The “New South”

Press Street

June 7, 1892

June 7, 1892 New Orleans

One afternoon in 1892, a New Orleans shoemaker named Homer Plessy bought a first-class ticket to Covington.

Louisiana law said this coach was for white passengers only. By that same law, Plessy was colored.

The conductor asked if he was a white man. Plessy said he was colored. Told to move to the other car, he refused.

A detective stepped in and arrested him.

The detective was expecting him. So was the railroad. This arrest was planned.

Why would anyone need a plan to ride a train? The answer starts in 1877.

A Brave and Beautiful City

1877–1889

In 1877, the last federal troops left the South’s statehouses. Reconstruction was over, and the Redeemers took charge.

In 1886, Atlanta editor Henry Grady spoke at a New York dinner. General Sherman, who burned Atlanta, had just spoken.

Henry W. Grady …though some people think he is a kind of careless man about fire,

Henry W. Grady …from the ashes he left us in 1864 we have raised a brave and beautiful city.

Grady was selling the South to the men with money.

Henry W. Grady To liberty and enfranchisement is as far as law can carry the negro. The rest must be left to conscience and common sense.

The pitch: Northern money in, Northern interference out. When he sat down, the band played “Dixie.”

The South even moved its tracks to match the North’s. By three inches. Crews did it on 13,000 miles of track in a day and a half.

Birmingham, founded at a rail crossing in 1871, became the Magic City of iron.

Southern cotton mills multiplied: 161 in 1880, about 400 by 1900. They hired white families. By 1900, a quarter of the workers were ten to sixteen.

Much of the money came from the North, and so did the owners.

Grady knew the catch. Ten days before he died, he told a funeral story.

Henry W. Grady The South didn’t furnish a thing on earth for that funeral but the corpse and the hole in the ground.

New rails, new mills, new money. Out in the country, where most Southerners lived, much less was new.

Iron and Cotton

1880s–1890s

Birmingham sat on coal, iron ore and limestone. Between 1880 and 1890, its pig iron output grew more than tenfold.

Some of that coal was dug by men who weren't free. Alabama leased its prisoners, nearly all Black, to coal companies.

In 1896, about 1,700 state prisoners worked the mines. In the two years before, 233 had died.

Sloss started its first furnace in April 1882. Its owners counted on Black labor.

But most Southerners still worked here.

Between 1880 and 1894, the cotton crop grew by more than a third. The price per pound fell by more than half.

Most Black farmers, and many white ones, didn't own their land. They rented it, or worked it for a share of the crop.

They bought food and seed on credit, against the harvest. The debt often rolled into next year.

In November 1887, about ten thousand sugar workers struck with the Knights of Labor. Most were Black.

At Thibodaux, armed white vigilantes killed at least thirty. Nobody was ever held accountable.

The Special Favorite of the Laws

1877–1891

In 1883, the Supreme Court struck down the 1875 law banning discrimination in inns, theaters and railroad cars. The Fourteenth Amendment, it ruled, limited states, not private businesses.

Joseph P. Bradley …when he takes the rank of a mere citizen, and ceases to be the special favorite of the laws…

Slavery had ended eighteen years earlier.

One justice dissented: John Marshall Harlan of Kentucky, a former slaveholder. His wife, Malvina, set Chief Justice Taney’s old inkstand on his desk. She wrote that Taney used it for Dred Scott.

The new rules soon had a name: Jim Crow, from a blackface stage act of about 1828.

Massachusetts railroads ran “Jim Crow cars” by 1841. Tennessee required separate cars in 1881. Other states followed.

Anna Julia Cooper …two dingy little rooms with “FOR LADIES” swinging over one and “FOR COLORED PEOPLE” over the other;

Anna Julia Cooper …while wondering under which head I come…

In 1883, a conductor tried to drag a young teacher out of the ladies’ car.

Ida B. Wells …I fastened my teeth in the back of his hand.

Ida B. Wells sued and won five hundred dollars. Tennessee’s supreme court threw it out.

Louisiana’s version, in 1890, made one exception: Black nurses caring for white children could ride in the white car. Separation was about rank, not distance.

In New Orleans, eighteen men of color formed a Citizens’ Committee to test the law in court. You’ve already seen their plan.

A year earlier, Mississippi had written a new constitution. One delegate admitted the goal.

J. B. Chrisman …we have been preserving the ascendency of the white people by revolutionary methods.

A two-dollar poll tax. A reading test the registrar graded. A list of crimes that cost you the vote: burglary, theft, bigamy. Not murder.

The words never mentioned race. They didn’t have to.

Where the law stopped, the mob took over.

Southern Horrors

1892–1895

In 1892, Ida B. Wells co-owned a Memphis weekly, the Free Speech. Her friend Thomas Moss ran a grocery with two partners. She was godmother to his little girl.

The People's Grocery drew customers away from a white grocer across the street.

In March, a night fight with armed deputies at the store put the three owners in jail. A mob took them from their cells and killed them. No one was ever punished.

