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De-Centring the South: America's Nationwide White Supremacist Order after Reconstruction Author(s): Desmond King and Stephen Tuck Source: Past & Present, No. 194 (Feb., 2007), pp. 213-253Published by: on behalf of Oxford University Press Past and Present SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25096664Accessed: 04-12-2015 06:46 UTC

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DE-CENTRING THE SOUTH: AMERICA'S NATIONWIDE WHITE SUPREMACIST ORDER AFTER RECONSTRUCTION*

Writing in the New York Freeman on 28 May 1887, ten years after the end of Reconstruction, T. Thomas Fortune called for a

national Afro-American League to fight rising racial injustice in the Southern states of the USA. Fortune castigated lynching, the

suppression of black voting rights, inequities in school funding, chain gangs, the 'tyranny' of segregated railroads and the denial of

equal rights and equal access to public and private accommoda

tions.1 One of the period's most prominent African American

leaders, Fortune had wide experience of America's race problem. Born a slave in Florida in 1856, Fortune lived in Delaware and

Washington DC after the Civil War before returning to Florida. He then left the South for good in 1879 and moved to New York, where he edited a series of influential African American news

papers. At the Afro-American League's first meeting Fortune called on the delegates, mostly from the Northern and Western

states, to stand 'as representatives of 8 million freedmen, who know our rights and have the courage to defend them'. Thus, African Americans beyond the South would, on behalf of their Southern counterparts, 'face the enemy and fight inch by inch for

every right he denies us'.2 Yet just over a decade later, Fortune found himself fighting

racial oppression, 'inch by inch', much closer to home. In 1900 a race riot devastated New York city's Tenderloin district.

Following a spate of assaults, mob violence broke out late on the night of 15 August. The New York Times reported that a crowd of a thousand people 'started to clean the streets of

* The authors would like to thank Steve Kantrowitz, Jay Sexton and Richard M.

Valelly for their comments on previous drafts of this article. 1 New York Freeman, 28 May 1887; 'Fortune's Speech: Founding Convention of

Afro-American League, 1890', in Herbert Aptheker (ed.), A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States, i (New York, 1951), 704-5.

2 'Fortune's Speech', 703, 704. Fortune outlined his view ofthe Southern problem

at more length in Timothy Thomas Fortune, Black and White: Land, Labor and Politics in the South (New York, 1884). For an overview of Fortune's career, see Emma Lou

Thornbrough, T. Thomas Fortune: Militant Journalist (Chicago, 1972).

Past and Present, no. 194 (Feb. 2007) ? The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2007

doi:10.1093/pastj/gtl023



214 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 194

Negroes... Every car passing up or down Eighth Avenue between

the hours of 8 and 11 was stopped by the crowd and every negro on board was dragged out, hustled about, and beaten until he was

able to break away'.3 Some shouted 'lynch the nigger'.4 One man

tied a clothes line to a lamp-post, looking for someone to lynch. The largely Irish police force often treated black victims with

contempt and encouraged the mob.5 Frank Moss, who collected

the testimony of eighty victims, concluded that 'it was the night sticks of the police that sent a stream of bleeding colored men to

the hospital'.6 No records were kept of how many people were

injured. But despite the fact that most black victims stayed at

home, 'afraid to trust themselves to the mercy of the crowds on

the streets while on the way to a police station or hospital', the

emergency staff of three New York hospitals worked through the

night to treat cracked skulls. With Moss and other New Yorkers, Fortune organized a Citizens' Protective League, which fought,

unsuccessfully, to persuade the mayor to bring rioters and com

plicit policemen to justice.7 Fortune's experience of racial injustice outside the South was

by no means unique.8 In this article we contend that Southern

white supremacy was constructed in conjunction with, rather

than in opposition to, developments in the rest of the country after Reconstruction. In the national government, federal officials

did not just acquiesce in the Southern counter-revolution but

promoted a nationwide order of white supremacy. At the grass roots in the North and West, there were not only isolated

instances of racism, but a systematic and effective drive to

establish white supremacy that mirrored developments in the

South. Considering the relatively small number of black Ameri

cans in Northern and Western cities teeming with immigrants,

3 New York Times, 16 Aug. 1900. 4

Ibid., 17 Aug. 1900. 5 Citizens' Protective League, Story ofthe Riot (New York, 1900), 8, 70. For Irish

hostility to black Americans, see Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York,

1995). 6 Citizens' Protective League, Story ofthe Riot, 2.

7 New York Times, 16 Aug. 1900; Citizen's Protective League, Story ofthe Riot. 8

See, for example, the recollection of the poet Langston Hughes after moving to

Chicago. Langston Hughes, The Big Sea: An Autobiography (New York, 1940), 33.

Also see the survey of Northern race relations by W. E. B. Du Bois, 'The Black North',

published weekly in New York Times Magazine, 17 Nov.-15 Dec. 1901.



DE-CENTRING THE SOUTH 215

the prominence of specifically anti-black behaviour is remark

able.9

Scholars have long recognized a general retreat from Recon

struction's egalitarian ideals about race across many aspects of American life during the late nineteenth century, from

Supreme Court rulings upholding segregation and presiden tial attitudes that abdicated responsibility on the question of

racial equality, to rising racism in popular and intellectual cul

ture.10 Yet the South is treated as exceptional, a section apart.

Invariably, the national downturn in race relations is presented as

the backdrop to the 'betrayal of the negro' and the reversal of

Reconstruction in the South. For example, in his pioneering

study of Northern and national race relations, Rayford Logan described the years after Reconstruction, 1877-1901, as 'the con

solidation of white supremacy in the South and Northern accept ance of victory for the "Lost Cause'".11 Scholars have stressed

the significance of this 'Northern acceptance' of, and thus partial

responsibility for, Southern white supremacy.12 But the North is

portrayed as a relatively safe if less than ideal haven, to which

many persecuted leaders escaped in the late nineteenth century, to be followed by hundreds of thousands of African Americans

fleeing the South during the great migration from the First World

War onwards.

In some respects, the South did seem distinctive in privil eging white supremacy. After all, Massachusetts was hardly

Mississippi. Some 90 per cent of African Americans lived in the

9 On immigrants, see John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American

Nativism, 1860-1925 (New Brunswick, 1988). 10 The pioneering work in the field was Rayford W. Logan, The Negro in American

Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877-1901 (New York, 1954). On rising racism and racist

culture, see David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass., 2001); James H. Dormon, 'Shaping the Popular Image of Post

Reconstruction American Blacks: The "Coon Song" Phenomenon of the Gilded

Age', Amer. Quart., xl (1988); George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (Hanover, NH,

1987); Alessandra Lorini, Rituals of Race: American Public Culture and the Search for Racial Democracy (Charlottesville, 1999); Eric T. L. Love, Race over Empire: Racism and U.S. Imperialism, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill, 2004); Heather Cox Richardson, The

Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901

(Cambridge, Mass., 2001). 11 Logan, Negro in American Life and Thought, 12.

12 See, for example, C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York,

1974), 69. See also Richard Valelly, 'National Parties and Racial Disenfranchisement', in Paul E. Peterson (ed.), Classifying by Race (Princeton, 1995), 188.




South, the vast majority recently freed from slavery. Grappling with the destruction ofthe master-slave relationship in rural areas was one of the central features of the postbellum South.13 The counter-revolution in the South after Reconstruction ?

culminating in the turn-of-the-century imposition of white

supremacy ? was as dramatic as it was ugly. By the start of the

twentieth century the so-called 'Jim Crow' South was uniquely the home of constitutional disfranchisement, state-sponsored

segregation, widespread spectacle lynching and black rural pov

erty.14 By contrast, some Northern and Western states passed civil rights laws during the late nineteenth century, the leading civil rights organizations ofthe early twentieth century were based in the North, and the national Republican Party remained osten

sibly biracial throughout the period. Nonetheless, a closer look at race relations beyond the South

reveals that their trajectory followed a markedly similar pattern across the country. This nationwide scope of rising white suprem

acy is underscored by widespread resistance by African

Americans to their deteriorating status not just in the South but

throughout the North and West, and as far as possible in the

national state. This was not a uniformly bleak picture. After

Reconstruction, there were a number of exceptional moments

of biracial politics in Northern and Western communities, and in the federal bureaucracy black Americans could expect merito

cratic employment opportunities until the 1900s. However, as the recent historiography of the South has shown, there

were many such moments ?

maybe many more ?

in the post

Reconstruction South too.15

Quite why the nationwide character of white supremacy has been overlooked is open to several interpretations. In part,

13 James L. Roark, Masters without Slaves: Southern Planters in the Civil War and

Reconstruction (New York, 1982). 14 'Jim Crow' refers to a minstrelsy figure, but was one term used to denote the

system of white supremacy in the South. 15

See Jane Dailey, Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia

(Chapel Hill, 2000); Steven Hahn, A Nation under our Feet: Black Political Struggles in

the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, Mass., 2003);

J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and

the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910 (New Haven, 1974); Richard M. Valelly, The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement

(Chicago, 2004). Such moments of African American political power continued in the

early twentieth century too. See, for example, Stephen G. N. Tuck, Beyond Atlanta:

The Struggle for Civil Rights in Georgia, 1940-1980 (Athens, Ga., 2003), 49-50, 64.




it is simply because little has been written on race relations beyond the South or in the national state during this period.16 Scholars

who have looked beyond the South mostly seek to explain the

national acceptance of the Southern retreat from Reconstruc

tion,17 or focus on the abolitionist period,18 the origins of

ghetto formation,19 the migration experience,20 the careers of

African American leaders21 or the responses of elite African

Americans to deteriorating race relations and migration.22 While there have been some pioneering case studies, there has

been no systematic study of the lived experience of African Amer

icans beyond the South that is comparable with the work on the

16 For some notable exceptions, see Leslie H. Fishel Jr, 'The North and the Negro,

1865-1900: A Study in Race Discrimination' (Harvard Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1954);

Logan, Negro in American Life and Thought; Emma Lou Thornbrough, The Negro in Indiana (Indianapolis, 1957); J. Morgan Kousser, Dead End: The Development of

Nineteenth-Century Litigation on Racial Discrimination in Schools (Oxford, 1986); Mark R. Schneider, Boston Confronts Jim Crow, 1890-1920 (Boston, 1997); Joe William Trotter Jr, Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915

45 (Urbana, 1985); Stephen Kantrowitz, 'Radical Reconstruction in the Deep North', paper delivered at Oxford Univ., Feb. 2005; Davison M. Douglas, Jim Crow Moves

North: The Battle over Northern School Desegregation, 1865-1954 (Cambridge, 2005), 123-66.

