The Culture of Jim Crow

Lecture plan

1. How Jim Crow worked2. Surviving Jim Crow3. Challenging Jim Crow4. The seeds of change

1. How Jim Crow worked

The Culture of Jim Crow

• Rituals of submission: no titles, to the back of the line

• Representations of blacks as lazy and stupid

• Socialisation within black community

• White-imposed role models (“Good Darky” statue, 1927)

The Culture of Jim Crow

Law

• The Woodward thesis: the closing of alternative possibilities, southern white class politics

• More than 400 state laws and city ordinances mandating segregation

• De facto disfranchisement• Scottsboro Trials (1931-1937)

The Scottsboro Boys

"If you ever saw those creatures, those bigots whose mouths are slits in their faces, whose eyes popped out at you like frogs, whose chins dripped tobacco juice, bewhiskered and filthy, you would not ask how they could do it." Defense Attoney Samuel Liebowitz commenting on the jury verdict in Alabama v Patterson (NY Times, 4/11/33)

The Scottsboro Boys (and Attorney Samuel Leibowitz)

The Scottsboro Boys

“I don’t care whether they’re innocent or guilty. They were found riding on the same freight car with white women, and that’s enough for me! It doesn’t matter to me what the women had done previously. I’m in favor of the boys being executed just as quickly as possible! You can’t understand how we Southern gentlemen feel about this question of relationships between negro men and white women.”Congressman George Huddleston, Birmingham, Ala., quoted in the NY Times, 1933

1882-1968: 4,743 recorded lynchings, more than 70% of them African Americans

Richard Wright, Black Boy (New York, 1937), p. 48

“The white brutality I had not seen was a more effective control of my behavior than that which I knew… As long as it remained something terrible and yet remote, something whose horror and blood might descend upon me at any moment, I was compelled to give my entire imagination over to it, an act which blocked the springs of thought and feeling in me…”

Gender and Class dimensions of Jim Crow

• Jim Crow associated with capitalism; black resistance also anti-capitalist?

• Centrality of denial of black masculinity: implications for gender roles, family structure and black society?

• Lead role for black women

2. Surviving Jim Crow

Joe Louis v Max Schmeling, Yankee Stadium, June 22,

1938

Jackie Robinson and Jesse Owens

Living “behind the veil”

“a double consciousness… this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others.” W.E.B. Du Bois

“Uncle Toms” or “double agents” (Glenda Gilmore)?

“Racial Uplift”

• Public health movement• Commission on Interracial

Cooperation• Better Schools Campaign

Robert Moton, President, Tuskegee Institute

Laurence C. Jones, head of Piney Woods School, Mississippi

Hardy School, Greneda County, Mississippi, 1955

“Racial Uplift”

Compromise with Jim Crow—improvements in black institutions often led to greater dependence on whites

OR “one step back to take two steps forward”—basic education as the foundation of the freedom struggle to come

3. Challenging Jim Crow

“Southern trees bear a strange fruit,Blood on the leaves and blood

at the root,Black body swinging in

the southern breeze,Strange fruit hanging from

the poplar trees…”

Billie Holliday, 1939

Anti-Lynching Campaigns

Ida B. Wells-Barnett Jesse Daniel Ames, Association of

Southern Women for the

Preventionof Lynching (1930)

The New Deal

• Depression exposed the limits of “interracial cooperation”

• No anti-lynching legislation• CCC ran segregated camps• AAA production limits hurt

sharecroppers• SSA excluded many black workers• NRA = “Negroes rarely allowed”…

Black Nationalism

• Marcus Garvey, the “Black Moses”

• The UNIA, Black Star Line

Socialism and the African American cause

• The National Urban League (1920 – product of great migration)

• A. Phillip Randolph, the National Negro Congress (founded 1935)

• Response to rise of fascism, context of communist popular front, black labour unionism and creation of CIO, influenced by IWW

A. Phillip Randolph: “…the salvation of the negro, like the workers, can only come from within. True liberation can be aquired and maintained only when the Negro people possess power, and power is the product and flower of organization…”

NAACP and legal challenges to Jim Crow

Charles Houston, Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP legal fund

Intellectual Assault on Racism

Franz Boas, Columbia anthropologist, challenged notion of immutability of racial differences: culture not nature

Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944)

Intellectual Assault on Racism

W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (1935)

Charles S. Johnson, sociologist and later President of Fisk University

3. The seeds of change

The New Deal

• FDR: “lynch law is murder, a deliberate and definite disobedience of the high command, ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill!’”

• Black New Dealers: Mary McLeod Bethune

• Ickes and Aubrey Williams (head of National Youth Administration) were racial progressives

• WPA did not formally discriminate• Democratic rhetoric of New Deal

Legal Breakthroughs

• Murray v Maryland (1936)• Smith v Allwight (1941)

Marion Anderson, Lincoln Memorial Concert, 1939