Wells urged Black Memphians to leave. By her count, six thousand did. The rest boycotted the streetcars.

On May 21, the Free Speech ran her editorial. She was away in New York.

Ida B. Wells Nobody in this section of the country believes the old thread-bare lie that Negro men rape white women.

Two white papers called for violence against the writer. Then businessmen met at the Cotton Exchange and made threats.

Ida B. Wells …not by the lawless element upon which the deviltry of the South is usually saddled—

Ida B. Wells but by the leading business men, in their leading business centre.

On May 27, the papers reported, a committee of white citizens wrecked the Free Speech office. They left a note: publish again and die.

Ida B. Wells Out of their own mouths shall the murderers be condemned.

Recorded lynchings peaked in 1892: 230 people, 161 of them Black.

She had an answer for Henry Grady, by name.

Ida B. Wells There is little difference between the Antebellum South and the New South.

Frederick Douglass Brave woman! you have done your people and mine a service which can neither be weighed nor measured.

Separate as the Fingers

1895

Booker T. Washington was born enslaved in Virginia. At twenty-five, he opened Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. His students learned trades and built the school with bricks they made.

In 1895, Atlanta held an exposition to show off the New South to investors.

The band played “Dixie.” The crowd roared. It played “Yankee Doodle.” The crowd quieted down.

Rufus Bullock We have with us to-day a representative of Negro enterprise and Negro civilization.

Booker T. Washington Cast down your bucket where you are.

Stay in the South, he told Black listeners. He told white employers to hire them, not immigrants.

Booker T. Washington In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers,

Booker T. Washington yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.

Booker T. Washington The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly.

He called legal rights “important and right.” But being prepared for them, he said, was “vastly more important.”

Newspapers across the country printed it in full and praised it. Then, Washington wrote, some Black readers seemed to feel “that they had been hypnotized.”

Surrender, or strategy under terror? Historians still argue. Remember the Memphis grocers. They had tried earning their way, too.

A young professor named W. E. B. Du Bois wrote to congratulate him.

This “Atlanta Compromise” is by all odds the most notable thing in Mr. Washington’s career.

In 1903, Du Bois gave it that name, and answered it.

Washington said “separate” about social life. Eight months later, the Supreme Court said it about the law.

The Thin Disguise

1896–1897

Eight months to the day after Atlanta, the Supreme Court decided Plessy's case.

Plessy's lawyer, Albion Tourgée, filed a brief.

Albion W. Tourgée Justice is pictured blind and her daughter, the Law, ought at least to be color-blind.

Seven justices upheld the law, as long as the cars were equal. Justice Brown wrote it. He and the trial judge, Ferguson, were both born in Massachusetts.

Henry Billings Brown …solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.

In other words, the insult was all in Black people's minds.

Henry Billings Brown Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts…

“Racial instincts” was the race science of the day, dressed as law.

That summer, an insurance statistician claimed Black Americans were dying out. Howard's Kelly Miller took his numbers apart.

One justice dissented, alone again: John Marshall Harlan.

John Marshall Harlan Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.

John Marshall Harlan The thin disguise of “equal” accommodations for passengers in railroad coaches will not mislead any one, nor atone for the wrong this day done.

But Harlan still called whites “the dominant race” and the Chinese “so different from our own.”

In January 1897, Homer Plessy pleaded guilty and paid a twenty-five dollar fine.

…we, as freemen, still believe that we were right… In defending the cause of liberty, we met with defeat, but not with ignominy.

The Comité's last report ended: …we, as freemen, still believe that we were right… In defending the cause of liberty, we met with defeat, but not with ignominy.

1898

In 1898 the Supreme Court looked at Mississippi's voting rules. Mississippi's own supreme court had already admitted what they were for.

Joseph McKenna But nothing tangible can be deduced from this.

The rules stood.

Louisiana's 1898 constitution added a grandfather clause. If your father or grandfather could vote before 1867, you skipped the literacy test. Almost no Black man qualified.

In 1897, Louisiana had 130,344 Black registered voters. By 1904, it had 1,342.

Wilmington, North Carolina, had a city government that included Black officials. On November 10, 1898, a white mob of about two thousand burned the Black-owned Daily Record.

White gunmen killed Black residents. The coroner counted fourteen; a 2006 state report said as many as sixty. No one knows exactly. Hundreds fled.

The mob forced the mayor and aldermen to resign. By late afternoon, its leader, Alfred Waddell, was mayor. The federal government did nothing.

One as the Hand

1896 → 1954

The New South built rails, furnaces and mills, partly with Northern money. It kept cotton, debt and white rule, and wrote white rule into law.

In 1896, Black women's clubs formed a national association. Their motto: “Lifting as We Climb.”

Anna Julia Cooper …when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood,

Anna Julia Cooper without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.

They organized, sued, wrote and counted. The next generation carried the fight north, and back into the courts.

Plessy v. Ferguson stood until 1954. Harlan's lonely dissent waited fifty-eight years.