538 Chapter 20 From Smoke-Filled Rooms to Prairie Wildfire: 1877–1896
races in this country are indissolubly linked together,
and the interests of both require that the common
government of all shall not permit the seeds of race
hatred to be planted under the sanction of law.”
More than half a century was to pass before the
Court came around to Harlan’s reasoning and
reversed the Plessydecision. Meanwhile, total segrega-
tion was imposed throughout the South. Separate
schools, prisons, hospitals, recreational facilities, and
even cemeteries were provided for blacks, and these
were almost never equal to those available to whites.
Most Northerners supported the government
and the Court. Newspapers presented a stereotyped,
derogatory picture of blacks, no matter what the
circumstances. Northern magazines, even high-
quality publications such asHarper’s,Scribner’s, and
the Century, repeatedly made blacks the butt of
crude jokes.
The restoration of white rule abruptly halted the
progress in public education for blacks that the
Reconstruction governments had made. Church groups
and private foundations such as the Peabody Fund and
the Slater Fund, financed chiefly by northern philan-
thropists, supported black schools after 1877. Among
them were two important experiments in vocational
training, Hampton Institute and Tuskegee Institute.
These schools had to overcome considerable
resistance and suspicion in the white community; they
survived only because they taught a docile philoso-
phy, preparing students to accept second-class citizen-
ship and become farmers and craftsmen. Since
proficiency in academic subjects might have given the
lie to the southern belief that blacks were intellectu-
ally inferior to whites, such subjects were avoided.
The southern insistence on segregating the public
schools, buttressed by the separate but equal decision
of the Supreme Court inPlessy v. Ferguson, imposed a
crushing financial burden on poor, sparsely settled
communities, and the dominant opinion that blacks
were not really educable did not encourage these
communities to make special efforts in their behalf.
Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896 at
http://www.myhistorylab.comBooker T. Washington: A “Reasonable”
Champion for African Americans
Since nearly all contemporary biologists, physicians,
and other supposed experts on race were convinced
that African Americans were inferior, white Americans
generally accepted black inferiority as fact. Most didView theImageA cartoon from Judgemagazine in 1892 depicts Ku Klux Klansmen barring a black voter from the polls.