The “New South” in two minutes
- After federal troops left the South in 1877, white Democrats called Redeemers controlled state governments, and Henry Grady urged Northern investors to back a “New South” of industry in an 1886 speech.
- Railroads, cotton mills, and Birmingham coal and iron grew, often with Northern money, but most Southerners still lived and worked on farms.
- Sharecropping and crop liens left Black and many white farmers in debt as cotton prices fell by more than half after 1880, while Alabama leased convicts, mostly Black, to coal companies.
- The Civil Rights Cases (1883) held that the Fourteenth Amendment limited states, not private businesses, and Southern states passed Jim Crow laws, such as Tennessee's separate railroad cars in 1881.
- Mississippi's 1890 constitution used poll taxes and literacy tests to remove Black voters, Louisiana added a grandfather clause in 1898, and lynchings peaked in 1892, a crime Ida B. Wells documented.
- Booker T. Washington's 1895 Atlanta speech urged Black Southerners to build skills and accept social separation, and Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 upheld “separate but equal” railroad cars.
- On the exam: expect continuity and change questions comparing the New South to the plantation economy and to Reconstruction; Plessy stood until Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
Topic 6.4 key terms
- Separate Car Act (Louisiana, 1890)
Required railroads to provide “equal but separate accommodations for the white, and colored races.” A passenger who sat in the wrong car faced a $25 fine or up to 20 days in the parish prison.
- Test case
A case brought on purpose to make a court rule on a law. Someone breaks the law in plain view, is charged, and argues that the law itself is unconstitutional.
- Redeemers
Southern Democrats who took back state governments as Reconstruction ended. They cut taxes, schools and spending, courted Northern investors, and used race to hold white voters together.
- New South
Henry Grady’s name for a South rebuilt on industry, railroads and Northern investment, at peace with the North, and left alone to run its own racial order.
- National rail network
Rail lines joined into one connected system. After 1886 Southern track matched Northern width, so freight cars could roll north and south without being unloaded and reloaded.
- Convict leasing
States and counties rented prisoners, overwhelmingly Black and often jailed for minor offenses, to mines, railroads and plantations. Alabama kept it until 1928.
- Tenant farming
Renting land and paying the owner in cash or a set share of the crop. Tenants usually owned their own mule and tools.
- Crop-lien system
Merchants sold food, seed and supplies on credit and took a legal claim (a lien) on the farmer's next crop. Credit prices ran high, so a bad harvest or a low cotton price left the farmer still owing.
- Colored Farmers' Alliance (1886)
A cooperative movement of Black farmers, about 250,000 strong by 1890. Its story continues in the Populist years.
- Civil Rights Cases (1883)
An 8–1 Supreme Court ruling (Oct. 15, 1883) that Congress could not ban discrimination by private businesses such as hotels, theaters and railroads. The 14th Amendment, the Court said, limits states, not private owners. Federal protection weakened, and segregation spread.
- Jim Crow laws
State and local laws that segregated Black Americans in public life, from the 1880s into the 1960s. The name came from a blackface stage act of about 1828. Segregated “Jim Crow cars” were already running on Massachusetts railroads by 1841.
- Poll tax
A fee a person had to pay in order to vote. Mississippi's 1890 constitution set it at two dollars a year, a lot of cash for a poor sharecropper. It kept many poor Black voters, and many poor white voters, from the polls.
- Literacy test
A test of reading, or of "understanding" a passage, that a voter had to pass before registering. Registrars decided who passed, so they could fail Black applicants and pass white ones. Together with poll taxes, these tests kept most Black men in Mississippi from voting.
- Disfranchisement
Taking away the right to vote. After 1890, Southern states used poll taxes, literacy tests and lists of disqualifying crimes to remove most Black voters, without ever naming race in the law.
- Memphis exodus and boycott (1892)
After the lynchings, Black Memphians protested by leaving the city or refusing to ride the streetcars. The streetcar company's officers came to the Free Speech office to ask for their riders back.