17 To a significant degree Logan's pioneering work falls into this category. 18 Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860

(Chicago, 1961); Patrick Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum

North (Chapel Hill, 2001). 19 David A. Gerber, Black Ohio and the Color Line, 1860-1915 (Urbana, 1976);

David M. Katzman, Before the Ghetto: Black Detroit in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana, 1973); Kenneth L. Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870 1930 (Urbana, 1976); Kenneth W. Goings and Raymond A. Mohl, 'Toward a New

African American Urban History', Jl Urban Hist., xxi (1995). 20 Joe William Trotter Jr (ed.), The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New

Dimensions of Race, Class, and Gender (Bloomington, 1991); Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (New York,

1991); William J. Collins, 'When the Tide Turned: Immigration and the Delay ofthe Great Black Migration', Jl Econ. Hist., lvii (1997). 21

David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919

(New York, 1993); Patricia A. Schechter, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 1880-1930 (Chapel Hill, 2001); Wilson JeremiahMoses,AlexanderCrummell:AStudy of Civilization and Discontent (New York, 1997); Stephen F. Fox, The Guardian of

Boston: William Monroe Trotter (New York, 1970). 22 On the response to migration, see Victoria W. Wolcott, Remaking Respectability:

African American Women in Interwar Detroit (Chapel Hill, 2001); Kevin K. Gaines,

Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, 1996); Elizabeth Dale,' "Social Equality Does Not Exist among Themselves, nor

among Us": Baylies v. Curry and Civil Rights in Chicago, 1888', Amer. Hist. Rev., cii

(1997). On the black intellectual response, see Mia Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830-1925 (New York, 2000).




South itself.23 Systematic studies of lynching, disfranchisement,

segregation and economic repression invariably focus on the

South alone, or mention areas beyond the South only in pass

ing.24 Considering the interest in white supremacy in the turn

of-the-century South,25 and in race relations in the North and

West and in the national state in other periods,26 this lacuna in the

literature is surprising. We aim therefore to de-centre the South by exploring the

system of white supremacy both locally in the North and West

and in the national state.27 Our approach rests on four proposi

23 The various studies cited above have not been brought together systematically in a

way that compares with Woodward, Strange Career of Jim Crow, or more recently Hahn, Nation under our Feet.

24 See, for example, W Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and

Virginia, 1880-1930 (Urbana, 1993); Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck, A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930 (Urbana, 1995); Alexander

Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York, 1991), 105-16; Kousser, Shaping of Southern Politics; Michael Perman, Struggle

for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888-1908 (Chapel Hill, 2001); Howard N.

Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (Athens, Ga., 1994); Gavin

Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War

(Baton Rouge, 1994); Jay R. Mandle, The Roots of Black Poverty: The Southern

Plantation Economy after the Civil War (Durham, NC, 1979). 25 Stephen Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy

(Chapel Hill, 2000); Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and

the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (Chapel Hill, 1996);

Hahn, Nation under our Feet; Tera W Hunter, To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black

Women's Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass., 1997); Joel

Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South since

Emancipation (New York, 1984). 26

Litwack, North of Slavery; James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, In Hope

of Liberty: Culture, Community and Protest among Northern Free Blacks, 1700-1860

(New York, 1997); Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest; Eric Foner, Reconstruction:

America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York, 1988), 307-15,461-8; EnaL.

Farley, The Underside of Reconstruction New York: The Struggle over the Issue of Black

Equality (New York, 1993); Kimberley L. Phillips, AlabamaNorth: African-American

Migrants, Community, and Working-Class Activism in Cleveland, 1915-45 (Urbana,

1999); Charles Payne, 'The Whole United States is Southern: Brown v. Board and

the Mystification of Race', Jl Amer. Hist., xci (2004); Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, 1996); Martha

Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in New York City

(Cambridge, Mass., 2003); Jeanne F. Theoharis and Komozi Woodard (eds.), Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles outside the South, 1940-1980 (New York,

2003); Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York, 2005).

27 For this interpretative task, we draw on primary materials, especially with regard

to lynching, urban violence and the federal bureaucracy; and on the findings of the

scholarly literature which relates to race and American political development in this

period.




tions, explicated in the course of the article's argument. First, in terms of the development of white supremacy, there was

nothing magical about crossing the Mason-Dixon Line, that is, the nominal division between the South and the North. Second, black Americans in the North and South tried to resist the down

turn in their status after Reconstruction, but faced with the

nationwide character of white supremacy, they were unable to

preserve their status. Third, the entrenchment of white suprem

acy beyond the South (as in the South itself) was never an inev

itable process but was contingent on the decisions and actions of

local and national leaders. Last, the nationwide triumph of white

supremacy beyond the South between the 1880s and 191 Os con

figured race relations throughout the nation and in the national

state well into the twentieth century.

I

IN THE STATES

In a series of articles on 'The Black North' for the New York Times

published in late 1901, the African American scholar and civil

rights advocate W. E. B. Du Bois concluded that 'the Negro prob lem is not the sole property ofthe South'.28 Du Bois was correct

that all regions owned the 'Negro problem'. Considering the severe downturn in Southern race relations at the end ofthe nine

teenth century, and the high level of migration within the South, it

is notable quite how few black Southerners moved to other parts ofthe United States in this period.29 The great migration did not

begin until the First World War era, almost a generation after the

Southern rise of white supremacy. The lack of job opportunities in the North for black migrants provides one key to understand

ing this delayed migration, and is telling in itself. But there were a

variety of disincentives to migrate. As in the South, African

Americans in the North and West were deliberately and decisively

marginalized at the polls, were routinely barred from much ofthe

labour market, suffered mob violence and were often segregated.

28 Du Bois, 'Black North', New York Times Mag., 17 Nov. 1901.

29 This was not because African Americans were unable to move when better oppor

tunities seemed on offer. Movement between plantations was a feature of Southern life in this period. See also Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after

Reconstruction (New York, 1992).




White supremacy in the late nineteenth-century North and West built on a long tradition. Although the Northern states were free from slavery in the antebellum era, this did not mean that they were free from racial oppression.30 For example,

Edward Turner, a historian at the University of Michigan, in his

prize-winning The Negro in Pennsylvania (1911), concluded that 'the history of the relations between the negro and the white man in Pennsylvania is largely the history of increasing race preju

dice'.31 Emancipation merely served to heighten white suprema cist attitudes, and 'occasionally some horrible act of cruelty was

committed, as it would appear, merely for the sake of the sport'.32 White Pennsylvanians petitioned the state legislature to prevent

migration of former slaves into the state. Turner's choice of topic was enlightened, but his conclusion was telling. Reflecting the

prejudices of his era, Turner blamed racial tensions on the vic tims: both those who were successful, for their economic threat, and those who were poor, for their susceptibility to vice.33

In American collective memory the Civil War was fought over

the issue of slavery, but again this should not be mistaken for racial

egalitarianism in the Free States.34 By 1865, at the end of the Civil

War, only five states allowed black men to vote on the same basis as white men.35 Racially motivated mob violence occurred in

most Northern states in the early years of the war, while many black soldiers and former slaves were appalled at the racism of white Union soldiers. In Philadelphia, former slave and Civil War hero Robert Smalls, fresh from stealing a Confederate ship, was

ejected from a streetcar and forced to walk to the navy yard. Out

West, the four thousand black Californians were barred from

voting, jury service, testifying in court, homesteading or marrying across the colour line.36

30 See Litwack, North of Slavery. 31 Edward Raymond Turner, The Negro in Pennsylvania: Slavery

? Servitude ?

Freedom, 1639-1861 (Washington DC, 1911), 143. 32

Ibid., p. vii. 33

Ibid., 145, 153, 158. 34

See, for example, Gerber, Black Ohio and the Color Line, 4, 27-8, 32; James M.

McPherson, The Negro's Civil War: How American Negroes Felt and Acted During the

War for the Union (New York, 1965), 246-7; Foner, Reconstruction, 27. 35

Leslie H. Fishel Jr, 'Northern Prejudice and Negro Suffrage, 1865-1870', Jl

Negro Hist., xxxix (1954), 12-15. 36

Malcolm Edwards, 'The War of Complexional Distinction: Blacks in Gold Rush

California and British Columbia', California Hist. Quart., lvi (1977), 36; Quintard

(cont. on p. 221)




Even at the height of Reconstruction, as radical Republicans legislated on behalf of the Southern freedman, there was only a

tentative commitment to civil rights within the loyal states.

African Americans in most parts of the North and West were as

dependent on Reconstruction legislation as were their Southern

counterparts. Nowhere was this clearer than with regard to the

suffrage in the period between the Civil War and passage of

the Fifteenth Amendment (1870). Despite petitions by African

Americans, in all but two states in the North and West the issue of

black suffrage was variously ignored, postponed or rejected

by state legislatures or in state referendums.37 Indeed, African

Americans voted in the South before they voted in most

Northern states. Similarly, African Americans in the loyal states

variously found themselves denied civil rights and excluded from

employment.38 Four of the six civil rights petitions sent to

Congress before the 1875 Civil Rights Act came from black

groups in Northern states that had passed state civil rights laws.39 Out West, the Choctaw and Chicksaw Indians enacted

Black Codes and embarked on a period of terror to drive out

black freedmen.40

Voting

African Americans outside the South, then, did not enter

the post-Reconstruction era in a position of strength. After

Reconstruction, despite vigorous organizing and protest, their status deteriorated. Formal disfranchisement may have been a

Southern affair, but African Americans across all regions became impotent in electoral politics. Thomas Fortune com

plained at the end of 1885 that 'not one black man in New York State enjoys the respect or confidence of the Republican politi cians ... the same is true of Boston, Providence, Philadelphia and

(n. 36 com.)

Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528 1990 (New York, 1998), 82.

37Fishel, 'Northern Prejudice and Negro Suffrage', 19. Although Republicans dominated the Western states, petitions by blacks for the suffrage in these states

were all ignored: Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier, 123.

38Foner, Reconstruction, 471-2.

