Jim Crow South 11The Birth of a Nation: A
1915 silent film that por-
trayed newly freed blacks
as buffoons and rapists
and thereby justified the
KKK’s vigilantism.Plessy v. Ferguson
(1896): The Supreme
Court decision that per-
mitted racial segregation.
Segregation: The en-
forced separation of the
races.Boycott: An organized
campaign to promote
civil rights by refusing to
buy goods or services.boxes, in advertisements, and as lawn ornaments. The theater staged popu-
lar minstrel shows that ridiculed blacks. In these productions, white men in
blackface sang songs, such as ‘All Coons Look Alike to Me.’ Thomas Dixon
demonized black men as crazed rapists of white women in his popular novel
The Clansman, which became the first modern film, The Birth of a Nation.
The message from this stereotyping was that blacks were subhuman.
For a century, the US Supreme Court sanctioned white supremacy. After
the Civil War, the Court invalidated attempts by the federal government to
grant basic civil rights to the freedmen. In 1883, the Court robbed the 14th
Amendment of much of its meaning when it barred racial discrimination by
states, but not by businessmen who ran hotels and restaurants. The time had
come, justice Joseph Bradley declared, for blacks to cease being ‘the special
favorite of the laws.’ In the 1896 case of Plessyv. Ferguson, the Court sub-
verted the meaning of the 14th Amendment still further to devise the ‘separ-
ate but equal’ doctrine that sanctioned segregated public facilities. With the
Court’s blessing, South Carolina segregatedthe races step-by-step, begin-
ning with trains (1898) and proceeding to streetcars (1905), restaurants
(1906), textile factories (1915), circuses (1917), pool halls (1924), and
beaches (1934). Edgar Gardner Murphy, an Episcopal cleric and reformer
from Texas, concluded that white supremacists had moved ‘from an undis-
criminating attack upon the Negro’s ballot to a like attack upon his schools,
his labor, his life – from the contention that no Negro shall vote to the con-
tentions that no Negro shall learn, that no Negro shall labor, and that no
Negro shall live.’
Blacks fiercely resisted this new social order. Tens of thousands escaped to
the West, especially Kansas and Oklahoma, where they built homesteads and
towns beyond the reach of white supremacy. More commonly, ministers,
businessmen, and newspaper editors vigorously protested against violence
and discrimination through equal rights leagues, lawsuits, and boycotts.
T. Thomas Fortune of the New York Ageformed the Afro-American League
in 1890 to denounce lynchings, unequal schools, separate railroad cars, the
leasing of black prisoners, and the exclusion of blacks from juries. Twenty-
five southern cities experienced boycotts of the newly segregated streetcars.
Blacks also searched for political allies, but the Republicans were too weak,
the Democrats too hostile, the Populist third party too opportunistic, and all
of them too racist. Given black poverty, illiteracy, and internal squabbling, as
well as unified white opposition, such resistance was sporadic and short-
lived. Before long, Jim Crow laws seemed unassailable, and many blacks
survived by becoming ‘good Negroes’ known as Sambos, retreating from
public life and praying for a better day.
Sambo: A black person
compelled to act defer-
entially toward whites.