After The Reconstruction Years, Blacks And Whites Often Rode Together
in the same railway cars, ate in the same restaurants, used the same public facilities, but did not often interact as equals. The emergence of large black communities in urban areas and of significant black labor force in factories presented a new challenge to white Southerners. They could not control these new communities in the same informal ways they had been able to control rural blacks, which were more directly dependent on white landowners and merchants than their urban counterparts. In the city, blacks and whites were in more direct competition than they had been in the countryside. There was more danger of social mixing, systems of control. In the article “Fencing Off The Negro”, the author gives “reason” and examples of why segregation is needed due to white anxiety in the North. These Jim Crow laws were a response to a new reality that required white supremacy to move to where it would have a rigid legal and institutional basis to retain control over the black population. What had shifted was not their commitment to white supremacy, but the things necessary to preserve it.
BIRTH OF JIM CROW
First, it is necessary to understand the creation of “Jim Crow.” The first expression of the term “Jim Crow” came after it was used to describe a Cincinnati black face song and dance team on the New York Stage as early as 1832. But the first racial use of Jim Crow, however, appeared during 1841 in Massachusetts when it became a colloquial term applied to a separate Negro railway car. “Jim Crow” now has widespread use as the popular meaning for discrimination and segregation of African Americans. In fact, it has now become firmly established in our American language, mores, and laws-especially in the Southern states where it is the openly accepted pattern of keeping the African American “in his/her rightful place.” It has also become accepted as standard English usage for a number of years and some Southern statutes have indexed their laws under the letter (1-2, Dees).
Sociologically, the words “Jim Crow” refer to the concept of accommodation or process of adjustment by the “inferior” Black to the “superior” Caucasian group. “Jim Crow”, therefore, describes the accommodation of the African American to the above social pattern-an accommodation to a racial struggle that has existed over 300 years. In brief, it applies to the position of the African American in American Society and the words “Jim Crow” are synonymous to the words-“segregation” and “discrimination” (2, Dees).
SUPREME COURT AND JIM CROW
The Supreme Court’s involvement in racial segregation during the first two decades of the twentieth century was rooted in the last two decades of the nineteenth, when the Court turned away from the constitutional claims of Reconstruction. Among the many nineteenth century decisions that played a role, two carried the main burden of repudiation: the Civil Rights Cases, decided in 1883, and Plessy v. Ferguson, decided in 1896. These cases dealt with racial segregation in railroads or other public accommodations; the first involved the constitutionality of a federal statute prohibiting it, the second state statute requiring it (514, Finkleman).
Segregation first became a major political issue in the 1870’s as many private railroads and street car companies, theaters, hotels, and restaurants excluded blacks altogether or set them apart in Jim Crow areas. The practice was not much more extensive in the South than in the North. The concerted and much publicized resistance of blacks to these insults helped Senator Charles Sumner drive congressional Republicans to what was both the crown principle of racial equality in American law (515,Finkleman).
In 1883, when the Supreme Court finally decided the dozens of cases dealing with the Civil Rights Act of 1875 constitutionality, the Court’s opinion was authored by Justice Joseph P. Bradley, who had cast the deciding vote in the Electoral Commission which threw the election of 1876 to Rutherford B. Hayes and set in motion the complex series of political events that historians have termed the Compromise of 1877, marking the end of the Reconstruction period (516, Finkleman). An ardent Unionist from New Jersey, a supporter of Lincoln and Grant, a backer of the Civil War amendments, Bradley now was joined by seven colleagues in carrying out the first installment of the Court’s contribution to the end of Reconstruction. Treating complex questions simply, the majority found the Civil Rights Act of 1875 beyond Congress’s powers under the thirteenth and fourteenth amendments. “It would be running the slavery argument into the ground,” Bradley wrote, to view acts of private discrimination as badges of slavery, which Congress could prohibit under its power to enforce the abolition of slavery. As for the fourteenth amendment, it permitted Congress to deal with state, not private, action (517, Finkelman).