39Fishel, 'North and the Negro', 474. See also Farley, Underside of Reconstruction New York, 13-4; Herbert Aptheker (ed.), A Documentary History of the Negro People in

the United States, ii (New York, 1966), 624. 40

Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier, 116.




other Northern cities'.41 He could have added Chicago, where

that very summer the governor received a delegation of white voters but refused to see an African American delegation.42 But

New York may well have been the worst. Almost half a century

passed between the Fifteenth Amendment and the election of the

city's first black officeholder.43 Some of the weakness of black politics outside the South arose

because the black population was invariably too small to make an

impact. Before the great migration, only 10 per cent of the

nation's black population lived outside the old confederacy. The low overall numbers, though, do not tell the whole story.44 Concentrated in the cities, by 1910 African Americans were over

5 per cent of the population in Philadelphia, almost 10 per cent in

Indianapolis, over 15 per cent in Baltimore and over 25 per cent in

Washington. Rather, the black vote was systematically margin alized across the Northern states. As in the South, the margin alization of the black vote followed a series of steps, including

violence, gerrymandering and diminishing influence within

either party.45 By contrast with most of the South, this process did not culminate in constitutional disfranchisement. The lower

numbers of African American voters outside the South meant

that such measures were not necessary (in some Southern

states, black voters were actually the majority). But by the same

token, the fact that relatively small black voting populations were

deliberately targeted is telling. The Republican attitude to black voters ranged from indiffer

ence to outright opposition. In Pittsburgh* Boston and elsewhere,

Republican Party leaders rejected out of hand candidates nomi

nated by African Americans.46 In 1895 black newspapers in New

York angrily headlined the news that one black man had even

been excluded from a Republican district club where blacks

41 Fishel, 'North and the Negro', 470.

42 Ibid., 472; and see Thomas A. Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color,

and Power in Chicago, 1890-1945 (New York, 2003). 43

Edwin R. Lewinson, Black Politics in New York City (New York, 1976), 34. 44

By 1900, over 70 per cent of black Northerners lived in cities, representing 2.5 per cent ofthe North's urban dwellers overall: Howard N. Rabinowitz, Race, Ethnicity, and

Urbanization: Selected Essays (Columbia, Mo., 1994), 220. 45

For a clear description of this step-by-step process in the South, see Kousser,

Shaping of Southern Politics. 4*

Fishel, 'North and the Negro', 472.




formed one-fifth ofthe district.47 Towns near the Mason-Dixon Line endured electoral violence and disfranchisement.48 From

1878 Congress appointed commissioners to govern the city of

Washington. The deal was ostensibly about finance, whereby the federal government would pay half of the city's expenses, but it also deftly removed the threat of black voters.49 Even in those cities renowned for good race relations, the minimal

strength of the black vote was often deliberately whittled down further. Black voters in Boston were unusually well represented politically before 1897, often holding at least one seat on the City Council. At the end ofthe century, however, the Council redrew

voting districts to the disadvantage of black voters.50 The lack of political influence was reflected in a concomitant

lack of patronage even in Republican states and cities. To be sure, a handful of black appointments were lucrative and influential, and of course almost any job was worth having. But on the

whole, patronage jobs were very much the proverbial crumbs left over from the white man's table. Often they amounted to

little more than a few janitors or doormen. In 1894 the new

Republican council in Seattle appointed only one black man, as a dog-catcher

? and his salary was cut in half.51 In Wilmington, Delaware, where black voters helped Republicans regain power in the 1890s, party bosses even refused to appoint black janitors, claiming that black appointees became 'stuck up'.52

African Americans did not withdraw from politics. In Seattle, for example, almost half of the city's black residents were mem

bers of a political club in the 1890s. And just occasionally, black

47 Lewinson, Black Politics in New York City, 35.

48 See, for example, Carol E. Hoffecker, 'The Politics of Exclusion: Blacks in Late

Nineteenth-Century Wilmington, Delaware', Delaware Hist., xvi (1974-5), 60-72; George Wright, Life behind a Veil: Blacks in Louisville, Kentucky, 1865-1930 (Baton Rouge, 1985). 49

Lois Horton, 'The Days of Jubilee: Black Migration During the Civil War and

Reconstruction', in Francine Curro Cary (ed.), Urban Odyssey: A Multicultural History of Washington, D.C. (Washington DC, 1996), 75.

50 Kantrowitz, 'Radical Reconstruction in the Deep North'; Schneider, Boston

Confronts Jim Crow, 1. Indianapolis switched to an at-large system in 1909, and no black candidates were elected until 1932; 1890 marked the high point of black political influence in Philadelphia. Emma Lou Thornbrough, Indiana Blacks in the Twentieth

Century (Bloomington, 2000), 28; Roger Lane, Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, 1860-1900 (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 76.

51 Quintard Taylor, The Forging of a Black Community: Seattle's Central District from

1870 through the Civil Rights Era (Seattle, 1994), 42. 52

Hoffecker, 'Politics of Exclusion', 68.




voters were able to make an impact. In the black majority town of

Brooklyn, Illinois, black voters gained control of local govern ment in 1886.53 In Boston in the 1870s and 1880s, Ohio in the

1880s and Detroit in the 1890s, black voters exploited close elec

tions to gain electoral victories and Republican patronage.54 In

1882 black residents in the black eighth ward in Harrisburg,

Pennsylvania, even swung behind the Democrats after the

Republican mayor refused to appoint a black policeman.

Thereafter, they began to hold public offices, including the post of alderman.55 In general, though, the Democrats were an unpal atable alternative.

Overall, the brief moments of black electoral influence, usually

during or soon after Reconstruction, were very much the excep tions that proved the rule. They were far less consequential than some of the political breakthroughs made by African Americans

in the South.56 Meanwhile black women were marginalized in the

suffrage campaign across the nation.57

Jobs

The marginalization of African Americans in politics was

reflected in and reinforced by discrimination in other aspects of

society. Their economic position was especially dire. Chicago's livestock market was the largest in the world, employing some

20,000 workers. In 1890 only one worker was an African

American.58 Most urban black workers, male and female, worked as basic labourers or as personal or domestic servants.

53 Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, America's First Black Town: Brooklyn, Illinois, 1830-1915

(Urbana, 2000), 118-23. 54

Kantrowitz, 'Radical Reconstruction in the Deep North'; Percy Murray, 'Harry C. Smith-Joseph B. Foraker Alliance: Coalition Politics in Ohio', Jl Negro Hist., lxviii

(1983), 172; Gerber, Black Ohio and the Color Line, 231-6; Katzman, Before the Ghetto, 193-200.

55 Gerald G. Eggert,' "Two Steps Forward, a Step-and-a-Half Back": Harrisburg's

African American Community in the Nineteenth Century', in Joe William Trotter Jr and Eric Ledell Smith (eds.), African Americans in Pennsylvania: Shifting Historical

Perspectives (University Park, 1997), 244. 5

See, for example, Dailey, Before Jim Crow; Lawrence C. Goodwyn, 'Populist Dreams and Negro Rights: East Texas as a Case Study', Amer. Hist. Rev., lxxvi

(1971), 1437^19. 57

Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850

1920 (Bloomington, 1998), 120. 58

Christopher Robert Reed, All the World Is Here! The Black Presence at White City

(Bloomington, 2000), 14. See also Thornbrough, Negro in Indiana, 349; Cha-Jua, America's First Black Town, 154.




In Chicago and Detroit, some two-thirds of black men and over

80 per cent of black women had such occupations. These propor tions of unskilled workers were on a par with those in the South.

Out West, where most African Americans were recent migrants, the proportions were even higher.59

The racial face ofthe market was not just the result of starting on the margins after Reconstruction. Rather, it reflected a strug

gle for control similar to the struggle over labour in the South.60 To quote Du Bois's survey of Northern race relations again, 'the

candid observer easily sees that the negro's economic position in New York has not been determined simply by efficiency in open

competition, but that race prejudice has played a large and

decisive part'.61 In Illinois, at least fifty towns had unwritten

ordinances prohibiting black workers from crossing city limits.62 African Americans in the North and West often com

plained about economic discrimination more than anything else.63 In 1899 the Indiana Afro-American Conference observed

that 'The greatest enemy ofthe Negro is the trade unionism ofthe

North'.64 Most labour unions were formally lily-white. In

California, union pressure forced the expulsion of black employ ees from the food industry during the 1890s.65 Even in Boston

white craftsmen took steps to bar blacks from training as their

equals.66 The exploitation of racial divisions in the workforce by Northern employers paralleled the tactics of Southern elites in

response to the threat of a biracial populist movement.67

59 Joe William Trotter Jr, The African American Experience (Boston, 2001), 311.

60 For the struggle over labour in the South, see Hahn, Nation under our Feet; Eric

Arnesen, Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class, and Politics, 1863-1923

(New York, 1991). 61 Du Bois, 'Black North', New York Times Mag., 17 Nov. 1901.

62 Ronald L. Lewis, Black Coal Miners in America: Race, Class, and Community

Conflict, 1780-1980 (Lexington, 1987), 84. 63

See Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 44. See also R. J. M. Blackett, Beating against the Barriers: Biographical Essays in Nineteenth-Century Afro-American History (Baton Rouge, 1986), 341; Taylor, Forging of a Black Community, 14-15.

64 Thornbrough, Negro in Indiana, 356.

65 Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier, 199.

66 Joe William Trotter Jr, 'Blacks in the Urban North: The "Underclass Question"

in Historical Perspective', in Michael B. Katz (ed.), The 'Underclass' Debate: Views from History (Princeton, 1993), 60. See also Lane, Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, 5.

67 See Brian Kelly, 'Sentinels for New South Industry: Booker T. Washington,

Industrial Accommodation and Black Workers in the Jim Crow South', Labor Hist., xliv(2003).




Not surprisingly, therefore, the pattern of resistance to eco nomic discrimination was similar to that in the South. Black workers used strikes and go-slows. The black unemployed some

times turned to strike-breaking, and by the early twentieth cen

tury flocked to African American agencies such as the National Urban League.68 Denied access to jobs in the North and West, black workers were left with little option but to stay in the South. The great migration out of the South would not begin until the First World War, when white employers were forced to seek black

workers.69

Violence

Marginalized in politics and the market, African Americans

beyond the South were also vulnerable to racially motivated vio lence. As the great anti-lynching campaigner Ida B. Wells com

plained, 'lynching mania has spread throughout the North and

middle West'.70 On the face of it, lynching was overwhelmingly a

Southern problem. According to statistics compiled by the

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), some 2,409 of the 2,522 black Americans lynched in America during the years 1889-1918 were Southerners (see

Map 1), with relatively few black Americans lynched in the Northern and Western states.71 But a closer look at the data

shows Wells to be more accurate than she may have realized.

