Segregation's Evolution in the Twilight Period

Segregation's Evolution in the Twilight Period

In our class discussion we contextualized the first four chapters of Blair L. M. Kelley's Right to Ride, which walks readers through the history of racially segregated streetcars.  

Historians have been asking about the nature of segregation.  Kelley hones in on the legal nature of segregation in the 19th century and early part of the 20th century.  Often we conceptualize segregation as a southern phenomenon, but Kelley forces us to expand this understanding by opening the book with examples of streetcar segregation in 1850s New York City.  Racial, as well as gender, segregation was a national phenomenon with particular manifestations in various regions.  Yet, there was a twilight period between the end of the Civil War and the "separate but equal" case ruling of Plessy v. Ferguson during which the nation had to answer, "how are we going to organize our society in regards to this race thing?"

In the South, following the Emancipation Proclamation, many questions regarding "the color line" were still unanswered.  While blacks began to push for liberties and equal rights as citizens, Southern whites were experiencing a racialized fear.  The abolition of slavery was the loss of white social control over blacks.  For whites to maintain their position in the social hierarchy, a new system of control need to be devised and implemented.  

To contextualize our discussion on segregation, we first imagined the institutions which were impacted by emancipation during the Reconstruction Era.  The South witnessed a rise in black education, churches, businesses, et cetera.  Former slaves were the foremost proponents of public education.  Booker T. Washington recalls the era, saying, "an entire race learning to read!"  School systems were organized by blacks, by which many HBCUs were founded.  There was a proliferation of black churches.  For example, the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church jumped from 10,000 to 100,000 members across the country during Reconstruction.  Though blacks were still tied to the land to support themselves (farming tobacco and cotton), in many ways, black laborers were earning money for the first time.  Black communities pooled their resources to build these institutions.  Since white bankers would not take their money, or make loans, black banks began to flourish across the South.  Southern black communities grew rapidly, and began wrestling with the concept of "freedom."

Black Americans were experiencing and utilizing a level of autonomy they had not yet seen.  Former slaves were changing their last names from their masters names.  Former slaves had mobility like never before, and they were able to seek decent wages in a variety of places.  Many became formally married.  All of these changes terrified the white South, witnessing a complete transformation of their way of life and social order.  Whites began to think about what social control might replace slavery, to restore the social hierarchy they had been accustomed to.  Segregation seemed to be the alternative method for denying the dignity of blacks.  

Segregation soon became the ingrained in all aspects of life following the Plessy case.  Segregation ordinances popped up across the South, ensuring de jure separation, while the North maintained de facto segregation.  These laws were violent in their nature, robbing a race of humans of their dignity through stigmatization and subordination.  At the crux of many of the segregation laws (such as it being illegal for whites and blacks to play a game of checkers with each other) came from a fear of interracial sex.  This can be seen in the rhetoric surrounding lynchings in newspapers.  In the book I've Got the Light of Freedom the author shows how while the motivation for 45% of lynchings were allegations of rape, 82% of newspaper articles following a lynching refer to sexual assault as a factor.  The need for social control inherent in white supremacy has evolved through history (i.e. slavery, segregation, lynching, prison industrial complex, etc).  

Once our class discussion was contextualized, we spent the remainder of the class period discussing the segregation we had been reading about and the African American Activist tradition in the face of white supremacy.  

First, we debated over whether the mere act of reading by black Americans in the South was an act of activism.  Those that argued reading was a form of activism point to fact that an educated black population in the eyes of white capitalists would negatively affect their profits, by forcing land owners to increase wages to maintain a workforce which suddenly has more occupational options.  Since white capitalists were against the explicit advancement education provided blacks, it was surely dangerous for black Southerners to seek education.  Hence the plantation saying, "Education wrecks a good field hand."  On the other hand, some students cautioned that we should not cheapen the idea of activism, by attributing everything blacks did at that time as a form of activism.  

With this dilemma, we tried to sharpen our definition of activism.  One student talked about how the body in occupation of space was often used as a weapon for activism, by pushing the boundaries on the place deemed unacceptable for black presence by white society.  Communication was a large part of activism back then, and it is still the key of organization today.  Black newspapers were like the social media of the day, where blacks received their news and used editorials to positively influence one another.    We also recognized the collective energy and effort needed for activism, and how those energies come and go like waves throughout history.