- Ida B. Wells (1862–1931)
Black journalist who counted lynchings from white newspapers and published the findings in Southern Horrors (1892) and A Red Record (1895). Her sources: the Chicago Tribune's yearly tallies, compiled by white reporters from white newspapers.
- Lynching
A killing by a mob that takes the law into its own hands, with no trial. In the South most victims were Black, and few killers were ever charged.
- Southern Horrors (1892)
Wells's pamphlet, written in exile in New York. It used newspaper reports to argue that the charge of rape was an excuse for lynching, not the reason.
- Tuskegee Institute (1881)
Alabama school for Black students that opened on July 4, 1881, with Washington as its first principal. It taught trades and farming, and its students built much of the campus themselves.
- George Washington Carver
Tuskegee scientist, on the faculty from October 1896, who urged Southern farmers to plant peanuts, sweet potatoes and soybeans instead of only cotton.
- International Migration Society (1894)
Bishop Henry McNeal Turner’s plan to help Black Southerners emigrate to Liberia. Its first ship, the Horsa, left Savannah on March 19, 1895, with about 200 emigrants. Washington told those who hoped to better their condition “in a foreign land” to cast down their buckets at home.
- Atlanta Compromise (1895)
Washington’s bargain, as critics later named it: Black Southerners would accept segregation for now and focus on work and education, while white Southerners would support Black schools and jobs.
- Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)
Supreme Court decision, 7–1, that upheld a Louisiana law requiring separate railroad cars for white and Black passengers. It let states require segregation (Jim Crow) as long as the separate facilities were “equal.”
- “Separate but equal”
The rule from Plessy: a state may require racial segregation if the separate facilities are equal. In practice they almost never were.
- Scientific racism
Claims dressed as science that races had fixed, ranked traits. It was used to justify segregation, disfranchisement and immigration limits.
- Williams v. Mississippi (1898)
The Supreme Court upheld Mississippi's poll tax and literacy test. The laws never named race, and the Court held that was enough, though the state's own supreme court had said what they were for.
- Grandfather clause
A rule that let men skip voting tests if their father or grandfather could vote before a set date. Louisiana chose 1867, before Black men had the vote, so nearly every white man was exempt and almost no Black man was.
- Wilmington coup (1898)
On November 10, 1898, armed white supremacists forced Wilmington's elected officials out and took over the city government. Once called a race riot, it was a planned overthrow, and historians now call it a coup.
- The New South: what changed
Railroads joined to the national network. Iron furnaces, textile mills and tobacco factories. Growing cities. Northern investment.
- The New South: what stayed
Cotton. Sharecropping and tenancy. Debt. White political control, now written into law.
- National Association of Colored Women (1896)
A national federation of Black women's clubs, formed in Washington, D.C. in July 1896 with Mary Church Terrell as its first president. Its motto: “Lifting as We Climb.”
- Brown v. Board of Education (1954)
The Supreme Court's unanimous 1954 ruling against school segregation: “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” It rejected “separate but equal” for public education.
Transcript
Quotes are from the historical record and name their source. Lines marked Dramatized are reconstructions.
Press Street
June 7, 1892
Key terms: Separate Car Act (Louisiana, 1890), Test case
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
Key terms: Redeemers, New South, National rail network
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
Key terms: Convict leasing, Tenant farming, Sharecropping, Crop-lien system, Colored Farmers' Alliance (1886)
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
Key terms: Civil Rights Cases (1883), Jim Crow laws, Poll tax, Literacy test, Disfranchisement
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
Key terms: Memphis exodus and boycott (1892), Ida B. Wells (1862–1931), Lynching, Southern Horrors (1892)
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
Key terms: Tuskegee Institute (1881), George Washington Carver, International Migration Society (1894), Atlanta Compromise (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
Key terms: Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), “Separate but equal”, Scientific racism
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
Key terms: Williams v. Mississippi (1898), Grandfather clause, Disfranchisement, Wilmington coup (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
Key terms: The New South: what changed, The New South: what stayed, National Association of Colored Women (1896), Brown v. Board of Education (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.