Age of Segregation White Supremacy

Age of Segregation

White supremacy shaped African-Americans in the South in several ways. But also provided the motivation for blacks to struggle harder and fight back against the racism. This paper will identify through sources issues and challenges that African-Americans faced during the Jim Crown period of social segregation, in particular in the Southern states.

Racial segregation was in fact legitimized and institutionalized by the U.S. Government in many instances during the age of segregation. As late as 1930, more than four of five African-Americans lived in the South, and according to author David Kennedy, "Tortuously" struggled through...the Jim Crow system, an "antiquated and grotesquely burdensome character" (Kennedy, 1999, p. 19). The bottom line, Kennedy writes, is that blacks "could not vote" and they had been nearly "universally disfranchised throughout the Southern states of America (Kennedy, p. 19). As late as 1940, fewer than five percent of eligible blacks were registered to vote in the eleven states of the former Confederacy, Kenney explains. This excerpt is pivotal to understanding Jim Crow:

Jim Crow meant social and economic segregation. Blacks sat in separate waiting rooms in railroad and bus stations, drank from separate drinking fountains, worshipped in separate churches, and attended strictly segregated and abysmally inferior schools. The South's few industrial jobs were largely barred to them.

Southern blacks thus constituted an extreme case of rural poverty... [and] infant mortality rates for blacks were nearly double those for whites in 1930. Blacks had an average life expectancy fifteen years shorter than whites... [and were] bound as fast to the land by debt, ignorance, and intimidation as they had been by slavery itself." (Kennedy, p. 19)

The New Deal, which lifted millions of people out of the dregs of the Great Depression, did not necessarily lend an equal hand to African-Americans. The time had not come, author Kennedy writes, for "direct federal action" to challenge Jim Crow and end at last crimes of slavery and discrimination (Kennedy, p. 378). Indeed, the New Deal also "...reinforced" and even "exacerbated racial segregation in housing" (Kennedy, p. 370). However, the New Deal did offer jobs for blacks with the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the WPA, and because his wife Eleanor Roosevelt pushed him, FDR did bring African-Americans into the federal government "...in small but unprecedented numbers" (Kennedy, p. 378). In fact FDR set up an informal "black cabinet" - led by Mary McLeod Bethune - to meet on occasion with federal officials and discuss "Negro affairs" (Kennedy, p. 378). This gave some credibility to the black community at a time when segregation and Jim Crow laws were a huge social burden.

Meanwhile in the 1930s, the Tennessee Valley Authority was created by the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) as part of the New Deal. It was FDR who requested the creation of a public corporation (TVA) to generate and distribute hydroelectric power" to produce fertilizers, to battle against soil erosion and deforestation...[and] to "upgrade health and educational services in the depressed valley..." (Kennedy, p. 148). The TVA, once in place, brought needed electricity and jobs to many.

One of the earliest foreign visitors to the TVA, Odette Keun, a journalist from France, observed in 1937 that America featured "...abject poverty, 'racial prejudice' and 'peonage'" (Book, 2004, p. 57-58). Author Robert Book notes that "Racial discrimination and segregation" were very much important parts of the TVA experiment. The National Association of Colored Peoples (NAACP) protested the "Lily-White" nature of the huge federal project, Book writes. And while blacks were excluded from living in the planned communities that would benefit from the new source of electricity, they were also excluded from the thousands of jobs created in order to build the TVA infrastructure, Book reports. A study in 1933 (Book, p. 58) showed that there were only "two blacks" employed by the TVA; after all, Tennessee was very much a segregated state, notwithstanding the millions of federal dollars that went into the building of the TVA.

Among the more horrific ramifications of segregation and of the Jim Crow mentality was the lynching of African-Americans by mobs of white Southerners. According to Ida B. Wells-Barnett's book (on Lynchings: Southern Horrors / a Red Record / Mob Rule in New Orleans) - which offers graphic details on numerous cases of lynching - of the 2,533 lynchings between 1882 and 1899, "less than one-third of them" were even charged with a crime (Wells-Barnett, 1969, 46-47). The book contains many verifiable instances where blacks were simply strung up by a mob - and once the hanging was complete the body was often riddled with bullets then burned in a bonfire.

Of the 2,533 lynchings that Wells-Barnett alludes to some 269 were charged with rape; 253 with murder; 44 with robbery; 37 with "incendiarism"; 4 with burglary; 27 with racism; 13 argued with Caucasians; 10 made "threats"; 7 allegedly rioted; 5 charged with trying to be white; and in 32 instances of lynching, the victims were killed "on general principles" (Wells-Barnett, p. 47). On page 21 Wells-Barnet asserts that those men and women in the South who oppose the barbarian act of lynching by a mob but do nothing and do not speak up are "accomplices" and are "equally guilty" with those who lynch.

Meanwhile, on July 26, 1947, the New York Times quoted the Tuskegee Institute's data that "six of every seven potential lynchings" over the past ten years in the south.

Between the years 1937 and 1947, the Times' story continued, there were 273 prevented lynchings, against forty-three cases where "a mob succeeded" in hanging black men in the South. "Alert" public officials and ordinary citizens have been the heroes in the 273 cases of attempted but failed lynching incidents. That having been said, a total of 4,717 black men had been lynched since 1882, an appalling statistic and part of urgency for the push for civil rights justice in 1963.

What did African-Americans do to overcome white supremacy? The leadership of people like Mary McLeod Bethune was important in the struggle to be free from the rule of Jim Crow in the South. She was called the "female Booker T. Washington" and "Mother Bethune" (McCluskey, 1999, p. 236) and she gained the widespread affection of the black community (and a significant portion of the white establishment) for her writings championing black progress in newspapers. Bethune was a charismatic speaker and she carved out a position of "moral authority" based on the use of "honey" rather than "vinegar" to affect change, McCluskey writes on page 237. She used both the black press (Chicago Defender and Pittsburgh Courier) and the white press to build a consensus for cooperation and fellowship on racial issues. And she used her leadership position in the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) to promote higher education for African-Americans, equality for all women, and she convinced First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to attend black conferences and to host White House conferences for the advance of black youth and black business interests (McCluskey, p. 239).

Even before the Civil Rights Movement, African-Americans pushed for change based on Smith v. Allright in 1946, a Supreme Court decision that struck down all-white primaries in Georgia (Wormser, 2003, p. 169). Through the Democratic Party, the NAACP and other organizations blacks began to be registered to vote. The leader of the black Masons in Georgia, John Wesley Dobbs, said, "When ten thousand Negroes get registered, the signal light of opportunity will change from red to green" (Wormser, p. 171). Those blacks did get registered, and the light did change to green. Another powerful force in the movement for survival during the age of segregation and Jim Crow was - and still is - the Black church. Andrew Billingsley writes in his 1992 book Climbing Jacob's Ladder: The Enduring Legacy of African-American Families that the black church - beyond its "purely religious function" - has historically served as a conservatory, forum, lyceum, "social service center, political academy" and financial institution. Indeed, Billingsley asserts, the black church has been "and is" for blacks in America "the mother of our culture, the champion of our freedom," and the "hallmark" of blacks' "civilization" (Billingsley, 1992, p. 223).