68 On strike-breaking, see Robert A. Campbell, 'Blacks and the Coal Mines of

Western Washington, 1888-96', in Monroe Lee Billington and Roger D. Hardaway (eds.), African Americans on the Western Frontier (Niwot, 1998), 101. On the South, see

Brian Kelly, Race, Class, and Power in the Alabama Coalfields, 1908-1921 (Urbana,

2001); Daniel Letwin, The Challenge of Interracial Unionism: Alabama Coal Miners, 1878-1921 (Chapel Hill, 1998). On the National Urban League, see Nancy J.

Weiss, The National Urban League, 1910-1940 (New York, 1974); Arvarh E.

Strickland, History ofthe Chicago Urban League (Columbia, Mo., 2001). 69 The First World War slowed the immigration of white European workers, while

many native white workers were involved in the war effort. 70

Ida B. Wells-Barnett, On Lynchings: Southern Horrors, A Red Record, Mob Rule in

New Orleans (repr. New York, 1969); Ida B. Wells-Barnett, 'Lynch Law in America',

Arena, xxiii (1900). See also S. Laing Williams, 'Frederick Douglass at Springfield,

Mo.', African Methodist Episcopal Church Rev., xxiii (1906), 9: 'How accurately did

[Frederick Douglass] prophecy that in a few years lynching in the Northern States

would be almost as possible as in Arkansas or Mississippi. How that baleful prophecy has been fulfilled, we can all bear sorrowful testimony'. 71

These years were the height ofthe lynching epidemic in the South. The data on

lynching is drawn from the NAACP's records, later published in NAACP, Thirty Years

of Lynching in the United States, 1889-1918 (New York, 1919). The data on populations is taken from United States Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United

(cont. on p. 227)




Relative to the size of the black population in each state,72 the

probability of an African American being lynched was not uni

formly higher in the Southern states than in the rest of

America. As can be seen in Map 2, there is a slight decrease in

the probability of lynching towards the north and north-east, but the pattern is far from the expected picture of a concentration

mainly in the South (and in the Deep South in particular). In fact, this state-level analysis reveals that black Americans were most

likely to be lynched in any given year in the Western states of

Wyoming (ranked first) and New Mexico and Oregon (ranked second equal). Moreover, the Northern states of Nebraska

(ranked 14), Missouri (15) and Iowa (17) all come out signifi cantly ahead of a number of Southern states, including South

Carolina (20), Virginia (25) and North Carolina (27). A number of states in the far North and the West witnessed no

lynchings, but in most cases they had tiny black populations (often too small even to be listed in the census). Only four states with a black population of over 5,000 did not witness a

lynching of a black American, and these were confined to the extreme north-east. In these states, this was most likely due to

the lack of lynchings of victims of any colour rather than lack of racist sentiment.73 Indeed, a comparison of the likelihood of

white and black people being lynched in any given year (by com

paring the ratio of white and black lynchings to the size of the white and black populations respectively) reveals that black

people were some ten times more likely to be lynched than white people across the Western and Southern states, but they were more than forty times as likely to be lynched as white people in Northern states.

Moving from the state to the regional level, the South becomes less exceptional still. The probability of an African American

being lynched in the South as a whole in any given year in this

period was triple that of the North, but only one and a half times

(n. 71 cont.) States: Colonial Times to 1970, i (Washington DC, 1975). The relevant tables are Series A 23, 'Annual Estimates ofthe Population by Sex and Race, 1900 to 1970', 9; Series A

172-94, 'Population of Regions, by Sex, Race, Residence, Age, and Nativity', 22-37. 72

Population totals were taken from the 1900 census because it is approximately the mid point of the period (also, the number of African Americans in each state is rea

sonably stable across the 1890, 1900 and 1910 censuses). 73 According to NAACP statistics, 702 white people were lynched in this period,

the majority in the South.



\A "

IIa?^^^Hb8Kp^ aJaSB^H

1 I States with no lynchings during this period ^^^^^^^^^^BP^ ^ H^L

UTTT] 61-90 >150

MAPI NUMBER OF LYNCHINGS OF AFRICAN AMERICANS 1889-1918



The probabilities of being lynched in each state in any given year were calculated \! :!: yf ^^i?? by dividing the number of lynchings in each state (1889-1918) by the state black

n^j | rf r

population and number of years (30). States with no lynchings are left blank. Of ^AJ.

these, only Mass, and NJ had a black population of 30,000 or more in the 1900 census. (In most cases the population was less than 3,000.) See also n. 72.

MAP2 AVERAGE ANNUAL PROBABILITY OF LYNCHING FOR AFRICAN AMERICANS BY STATE 1889-1918




that of the North Central region and less than that of the West

(see Map 3).74 This regional map confirms the picture that there was no simple North-South divide for the lynching of black

Americans. If anything, the divide is West-East. Moreover, cal

culating the likelihood of lynching relative to the rural black popu lation rather than the total black population?to allow for the fact

that most lynchings occurred in the countryside ? underscores

this West-East picture (see Map 4). According to our analysis, black Americans were equally likely to be lynched in the rural

North and South in any given year, with the rate in the rural

North Central region slightly exceeding that of the rural South, and with the rate in the rural West double that of the rural South.

As in the South, some of these lynchings were spectacle lynch

ings. In 1899 Georgia's governor cited the example of Indiana

when condoning Georgia's own lynching record. Shamed into

action, Indiana's state legislature passed a law so that any sheriff

who surrendered a prisoner would be removed from office. It had

little effect. The following year, four more black men were killed

in front of crowds of thousands. In the final case, the local sheriff

stood in the crowd to watch the victim burn.75

Lynching was only one expression of anti-black violence. By contrast with the South, most black Americans in the North lived

in urban areas. In cities North and South, racial violence was far

more likely to take the form of gang attacks or race riot. In many

ways, riots were simply mass lynchings in an urban setting

(although fatalities from race riots were not included in lynching

statistics) ,76 As with spectacle lynchings, riots were often directed

at recent migrants for allegedly attacking an authority figure or

74 The four regions?North East, North Central, South, and West?are those used

in the census. A regional map has the advantage of avoiding the rather patchy appear ance ofthe state map, where a difference of a single lynching in states with tiny black

populations can cause the probability of lynching to fluctuate from zero to high prob

ability. The authors would like to thank Paul Chaisty, Daniel Goodman and Raphael Hauser for their help in preparing the maps.

75 Thornbrough, Negro in Indiana, 280-1. For comparison, see Gerber, Black Ohio

and the Color Line, 252; Clare V. McKanna Jr, Homicide, Race, and Justice in the

American West, 1880-1920 (Tucson, 1997), 70-1. 76

In his landmark study An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern

Democracy (New York, 1944) the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal reckoned that

a 'riot' would be better described as a 'massacre ... a magnified, or mass, lynching'

(p. 566).




molesting a white woman.77 In cities across the nation, when

gangs went 'hunting the nigs', they invaded black neighbour hoods.78 The riot in New York in 1900 was only one of any number of incidents, setting a chilling pattern for twentieth

century urban race relations.79 As in the South, African

Americans met violence with numerous appeals for protection, or with violence in return. During the New York riot, a Times

reporter was taken aback at the sight of Vincent Streets, a black

painter, emptying his pockets after being arrested: 'He was a

walking arsenal. First came from his pockets a huge loaded

revolver, then a razor, after that a dirk knife, and finally a dozen

cartridges'.80

As in the South, it was black men who were disproportionately tried, and convicted, of interracial murder.81 And as in the South,

mobs were ignored, and often supported, by local law enforce ment officials. In many Northern cities, policemen were drawn

from the very immigrant groups competing with black migrants for jobs and housing. During the New York riot, for example, the

Times reported that 'The policemen, according to their own

statements, are feeling vindictive against the colored people

generally'.82 'One neatly dressed woman', threatened by the

crowd, appealed to a policeman for help. ' "Go to h?1, d?n

you" said the policeman, turning away from her'.83

Segregation

In this setting, it is unsurprising that segregation and exclusion characterized Northern society, just as Jim Crow swept across the

South. Yet on the face of it, civil rights laws in the North and West seemed to provide a bulwark against discrimination. Between 1884 and 1905, some seventeen Northern and Western states

adopted civil rights laws, and many introduced laws requiring

77 On Southern lynchings, see Brundage, Lynching in the New South; Tolnay and

Beck, Festival of Violence. 78

Lawrence B. De Graaf, 'The City of Black Angels: Emergence ofthe Los Angeles Ghetto, 1890-1930', Pacific Hist. Rev., xxxix (1970), 336.

79 Major riots occurred in Akron, Ohio (1900), Springfield, 111. (1908), Coatesville,

Pa. (1911), East St Louis (1917), Chicago and Washington DC (1919). 80 New York Times, 17 Aug. 1900.

81 McKanna, Homicide, Race, and Justice, 54; Lane, Roots of Violence in Black

Philadelphia, 142-3. 82

New York Times, 17 Aug. 1900. 83

Ibid., 16 Aug. 1900.



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The probabilities of being lynched in each region in any given year were calculated Û^

by dividing the number of lynchings of black Americans in each region (1889-1918) by the regional black population and number of years (30). See also n. 72.

MAP 3 AVERAGE ANNUAL PROBABILITY OF LYNCHING FOR AFRICAN AMERICANS BY REGION 1889-1918



ICUd 10x10-6^P<15x10~6 î:ii:i:::::::::::::::!::::J::ii::::i

E22 20x10-^ P< 25 x10~6 î^li'^^^Xi::::::::::::::r^^^^^1^^^^^^ |j.^Kj\

The probabilities of being lynched in each region in any given year were calculated Û^

by dividing the number of lynchings in each region (1889-1918) by the regional rural black population and number of years (30). See also n. 72.

MAP 4 AVERAGE ANNUAL PROBABILITY OF LYNCHING FOR RURAL AFRICAN AMERICANS BY REGION 1889-1918




integrated schools or equal provision for black education.

