Progressives, Jim Crow, and Selective Amnesia
25th May 2010
The Times editorial and other media pronouncements have perpetuated a drastic misreading of history and of government’s role in ending racial discrimination in this nation. This history is far more nuanced than is widely assumed. At the center of the Jim Crow system lay the “Jim Crow laws.” They were indeed laws, i.e., requirements that persons and businesses and government agencies must practice racial discrimination or face civil or criminal penalties. In other words, government had bolstered discrimination instead of suppressing it. For example, the famous 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which endorsed “separate but equal” treatment in railroad travel and eventually in other spheres such as public education, was about whether an 1890 state law in Louisiana requiring segregation was constitutional. The court said it was.
The Jim Crow system did not start in the South. It first arose in the North (although the term dates only from the early 20th century) as a way to deal with free blacks, including ex-slaves. After the Civil War ended slavery in the South, some politicians rallied poor whites and newly freed blacks in support of economic populism, while others sought different forms of accommodation that stopped well short of systematic, state-enforced racial separation. It was only in the last two decades or so of the 19th century—especially in the 1890s—that the Southern states enacted laws to force a level of segregation that had not arisen spontaneously, creating the rigid legal apparatus that some people still remember from the first half of the 20th century. Far from forming the vanguard of segregation, businesses tended to lag, with the railroads particularly notable for their persistence in maintaining a substantial degree of integration until forced by law to halt their practices.