Vann Woodward and Jim Crow Evaluating the Essay

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Vann Woodward and Jim Crow

Evaluating the impact of Reconstruction social policy on blacks is more controversial due to the issue of segregation. Until the publication of C. Vann Woodward Strange Career of Jim Crow in 1955, the traditional view was that after the gains of Reconstruction, Conservative Democrats clamped down on the blacks by instituting an extensive system of segregation and disfranchisement (Woodward, 1974). Woodward, however, argued that there was a period of fluidity in race relations between the end of Reconstruction and the 1890s. Woodward concentrated on de jure segregation rather than de facto segregation, in part because he was influenced by the Brown v. Board of Education decision (1954) and the growing agitation over desegregation. In still another example of current affairs influencing a historian's viewpoint, Woodward wanted to show that segregation was not an irrevocable folkway of Southern life, but actually a rather recent innovation. Despite attacks from a number of scholars who pointed to the existence of segregation during the antebellum period in both the North and South, and, most pointedly, even during Reconstruction, Woodward's view was widely accepted. Woodward's critics were limited by their own desire to make history conform to their expectations and as a result simply searched for proof that segregation represented the norm in Southern life (Dailey, et al. 2000). As a result their work lacked a dynamic approach which would emphasize process (Rabinowitz, 1978).

In fact, the question is what segregation replaced, and the answer is not integration but exclusion. In other words, those institutions established by the Radicals, such as public schools and colleges like Fisk, Atlanta, and Howard, and welfare institutions that included poor houses and asylums for the care of deaf, dumb and blind, broke new ground by admitting blacks for the first time (Woodward, 1993). But blacks were admitted on a segregated basis. Initial access to places of public accommodation often followed a similar pattern. Yet under the Radicals, there was not simply a shift from exclusion to segregation, for the Radicals proclaimed that the blacks would enjoy facilities the equals of those open to whites (Woodward, 2013).

In other words, the concept of separate but equal treatment was the basic Republican goal in the area of social policy, an idea whose roots can be traced to antebellum Northern society (Cole, 2012). As such, and for a variety of reasons, the policy was endorsed by most black leaders. The Democrats, upon gaining power, accepted the shift from exclusion to segregation, but though they publicly endorsed the concept of separate but equal, in practice they failed to sustain it (Williamson, 1968).

Segregation, then, emerged in the postwar South as a reform, that is, an improvement over the previous policy of exclusion. It was certainly an ironic legacy of the Reconstruction governments, but it was also about as much of a change as the legal, social, and political climate would permit (Dailey, et al. 2000).

American Reconstruction was thus primarily concerned with reintegrating the South into the national economy through the substitution of free labor for slavery (but without the massive federal rebuilding effort associated with modern reconstructions), increasing the political power of the Republican party, and guaranteeing blacks equal rights, even while accepting segregation (Woodward, 1993). The years after Reconstruction, generally referred to as The New South, but which I've called The First New South to distinguish it from at least three separate twentieth century proclamations of a New South, reveal just how badly the Reconstructionist agenda fared (Woodward, 1974). They also provide a sobering message for those trying to predict the outcome of German Reunification (Bell & Robert, 1978).

As should already be clear, limited federal support for the weak Southern Republican coalition eventually meant the return of the former Confederates to power. This did not constitute a simple return of the old planter elite, however. Although its representatives continued to wield considerable power, it was no longer dominant and indeed had gone from being the most powerful and influential agrarian elite in the western world to perhaps the least powerful. It had no control over the conditions for Reconstruction laid down by the federal government, unlike, for example, the situation in Russia, Jamaica, Cuba and Brazil. After all, unlike their Latin American and European counterparts, these men bore the label of "traitor," (Woodward, 2013) which justified a more extensive challenge to their authority. Even after Reconstruction ended this old elite had to share power with new men more in tune with urban and capitalist values, values that many of them had in fact come to embrace as well (Cole, 2012).

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Together this new coalition created a Solid South which enabled the national Democratic party to survive the taint of treason and remain one of the two major political parties, with perhaps a natural majority of voters in the nation as a whole. The new leadership's promises, however, of a genuinely New South, one dedicated to sectional reconciliation and characterized by increased urbanization and industrialization, diversified agriculture and moderate race relations, convinced many Northerners and even some Southern blacks that the region would lose its distinctiveness and become fully integrated into the American mainstream (Williamson, 1968).

In fact, the new Democratic governments proved unresponsive to the needs of both poor whites and blacks. They embraced retrenchment in public services, and demonstrated a capacity for corruption that could put the most dishonest Radicals to shame. And despite much rhetoric to the contrary, the Southern economy was not remade in the image of the North. Even allowing for some notable urban growth, the South remained the most heavily rural area in the country. Although industrialization increased, the Southern economy was primarily agrarian and lagged far behind the rest of the country. In short, as C. Vann Woodward put it, the South experienced an industrial evolution rather than revolution. As a result, the region was becoming an economic colony of the North. By the 1880s Northern capital was in control of railroads, factories, and mines, and the South was firmly established as a producer of raw materials for Northern industry (Cole, 2012). Agriculture itself was less healthy than it had been before the war. The first point is that by 1880 the South was no longer self- sufficient in basic foodstuffs as it had been in the antebellum period. For a variety of reasons that are not altogether clear, both a majority of blacks and of formerly self-sufficient whites were engaged in the production of cotton rather than foodstuffs. And this occurred despite the virtual stagnation in the worldwide demand for cotton between 1860 and 1880 (Bell & Robert, 1978).

The Rise of Jim Crow and Academic Interest

On April 20, 1937, Arthur Mitchell boarded an Illinois Central train in Chicago bound for Hot Springs, Arkansas. A black Democratic congressman from Chicago, Mitchell was off that evening for a brief vacation. He bought a first class ticket, secured a compartment in a sleeping car going as far as Memphis, and passed an uneventful night. The next morning, just before the train arrived in Memphis, a porter transferred Mitchell to the Pullman car that was going through to Hot Springs, and the congressman settled down in one of a number of empty seats. From Memphis on, he traveled over the fines of the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railway (Bell & Robert, 1978).

Soon after the train pulled out of Memphis and crossed the Mississippi River into Arkansas, a Rock Island conductor approached Mitchell and told him that because the state had a railroad segregation law, he would have to move to the Jim Crow coach. Mitchell objected, pointing out that his first class ticket entitled him to ride in the Pullman car and that there was plenty of room in it to accommodate him. When these arguments failed to impress the official, Mitchell added that he was a United States congressman. The conductor, Mitchell later recounted, "said it didn't make a damn bit of difference who I was, that as long as I was a nigger I couldn't ride in that car" (Cole, 2012). "You will have to ride in the 'secondclass' car and no other place on this train," he allegedly warned Mitchell, "or I'll stop the train and have you locked up" (Woodward, 1974). Mitchell gave some thought to letting himself be arrested but then remembered he was in Arkansas, where a troublemaking black risked a lynching. After a last and futile effort to get a seat in the smoking section of the car, which was completely vacant, Mitchell reluctantly headed for the Jim Crow coach, His baggage was allowed to remain in the Pullman. Mitchell had been riding in a clean, carpeted, air-conditioned car, equipped with modern and well-kept rest-room facilities (Dailey, et al. 2000). A potter's services had been available, and Pullman passengers had access to the dining and observation-parlor cars on the train. For the next four hours, however, from the time of the incident until his arrival in Hot Springs, Mitchell sat in….....

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