Frequently, such laws were proposed by black legislators, or lob bied for by black voters.84

State laws failed in practice to empower African Americans as

much as they promised on paper. Indeed, even on paper they were

sometimes limited. In Ohio, the Equal Rights League opposed the state's first civil rights law for failing to include equal protec tion in restaurants and barber's shops or on juries. Plaintiffs were

liable for all costs, and there were no set minimum fines.85 Across the North and West, municipal authorities found state laws easy to circumvent. In 1882 in Louisville, Kentucky, the education board ignored a federal decision to equalize facilities. Only black teachers had morality clauses written into their contracts.86 School segregation was the law in Arizona from statehood, but in small schools 'a screen around the desk of a Negro child' was

considered sufficient.87

Still, having the law on the statute books did allow some lever

age for protest. Indeed, in the racial atmosphere of the late nine teenth century, courts were often the most productive terrain of battle for African Americans. Considering the costs and potential obstacles, it is striking that more suits were brought in the late nineteenth century than during the antebellum and Reconstruc tion eras. Often, it was elite African Americans who lodged inte

gration suits, appealing to their higher class status ? rather than to universal human rights

? as justification for integration.88 Education was the most common battleground, both through law suits and boycotts, and the most successful battleground too.89 Aside from education, though, black Americans were un

able to exert much influence through the law.

84 Thornbrough, Negro in Indiana, 259; Dale,' "Social Equality Does Not Exist"',

316,324; Gerber, Black Ohio and the Color Line, 242-3. See also Kousser, Dead End, 9. 85

Gerber, Black Ohio and the Color Line, 235-40. 86

Wright, Life behind a Veil, 65-9; Eggert,' "Two Steps Forward, a Step-and-a-Half Back"', 245; Gerber, Black Ohio and the Color Line, 267.

87 Bradford Luckingham, Minorities in Phoenix: A Profile of Mexican American,

Chinese American, and African American Communities, 1860-1992 (Tucson, 1994), 143.

88 Albert S. Broussard, African-American Odyssey: The Stewarts, 1853-1963

(Lawrence, 1998), 52; Dale, * "Social Equality Does Not Exist"'.

89 According to Morgan Kousser, 'Northern white liberals... and their black allies'

won 75 per cent of cases filed during 1880-1900, compared with 60 per cent during the nineteenth century overall: Kousser, Dead End, 1. See also J. Morgan Kousser, 'Before Plessy, before Brown: The Development of the Law of Racial Integration in

(com. on p. 235)




From the 1890s and 1900s most elite African Americans ? in

the North as in the South?recognized that integration was a vain

dream, and instead turned to the issue of 'racial uplift' to try and bolster the rise of the whole race by improving the conditions and

morals of the black poor.90 More generally, it was increasingly clear that judges could interpret the law as they chose. Black campaigners were further hampered by their lack of

voting power and economic resources. Chicago's Commission on Race Relations found that the average civil suit payment was

less than the cost of bringing the case. In many states, few cases

were brought at all.91 Northern cities were not segregated resi

dentially as they would be with the rise of ghettos after the great

migration. But it was the lack of a developed urban transport system, not a lack of prejudice, which explains residential QO integration.

By the end of the century, state civil rights laws had little rele vance to discriminatory race relations on the ground, even in the case of education.93 A group of New England black men met in

September 1886 'because the colored citizen is discriminated

against in so many depressing and injurious manners not with

standing the letter of the law does not favor the same'.94 There was no single pattern of race relations outside the South,95 but the situation deteriorated even in cities with a reputation for better race relations.96 On 16 August 1900 another group of New

England black men met in Boston. The previous day's riot in New York confirmed their fears. 'This condition exists in the South and is gradually working North. Murders of colored men

(n. 89 com.) Louisiana and Kansas', in Paul Finkelman and Stephen E. Gottlieb (eds.), Towards a Usable Past: Liberty understate Constitutions (Athens, Ga., 1991), 237.

90 For an excellent discussion of this transition, see Jacqueline M. Moore, Leading

the Race: The Transformation of the Black Elite in the Nation's Capital, 1880-1920

(Charlottesville, 1999); Kevin Gaines, 'Rethinking Race and Class in African American Struggles for Equality, 1885-1941', Amer. Hist. Rev., cii (1997), 383.

91 Dale, '"Social Equality Does Not Exist"', 336-7; Thornbrough, Negro in

Indiana, 259.

92Kusmer, Ghetto Takes Shape, 36. 93

Douglas, Jim Crow Moves North, 123-66.

94Fishel, 'North and the Negro', 482. 95

Most individual cities had an internally incoherent variety of segregation prac tices. See, for example, Randall B. Woods, 'Integration, Exclusion, or Segregation?

The "Color Line" in Kansas, 1878-1900', in Billington and Hardaway (eds.), African Americans on the Western Frontier, 134; Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier, 216.

96 Thornbrough, Negro in Indiana, 265-6; Schneider, Boston Confronts Jim Crow, 1.




in the South to-day, and same in New York to-morrow. That is the order of events lately'.97 What made this local-level deterioration so significant was that it was mirrored in the polity's national

state.98

II

WHITE SUPREMACY IN AND FROM WASHINGTON

Political sociologists have compounded the problem of over

emphasizing the South's distinctiveness by treating the US

polity either as a weak national state incapable of enforcing equal

ity of rights of citizenship throughout its territory,99 or more com

monly as a sectional state in which the North and the South had

considerable autonomy.100 Both characterizations pay insuffi

cient attention to the racial dimensions of government policy from the 1880s which contributed to the spread of segregation across the nation.

In the first place the post-Reconstruction decades were ones

of political dynamism and change in which political parties and

their representatives in national institutions such as Congress and

the presidency took leading roles; and in which administrative

reform enhanced the capacities of the federal bureaucracy to

97 New York Times, 17 Aug. 1900.

98 For the comparatively distinct development of this national state, see Stephen

Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative

Capacities, 1877-1920 (Cambridge, 1982); Daniel P. Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive

Agencies, 1862-1928 (Princeton, 2001). 99

This view arises both from comparisons with the power of the state in other

countries and from consideration of the institutional complexities posed by the US

separation of powers and federalism. For instance, Theda Skocpol refers to 'America's

relatively weak, decentralized, and fragmented state structure': Theda Skocpol,

'Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research', in Peter B.

Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol (eds.), Bringing the State Back In

(New York, 1985), 27. 100

Thus Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens argue that extensive decentraliza

tion permitted local racial arrangements to endure, arrangements which 'allowed the

South to politically exclude blacks totally and install a system of debt peonage which

met their needs for a large supply of cheap labor': Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens and John D. Stephens, Capitalist Development and Democracy

(Oxford, 1992), 129. This analysis overemphasizes the regional character of bureau

cratic racialism: segregationist practices were not simply a Southern phenomenon, as

they imply, but were encountered both in Northern cities and in the federal govern ment's own administrative institutions.




govern nationally.101 Although Congress's bold Reconstruction

experiment in expanding national power had ended by 1873,102 the legacy of an activist national state endured. Federal public policy flourished, driven by populist demands and reform

minded progressives.103 Moreover, it was not simply the case

that Republicans, who were notionally committed to the idea of

equality, proved ineffective in the federal government because of

the ability and determination of Southern politicians to defend their preferences in Congress and the courts.104 White Southern

Democrats had limited influence in federal institutions in this

period. Between 1865 and 1912, Southerners gained only 7 out

of 31 Supreme Court appointments, 2 out of 12 House speaker ships and 14 out of 133 cabinet positions.105

Rather, in the years after Reconstruction, the main branches of

government ? the courts, Congress, the presidency and the bur

eaucracy ?

collectively did more to cement than to mitigate a

national white supremacist order. In response, black Americans

expressed anger at Republican leaders and federal officials. Federal policy reflected choices by national policy-makers about the extent to which federal authority would be used to

uphold the civil rights enshrined during Reconstruction in the

Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Not with out irony, it was through citation of precisely these constitutional sources that civil rights were established nationwide from the

1960s, so their neglect in the post-Reconstruction era warrants

explanation.

The Court

If any national political institution exercised its power decisively to entrench and legitimize a national system of segregated race

101 See, for example, Skowronek, Building a New American State.

102 Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, The Search for American Political

Development (New York, 2004), 133-43. 103

Peter H. Argersinger, 'The Transformation of American Politics: Political Institutions and Public Policy, 1865-1910', in Byron E. Shafer and Anthony J.

Badger (eds.), Contesting Democracy: Substance and Structure in American Political

History, 1775-2000 (Lawrence, 2001); Skowronek, Building a New American State. 104

This would not be the case until the New Deal, when Southern Democrats had a hold on the national Democrat government of Franklin Roosevelt.

105 Steven Hahn, 'Class and State in Postemancipation Societies: Southern Planters

in Comparative Perspective', Amer. Hist. Rev., xcv (1990), 95. On the economic weak ness of Southern elites, see Jay R. Mandle, Not Slave, Not Free: The African American Economic Experience since the Civil War (Durham, NC, 1992), 6.




relations, it was the Supreme Court acting in the momentous

Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 to permit the segregating 'sep arate but equal' policy. As the legal historian Michael Klarman

recently observed, 'without Northern acquiescence, Southern

racial practices could not have become so oppressive'.106 But

Klarman's interpretation is probably too cautious to grasp fully the nationwide effects of the Court's decision on racial order in

the United States.

The Plessy decision rendered segregation constitutionally legit imate across the whole of the United States and not simply the

South. In having this consequence, Plessy was the culmination of

earlier judicial decisions and an expression of an invigorated American nativism and racism.107 Most notable was the

Court's judgment in the Civil Rights Cases of 1883 that invalidated

the 1875 Civil Rights Act forbidding discrimination in public

transportation. Deciding the Civil Rights Cases, the Court took a minimalist view of federal powers. Importantly, one rationale

given for this interpretation was the antebellum practices of racial

discrimination in places of public accommodation in Northern

states.108

Writing the Court's majority opinion in the eight-to-one

judgment, Justice Joseph Bradley not only found no protection

against racial discrimination in public places in the Fourteenth

Amendment but warned African Americans against further

appeals to constitutional protection of equal rights, declaiming, in an infamous phrase, that having assumed the 'rank of mere

citizen' they could no longer be 'a special favorite of the

laws'.109 Emancipation marked a 'stage in the progress' equiva lent to citizenship, a citizenship openly compromised and

106 Michael J. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the

Struggle for Racial Equality (New York, 2004), 12. Curiously, this point undermines

Klarman's own claim that 'it is unlikely that contrary rulings would have significantly alleviated the oppression of blacks' (p. 10).