The Supreme Court gave its full constitutional blessings to Jim Crow in the 1890’s when racial separation evolved from a matter of private prejudice to a mandate of state law (Finkelman, 517). The first batch of Jim Crow laws after the Civil War covered railroad cars, a fitting legal symbol for a southern society in motion, losing its roots in the solid earth or feudal agricultural arrangements that had kept blacks in their place without the need for a legal structure specifically enforcing racial separation. Segregation laws had been originally a Northern contrivance, commonplace above the Mason-Dixon Line before the Civil War, revived by Southern legislatures when emancipation, new conditions of personal mobility, and urbanization threatened the heritage of caste associations between races. Aside from the few short-lived statutes after the Civil War, lasting Jim Crow legislation began in Florida in 1887 with a requirement that railroads put African Americans in separate cars or in separate compartments. Ironically, this was the same year that the Interstate Commerce Act barred railroads from causing customers “undue or unreasonable prejudice or disadvantage.” But the ICA was concerned with economic favoritism, and it was the impulse of the state laws to segregate, not the federal statute’s ban on discrimination, that carried the nation’s dominant convictions on race relations (Finkelman, 520).
As Jim Crow laws first made their way into Southern statue books in the 1880’s and 1890’s as regulations of railroads and other public carriers, so in the Supreme Court of the United States the process of bending the Constitution to accommodate them was dominated by cases involving public transportation. In this area of race relations, the Supreme Court during the Progressive era did little to cast doubt on the sway of Plessy and Louisville, and even the Civil Rights Cases had a final approving echo. There was, however, one intriguing decision, McCabe v Atchison, Topeka v. Santa Fe Railway, handed down in 1914, which for the first time put some constitutional teeth in the equality side of the separate but equal formula, and in the process carried the seeds of the doctrine’s demise. Otherwise, the White Court was content to leave matters where the Fuller Court had left them (531, Finkelman).
JIM CROW MIGRATING NORTH
It is Erronous to consider Jim Crow as merely peculiar only to the South. Although it is true that the Jim Crow attitudes are more often found or more openly expressed in the South, the North, the border States, and the South each practice their own distinct types of Racial discrimination or Jim Crow. In the article written in 1913, “Fencing Off the Negro”, discusses the movement of racial Segregation to the Northern cities of Baltimore and Louisville (47, Literary Digest). Local newspapers, such as the Louisville Times endorsed the proposed segretory acts and Baltimore Sun. The North had been a “save haven” to slaves prior to the Civil War due to their strong avidcacy against Slavery. Post Reconstruction, though, the North was slowly adapting the same restrictive, racial segregation policies as the Southern States.
The rational the Baltimore Evening Sun gives the proposed segregation Acts are that “the essential effect of the legislation is to deprive a portion of the population of the right to occupy any (with rare exceptions) but the least desirable sections of the city (47, Literary Digest). Even the Charleston News and Courier commented on the proposed segregation laws in the North by stating “every Southern city knows where its disease centers lie. It may not be the Negro’s fault that he does not maintain proper sanitary conditions in his home, for generally he fails to understand the need of sanitation (47, Literary Digest). The North, with support from both sections of the country, was now closing the segregation gap swiftly with its Southern Neighbors.
Whereas this article does discuss the New York Evening Post insistence that Segregation Acts are undemocratic and the Philadelphia Public leader stating that “class legislation is violative of the spirit if not of the letter of the Constitution, the author mainly focuses on the pro-Northern Segregation Acts. This article, written in 1913, portrays the exact image given off in history books today of the rising Segregation Movement towards the Northern States. In all, “Fencing Off the Negro” reflects the attitudes of the Northerner condonment towards rising segregation.
Works Cited
1. Dees, Jesse Walter. Jim Crow. Ann Arbor: Ann Arbor Publishers, 1951.
2. Finkelman, Paul. African Amerians and the LAW. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1992.
3. NA. “Fencing Off the Negro,” Literary Digest (November 1, 1913): 47:801.
