic 4 of the AP U.S. History curriculum. If you need help getting an A in your class and a five on your exam in May, videos then go ahead and subscribe and I shall oblige. Heimler out.