107 Andrew Gyory, Closing the Gate: Race, Politics and the Chinese Exclusion Act

(Chapel Hill, 1998); Higham, Strangers in the Land; Eric P. Kaufmann, The Rise and

Fall ofAnglo-America (Cambridge, Mass., 2004); Desmond King, Making Americans:

Immigration, Race, and the Origins ofthe Diverse Democracy (Cambridge, Mass., 2000);

Henry Yu, Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America

(New York, 2001). 108 In the words of Justice Joseph Bradley, 'mere discrimination on account of race

or color were not regarded as badges of slavery': Civil Rights Cases 109 US 3,25(1883). 109

Ibid.




tempered by racism and inadequate legal redress against racism.

According to Bradley,

there were thousands of free colored people in this country before the

abolition of slavery . . . yet no one, at that time, thought that it was any invasion of his personal status as a freeman because he was not admitted to

all the privileges enjoyed by white citizens, or because he was subjected to

discriminations.* 1

In his sole dissent, John Marshall Harlan (a former slave-owner

from Kentucky) made no effort to contain his incredulity at

his colleagues' implausible interpretation of the congressional intent of the Reconstruction Amendments: 'it is, I submit,

scarcely just to say that the colored race has been the special favourite of the laws'.111 But Bradley's views were in step with

white public opinion. The influential Nation noted 'the calm with

which the country receives the word that the leading section of

the celebrated Civil Rights Act of 1875 has been pronounced unconstitutional'.x

12

Black leaders, though, were far from calm. Henry McNeal

Turner, an influential campaigner from Georgia, called the

1883 decision 'barbarous', one which should be 'branded,

battle-axed, sawed, cut and carved with the most bitter epithets and blistering denunciations that words can express'. It was 'a

crime more infamous in its character than was ever charged upon the devil'.113 Turner's comments were widely read across the

nation. Riots by black Texans in response to the 1883 decision

had to be put down by the state militia. Black leaders were espe

cially incensed because Republican justices, not least Bradley,

supported segregation as much as Democrats did. After the 1883 decision, the African Methodist Episcopal minister Revd

Robert Seymour resolved that 'the black man has a good cause for divorce from the Republican party on the ground of desertion'.114

The 1883 cases proved to be a decisive expression of judicial

approval for segregated race relations as a de jure institution. It transplanted the Court's limited interpretation ten years

110Ibid. 111

Ibid. 112

Dale,' "Social Equality Does Not Exist"', 323. 113

Bess Beatty, A Revolution Gone Backward: The Black Response to National Politics, 1876-1896 (New York, 1987), 57; John Dittmer, 'The Education of Henry McNeal

Turner', in Leon Litwack and August Meier (eds.), Black Leaders ofthe Nineteenth

Century (Urbana, 1988), 265. 114

Cox Richardson, Death of Reconstruction, 198; Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 28.




earlier, articulated in the Slaughterhouse Cases,115 ofthe federal

government's powers, legislated in the Fourteenth Amendment. The 1883 judgment was much more significant, however, for America's racial order, because unlike the Slaughterhouse Cases

it dealt explicitly with the rights of citizenship of African Americans. There were some exceptions to this constitutional and judicial journey to the Plessy decision ?

notably the 1884 ex parte Yarbrough ruling that the Fifteenth Amendment gave a national right, federally enforceable, to vote ? but their infre

quency confirms that Plessy was the culmination of, rather than an

aberration from, previous judicial rulings. Thus Supreme Court decisions after Reconstruction pre-dated

and spurred on the establishment of segregation and disfran

chisement in the South. At the local and state levels in the

North, segregation did not depend on legal justifications, and de facto segregation endured and dilated. Moreover, laws proscrib

ing segregation were rarely enforced with much effect.116

Congress, the Republican Party and the Lodge Force Bill

Scholars have long recognized that Congress failed to counter the rise of lynching and the imposition of segregation and disfran

chisement in the South. But democracy was not betrayed just because Northern politicians were too weak, too weary or too

worried about other things to interfere. Rather, congressional behaviour was marked by several decades of deliberate action ?

and deliberate inaction ? in response to the rising tide of white

supremacy across the country. Congress pulled back from the

issue of securing racial equality early in Reconstruction, largely

ignored the issue during the 1880s, failed to pass the Lodge Bill

of 1891 that would have increased federal power to secure

African American voting rights, and weakened black voting thereafter.

On the face of it, Republican politicians stood apart from

Democrat racism.117 A Republican-dominated Congress passed the Reconstruction Amendments, and Republican congressmen

115 The Slaughterhouse Cases 16 Wall, [83 US] 36 (1873).

116 For differing accounts of this issue, see Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights,

27; Kousser, Dead End; Douglas, Jim Crow Moves North. 117

Some of the fiercest defenders of white supremacy were Democrats representing Northern states.




did not indulge in the race-baiting that typified Southern

politics at the end of the century. Before disfranchisement, black voters remained the core supporters of the Southern Republi can Party. Republican Congresses acted as a restraining force on the Democrat takeover of the South. Between 1880 and

1901, Republican Congresses seated twenty-six times Southern

Republicans or Populist congressional candidates who had been defeated through fraud.118 Most importantly, the Senate came

within one vote of passing the Lodge Bill.

Yet Republicans were also complicit. The retreat from

Reconstruction occurred on the Republicans' watch. Between

1868 and 1912, the Republican Party controlled the Senate for

forty years and the House for twenty-six. Democrats had full control of Congress for four years only. On votes concerning the rights of black Americans, only Republicans proved willing to step across the aisle.119 The Reconstruction Amendments had been a momentous advancement of black rights, although nar rower than the more radical Republicans had hoped for.120 But after Reconstruction, Congress was unwilling to take responsibil ity for protecting these rights. With hindsight, the Fifteenth

Amendment marked the high point of congressional interven

tion, and arguably Congress retreated from Reconstruction at

greater speed than Southern states, where biracial politics con

tinued until late in the century. In 1870 the Republican New York Times reported that 'a feeling prevails that the work of the

Republican Party . . . ends with the adoption of the Fifteenth

Amendment'.121 This feeling was soon followed by action.

Congressional Republicans decided, crucially, against removing Reconstruction from the oversight of the Court, in the full know

ledge that the Court was likely to circumscribe federal protection for black Southerners.122

From this moment on it was clear that Republican commit ment to rights of citizenship had waned. During the 1880s, the

issue of protecting the suffrage dropped off Republican Party platforms, only to re-emerge briefly in 1890 in a 'perfunctory

118 Kousser, Shaping of Southern Politics, 263.

119 Richard Franklin Bensel, The Political Economy of American Industrialization,

1877-1900 (Cambridge, 2000), 171-2. 120

Keyssar, Right to Vote, 101. 121

Brooks D. Simpson, The Reconstruction Presidents (Lawrence, 1998), 148. 122

Orren and Skowronek, Search for American Political Development, 134, 140-2.




manner'.123 Republican concern to retain Southern black votes was offset by the loss of support from white voters elsewhere who

disapproved of the Republican defence of black voting. Lack of

Republican interest translated into a lack of regulatory interest.

Between 1871 and 1893, only 5.3 per cent of expenditure for

federal election officers was spent on former Confederate

states.124 Although the Department of Justice mounted nearly 5,000 criminal indictments in the South between 1870 and

1894 under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, only a

quarter came after the end of Reconstruction in 1877, and the vast majority of these occurred before 1884.125

Most importantly, Congress failed to respond to Southern dis

franchisement. Because the Lodge Bill failed so narrowly, and

because of the emotive rhetoric in favour of equal rights deployed

by some of the bill's supporters, it is possible to draw a contrast

between Southern Democrats and Northern Republicans. Yet

the failure to pass the bill during the Republican-dominated

Congress of 1889-91 is telling. It would have been in the

Republicans' self-interest. Strategists calculated that thirty seats

out of 123 in the former slave states had been 'stolen' during the

elections of 1888,126 enough, if retained, to have swung that elec

tion decisively to the Republicans. Above all, Republican Speaker Thomas 'Czar' Reed famously forced an end to the minority

party's ability to obstruct House business. During this 51st

Congress, the Republicans passed such wide-ranging measures

as the McKinley Tariff Act, the Dependent Pension Act and the

Land Revision Act, but the Lodge Bill 'was the one element of

their legislative package that Republicans failed to enact'.127

Congress did not even pass the Blair Education Bill which

would have supported African American schooling. After con

gressional repeal of the election laws during 1893-5, the

Republican Party abandoned black voters completely.

123 Bensel, Political Economy of American Industrialization, 171.

124 William Gillette, Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869-1879 (Baton Rouge, 1979),

48-9. 125

Valelly, 'National Parties and Racial Disenfranchisement', 200. See also Richard

Franklin Bensel, Sectionalism and American Political Development, 1880-1980

(Madison, 1984), 84. 126

Schneider, Boston Confronts Jim Crow, 31. 127

Argersinger, 'Transformation of American Polities', 131.




In part this desertion was due to practical political calculations.

Some Republicans reckoned that the promotion ofthe Lodge Bill

had led to the Democrat sweep in Congress in 1893. After the

critical realignment of 1896, when Republicans gained new

voters in the West, they no longer needed to protect their party in the South.128 But this desertion also reflected the increasing

impotence of black voters throughout the nation to stem white

supremacy. After Reconstruction, both parties in the North and

South had made some appeal for the black vote. But with the

disfranchisement and marginalization of black voters across the

nation, black voters had no leverage on either party. Increasingly few black delegates attended the national Republican convention, and George White from North Carolina, the last black congress

man, left Congress in 1901.129 No black person would be elected

to Congress for another thirty years. Black spokesmen were less concerned with the causes than

the effects of their isolation. As one black Charlestonian wrote

to Henry Lodge, 'the failure to pass [your] Election bill has

knocked us completely out in this state'.130 In his farewell

speech, White denounced the unchecked 'race hatred . . . and

prejudicial and unjust public sentiment' that prevented black

Americans from enjoying their rights of 'manhood and woman

hood'.131 Despite their emotional ties to the party of Lincoln, and

the importance of patronage, black leaders condemned the

Republican Party soon after Reconstruction, and well before

Southern disfranchisement. In 1883 T Thomas Fortune reck

oned that the 'Republican party . . . eliminated the black man

from its polities'.132 By the end ofthe century, some black leaders,

including Fortune, had turned away from the Republican Party.

128Valelly, 'National Parties and Racial Disenfranchisement', 194, 212; Paul

Kleppner, Continuity and Change in Electoral Politics, 1893-1928 (New York, 1987), 34-5.

129 Richard Bensel argued that the desertion of Southern black voters by the

Republicans stemmed from their 'unwillingness to disturb the now pacified southern

periphery and thus destroy the stable economic environment for northern investment and commerce': Bensel, Sectionalism and American Political Development, 77.

130 Schneider, Boston Confronts Jim Crow, 32.

131 Congressional Record, 56th Congress, 2nd Session, xxxiv/2 (Washington DC,

1901), 1637-8.

132Beatty, Revolution Gone Backward, 59.




The significance of Republican complicity was not just to

exclude black voters in the South but to permit the diffusion of

segregation in national institutions throughout the United

States.133 The Republican Party enjoyed fourteen consecutive

years of unified government after 1896. Yet Republican Con

gresses did not even seek to end segregation in areas under

congressional jurisdiction, such as the Senate restaurant.134 By choosing not so to act (for example, by not enforcing section two

ofthe Fourteenth Amendment, which reduces the congressional representation for any state which deprives some of its voters of the right to vote on racial grounds), the party fanned Southern

exclusions and gave added legitimacy to mistreatment and racism in the North and West.

The Presidency

Time and again black spokesmen hoped to find an ally in the

White House. The writer and early NAACP leader James Weldon Johnson even wrote one of Theodore Roosevelt's cam

paign theme tunes, 'You're All Right Teddy'.135 After all, every

president save one between 1877 and 1913 represented the party of Lincoln. Yet time and again black spokesmen complained about presidential attitudes and actions. Furious at Benjamin

Harrison's removal of patronage for many black Southerners, one resident of St John's County, Florida, warned in 1890, 'The negro [will] have nothing to do in the future with the

White Louse'.136

A closer look at these complaints across the period reveals that

black spokesmen did not simply blame presidents for failing to

restrain Southern Jim Crow. Rather, they blamed successive

presidents for helping to create the problem of white supremacy

throughout the nation. These complaints were justified. By the

time America joined the First World War, successive presidents had connived in the reversal of Southern Reconstruction, de

liberately sidelined black Republican leaders and virtually with

133Valelly, Two Reconstructions. 134

Richard B. Sherman, The Republican Party and Black America from McKinley to

Hoover, 1896-1933 (Charlottesville, 1973), 165. 135

Roosevelt thought it a 'bully good song': James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson (New York, 1934), 219.

136 Canter Brown Jr, Florida's Black Public Officials, 1867-1924 (Tuscaloosa, 1998),

65.




drawn all patronage from African Americans throughout the 1 37

country.

After Reconstruction, Republican presidents signalled ambiva

lence, at best, about interfering in the South. Indeed, even before

the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, Ulysses Grant

(in office 1869-77) made the widely publicized observation that

'the whole public are tired out with these annual autumnal out

breaks in the South . . . [and] are ready now to condemn any interference on the part of the Government'.138 Though the

first post-Reconstruction presidents had some credentials as

advocates of black citizenship (and Chester Arthur (1881-5) was moved to tears when the black Fisk choir sang at the White

House), it was not reflected in practice. Rutherford Hayes (1877

81) told a biracial audience in Atlanta that 'your rights and inter

ests would be safer if this great mass of intelligent white men were

let alone by the general Government'.139 James Garfield (1881) admitted in private that he 'never could get in love with [the]

creatures', and Arthur effectively abandoned the Southern

black vote.140

In 1885 Grover Cleveland was elected the first Democrat presi dent since the Civil War. But his behaviour was hardly out of step with that of his Republican counterparts of the era. Indeed, he

appointed more Northern black men to minor offices than had his

predecessors, and Republicans even rejected his black nominee to

Recorder of Deeds in Washington DC on partisan grounds.141 The Washington Bee, an African American newspaper, said

Republican leaders had driven a 'political stiletto into the hearts

of thousands of Negroes'.142 At the turn of the century, presidents again made rhetorical

gestures of support for black Americans. Benjamin Harrison

(1889-93) called on Congress to pass the Lodge Bill. Theodore

Roosevelt (1901-9) called for a 'square deal for black and white

alike', famously hosted black leader Booker T Washington for

137 Russell L. Riley, The Presidency and the Politics of Racial Inequality: Nation

Keeping from 1831 to 1965 (New York, 1999), 126. 138

Foner, Reconstruction, 560. 139

Kirt H. Wilson, The Reconstruction Desegregation Debate: The Politics of Equality and the Rhetoric of Place, 1870-1875 (East Lansing, 2002), 189-90.

140 Kenneth O'Reilly, Nixon's Piano: Presidents and Racial Politics from Washington to

Clinton (New York, 1995), 54-7. 141

Thornbrough, Negro in Indiana, 299; Beatty, Revolution Gone Backward, 74-8.

142Beatty, Revolution Gone Backward, 80.




dinner in the White House and sought his advice on patronage appointments thereafter. At his inaugural, William Taft (1909 13) said 'personally, I have not the slightest race prejudice or

feeling'.143 Yet their agendas actively discriminated against black Americans. Harrison supported the promotion of lily white Republicans, and he did not deliver the Lodge Bill, despite Republican majorities in Congress. Roosevelt's relationship with Washington was simply a prominent case of selective prefer ment ? successive presidents advanced the careers and influence of black leaders who fitted their view of what a black man ought to be and do. In any case, Roosevelt decreased the amount of patron age for black men, attributed lynching to the rapist tendencies of black men, published his views that black soldiers were cowardly and pointedly discharged over 160 black soldiers without honour after a shooting incident in Brownsville, Texas.144 Taft virtually ended patronage for African Americans altogether.

The Federal Government

The way in which segregated race relations spread in the federal

bureaucracy differs from the narratives recounted for the other institutions ofthe national state. A key reform, the Pendleton Act of 1883, seemed to express the radical promise of Reconstruction since it established the principle of meritocratic standards for admission to the civil service. It was not until the 1910s that seg regation became firmly rooted. The intervening years could be seen as the unthinking acceptance of Southern practices and values in Washington. But such an account would underestimate how segregation became a standard aspect of the civil service.

Rather, the pattern shows the slower pace of reform in the bur

eaucracy than was possible in other areas ofthe state.145 As in the denial of voting and economic rights to African

Americans in the North, so the dissemination of segregated race relations in the federal government's agencies and depart

ments was not an inevitable process. Rather segregation was a

143 Sherman, Republican Party, 83.

144 On Roosevelt's writings, see Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in

the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 2001), 32-6. 145

Gareth Davies has demonstrated this point in respect to the Great Society's legacy: Gareth Davies, 'The Great Society after Johnson: The Case of Bilingual

Education', Jl Amer. Hist., lxxxviii (2002).




policy initiated in federal government departments by senior

officials encouraged by cabinet members. This segregationist turn is doubly significant: not only did it introduce and perpetuate racial inequalities in the bureaucracy, but it eroded the potential for equal treatment which was a legacy of Reconstruction.

Looking at the debates around the Pendleton Act in comparison with other areas of the national state, one clearly sees that the

original intention was to build a bureaucracy based on equality of opportunity in recruitment.

Indeed, black Americans could realistically identify the federal

civil service as a source of employment through to 1912.146 But

segregated race relations were increasingly observable during the Roosevelt and Taft presidencies, and the trend intensified

from 1913. Woodrow Wilson appointed outspoken segregation ists to cabinet posts, many of whom proceeded to segregate their departmental employees. Segregation was discussed at the

cabinet in April 1913, when the postmaster general reported the

difficulties for white men in integrated departments: 'it is very

unpleasant for them to work in a car with negroes where it is

almost impossible to have different drinking vessels and different

towels, or places to wash'. As a consequence, he was 'anxious to

segregate white and negro employees in the departments of

Government'.147 These cabinet-level initiatives were comple mented by the newly majoritarian Democrats in the House of

Representatives. In May 1914, the Civil Service Commission

required applicants to attach a photograph to their application

forms,148 leading to a decline in black appointments. The re

quirement remained in place until 1940.

Segregation shaped promotion prospects and set limits on how

African Americans could respond. Protesting against these lim

itations endangered their employment ? and this absence of pro

test was paradoxically then cited as supporting evidence by the

segregationists. All that civil rights organizations could do was

146 'Benefit to the Colored Race', in US Civil Service Commission, Eighth Report of

the US Civil Service Commission July 1, 1890tojune30, 1891 (Washington DC, 1891), 6.

147 Quoted in The Cabinet Diaries ofjosephus Daniels, 1913-1921, ed. E. D. Cronon

(Lincoln, Nebr., 1963), 32. 148

US Civil Service Commission, Minutes 1886-1929,27 May 1914,228: United

States National Archives, College Park, Maryland, RG 146, Records ofthe US Civil Service Commission, box 21.




monitor discrimination.149 An NAACP investigation at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing early in the Wilson administra tion found that 'colored clerks are segregated in work by being placed at separate tables and in separate sections of rooms when ever possible'. Furthermore, 'colored girls no longer use the lunch rooms which for nine years they have been using in common with white girls'.150

It might be assumed that Wilson's Southern origins, and his Southern-dominated cabinet, explain segregation in the civil ser vice. But the story is more complex. One correspondent of the

NAACP concluded that segregated race relations were begun 'on the initiative of subordinate chiefs who would like to have done it

long ago'.151 These subordinate chiefs received no discourage ment from their superiors, and the chief executive himself con

curred in the new policy. Such a Southern-centred explanation also fails to explain why those introducing segregation mostly denied that this was what they were doing, a caveat with which few Southern racists would have bothered. So whereas in the South segregation was celebrated by its promoters, in the federal

government it was presented in apologetic terms. Wilson's

Treasury Secretary and son-in-law William McAdoo wrote to the editor of the African American World, 'separate toilets . . .

assigned to the blacks are just as good as those assigned to the whites ... I do not know that this can properly be called

segregation'.152

The very fact that the federal government introduced segrega tion without an electoral or economic motive reveals the extent to

which white supremacy had become an ideological conviction at

the highest levels of the national state.

149 May Childs Nerney, 'Segregation in the Government Departments at

Washington', 14 Oct. 1913: Library of Congress, Washington, Papers of the

NAACP, Group I, box C70. 150

Nerney report (see n. 149), repr. in Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Arthur S. Link, xxviii (Princeton, 1978), 402-4.

151 Letter from John Palmer Gavit to Oswald Garrison Villard, 1 Oct. 1913, ibid.,

350. 152

Letter from Secretary McAdoo to F. I. Cobb, editor ofthe World, 26 Nov. 1914, in Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Arthur S. Link, xxix (Princeton, 1979), 261 (emphasis

original); letter from William Gibbs McAdoo to Oswald Garrison Villard, 27 Oct.

1913, ibid., xxviii, 453.




III

CONCLUSION

The course ofthe 'negro question' after the Civil War followed a

similar trajectory across all regions and aspects of the United

States. The status of black Americans improved under Recon

struction, and then deteriorated towards a low point by the end

of the century. This does not mean that the trajectory of race

relations over time was uniform throughout the United States.

In the federal bureaucracy, for example, the retreat from Recon

struction was almost inevitably slower than in local politics. White supremacy also translated into action in different ways.153 However, variations in the imposition of white supremacy did not

follow a simple sectional divide, with 'radical racism' confined to

the South.154 The sections themselves were far from internally

homogeneous, as the data on lynching shows. Above all, it was

by no means the case that Southern states were the first to

impose the various aspects of white supremacy. Indeed, African

Americans in many parts of the South were relatively powerful

politically in the first years after Reconstruction. Overall, whether

black Americans were ultimately oppressed with a shout or a whis

per, for political or for economic reasons, the effect was markedly similar.

Recognition of this nationwide character of white supremacy necessitates a second look at both the causes and the conse

quences of rising nationwide white supremacy after Reconstruc

tion, and a reassessment of various aspects of race relations in the

early twentieth century. In the first place, this acknowledgement suggests that the South

alone is an inappropriate framework for studies of many aspects of race relations in this period. The timing and nature of white

supremacy in practice was determined by such variables as demo

graphics, economics, class, occupation, gender, urban or rural

location, and even the tone of skin colour. Many of these variables were pan-American. Any scholar seeking to investigate the rise of white supremacy in this period, therefore, would be advised to

153 For a helpful discussion of the meaning of race in practice, see Barbara Fields,

'Ideology and Race in American History', in J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (eds.), Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward (New York, 1982). 154

On the idea of radical racism in the South, see Williamson, Crucible of Race.




look at comparative, connective and contrasting developments across the country as a whole. The struggles of the light-skinned black elite in Boston and Atlanta were similar, as were those of domestic workers in New Orleans and New York, those of miners in Alabama and Washington State, and those of black Republi cans seeking patronage or redress in the courts across the coun

try. Studying the nation also allows the testing of explanations for the rise of the white supremacy previously based on the Southern example. For instance, the gendered appeal to white

manhood, honour and control of the household is not made as

explicitly in the Northern context.155 The systematic imposition of white supremacy beyond the

South after Reconstruction had significant, but mixed, conse

quences for race relations in the North and West and in the

national state in the early twentieth century. The exclusion of

black workers from major sectors of the Northern and Western

economy during a period of industrialization set a pattern of

racial exclusion and oppression at the workplace. American

gross national product quadrupled between 1870 and 1900 but

the economic status of African Americans deteriorated. In

Philadelphia, for example, some 15 per cent of black men

worked in skilled trades in 1870. By 1910, it was only 1 per cent.156 This pattern also helps to explain why black migrants to the North fared particularly badly in comparison with immi

grant groups. They alone carried with them the stigma of black

ness, a stigma reinforced by their role as strike-breakers. Forced

into 'dirty' jobs or domestic service, black workers (as in the

South) became associated with lowly status. By contrast,

European immigrants were able to enter the melting pot and

'become white' (and often this whiteness was asserted in oppos ition to blackness).157

155 On the connection between gender and white supremacy in the South, see

Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow. 156

Trotter, African American Experience, 310. The near-quadrupling ofthe black

population and the changing labour structure account for some of this change, along with union and employer attitudes to black workers. Population details from Series A

195-209, in United States Bureau ofthe Census, Historical Statistics of the United

States: Colonial Times to 1970, i, 33. 157

For immigrant groups' negotiation of whiteness, see Guglielmo, White on

Arrival; Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass., 1998); Russell A. Kazal, Becoming Old

Stock: The Paradox of German-American Identity (Princeton, 2004); David R. Roediger,

Working toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White (New York, 2005).




In local and state politics, on the other hand, the downturn in

race relations was not disastrous in the longer term. Because

African Americans were relatively few in number outside the

South and were concentrated in urban pockets, the black vote

was marginalized without recourse to state constitutional disfran

chisement.158 It is quite possible that if migration had happened soon after Reconstruction, disfranchisement would have spread

throughout the United States.159 Nonetheless, one unintended

consequence of Reconstruction was the right of African

Americans to vote outside the South. By the time of the major

migrations ofthe twentieth century, further disfranchisement of

any group was off the national agenda, and by this stage black

workers had some resources with which to defend their citizen

ship rights. African American voting power in Northern cities

(and after the Second World War in the West) would have

major implications not just for race relations outside the South, but also for race relations in the national state, and thus, in turn, in the South.

In the national state, the rise of white supremacy had particu

larly damaging consequences for African Americans. The rise of

de jure segregated race relations coincided with the turn of the

century's embrace of reformed government and bureaucratic

expansion designed to produce the organizational capacity to

extend positively the federal government's role in American soci

ety. This was a fatal consequence. Activism by the national state

became associated with the enforcement of segregation and

racism instead of their erosion. This pattern had two, intercon

nected, expressions. First, during the 1910s and 1920s federal

government policy fostered segregationist practices where they had not previously existed or had been muted.160 Second, these

158 See Orren and Skowronek, Search for American Political Development. 159

There was a widespread attack on the right to vote in the late nineteenth century across the country. See Sven Beckert, 'Democracy in the Age of Capital: Contesting

Suffrage Rights in Gilded Age New York', in Meg Jacobs, William J. Novak and Julian E. Zelizer (eds.), The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political

History (Princeton, 2003). 160 Statistical data about black American employment in the US federal government

collected by the NAACP in 1928 showed a decline in the number of African Americans and their increasing confinement to junior positions between the mid

1910s and the date of the study. 'Memorandum from Walter White to the Conference of Executives NAACP', 17 Oct. 1928: Library of Congress, Papers of the NAACP, Group I, box C403, file: 'Segregation

? Federal Service 1928'. For a

(com. on p. 252)




racially biased forms of government activism were the framework

upon which the significant bureaucratic expansion associated with the New Deal and Second World War was imposed.161

Appreciation of the nationwide character of white supremacy prompts a reassessment of some aspects of civil rights protest at the turn of the century. Take the example of black leadership.

Historians have long debated whether Booker T Washington, who famously called on black Southerners 'to cast down your buckets where you are', was a prudent accommodationist or a

self-serving race traitor.162 Whatever his motivation, Washing ton's contention that most African Americans had a 'better chance in the South than in the North' may have been valid.

Meanwhile, the context of Northern racism suggests that the NAACP was quite a radical organization at its founding in

1909, even though its initial activities were moderate and often focused on the North, by contrast with later civil rights protest.

The NAACP was, after all, founded in response to a race riot in

Illinois in 1908, and Du Bois named the association's magazine (the most important race publication of the early twentieth cen

tury) The Crisis.163

Acceptance of the nationwide character of white supremacy also allows a reassessment of African American protest after

this period. For example, compared with the heady interracial

protest of the civil rights movement, the attempts at biracial

organizing during the New Deal and the Second World War seem sporadic and faltering. But in contrast to the bitter history of race relations in the late nineteenth-century workforce, in

Northern states in particular, even these scattered attempts at

(n. 160 com.)

sceptical view of these trends, see Samuel Krislov, The Negro in Federal Employment: The Quest for Equal Opportunity (Minneapolis, 1967). 161

Desmond King, Separate and Unequal: Black Americans and the US Federal

Government (Oxford, 1995), 205-10; Thomas C. Holt, 'Marking: Race, Race

Making, and the Writing of History', Amer. Hist. Rev., c (1995), 1-10; Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White; Margaret Weir, 'States, Race and the Decline of

New Deal Liberalism', Studies in American Political Development, xix (2005). 162 For a recent critique of Washington as race traitor, see Kelly, 'Sentinels for New

South Industry'. For a defence of Washington, see Adam Fairclough, Better Day

Coming: Blacks and Equality, 1890-2000 (New York, 2004). 163 Support for black nationalist Marcus Garvey, commonly associated with

Harlem and the urban north, actually spread across the South, North and West of

America. See Mary Gambrell Rolinson, 'The Garvey Movement in the Rural South'

(Univ. of Georgia Ph.D. thesis, 2002).




biracialism show the significance of the challenge that the labour movement was to pose to American white supremacy.164 In the national state, it helps to explain the enthusiasm of black

workers and leaders for the New Deal. Even though Roosevelt's administration was often discriminatory (which in turn prompted further protest), it was a major advance on the white supremacist outlook of the federal government.

Finally, the prevalence of white supremacy beyond the South at the end of the nineteenth century provides a crucial context for the interpretation of Northern race relations during the first half of the twentieth century and beyond. For example, at the

grass roots, it helps to explain the years of racial violence after the First World War. In the so-called red summer of 1919, at least twenty-five major riots broke out, mostly in Northern cities. Historians have explained this unprecedented wave of violence in the urban North in terms of economic, residential and labour tensions triggered by the great migration and post

war economic volatility. But the post-Reconstruction history of Northern race relations shows that such tensions did not reverse a more harmonious age, but were interpreted within the frame

work of an often violent white supremacist order. These and later riots, ghettoization, the fight against bussing and countless

other examples of twentieth-century supremacist behaviour in the North and West were building on a longer tradition. In

national memory, the Jim Crow era may somewhat conveniently belong to the South, but it should belong to America.

Nuffield College, Oxford Desmond King Pembroke College, Oxford Stephen Tuck

164 For studies calling for a recognition ofthe vibrancy of biracial organizing, see

Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein, 'Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement', JIAmer. Hist., lxxv (1988); Robert

Rodgers Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South (Chapel Hill, 2003); Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill, 1990); Bruce

Nelson, Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality (Princeton, 2001).



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