Segregation within southern society was a way of life, layers upon layers of ignorance, supremacy and stubbornness encrusted the white southern attitude towards the African-American proportion of the population. It is crucial however to consider the process of segregation before there is an attempt to determine the events that lead to the dismantling of it. It is then of particular significance that segregation is defined in order to resolve how it was built and what events took place to demolish it. Segregation in itself, contains many characteristics that lead to its wider appearance. Many circumstances were highly significant in the dismantling of the legalized segregation, that was deeply rooted in the twentieth century south. Segregation was the enforced separation of different racial groups within southern society, however during the twentieth century the gusts of change where blowing throughout the South. To investigate how the transformation of segregation in the American south happened, it is important to define the process of segregation during the years 1865-1950s. In doing so, we can then understand why it was important for the welfare of the South as a whole, to give up the deeply implanted attitude that was linked to the separate white and black spheres. Southern culture as a whole, was protected by their own embedded culture of segregation. Old ways of thinking were stubbornly embroiled in southern culture, this is particularly shown in 1963 when asked about segregation and the civil rights movement, the Atlanta resident A.Y chancellor remarked that supporters of the movement were completely delusional. “Are you so foolish as to think that you can undo, overnight, custom and society which has prevailed for these... ... middle of paper ... ...outhern culture. Bibliography Secondary readings Ayers, E. L., Southern Crossing: A history of the American south 1877-1906 (Oxford, 1998) p. 157-181 Sklaroff, L. R., Constructing G.I Joe Louis: Cultural Soloutions to the “negro problem” during world war II Nasstrom, K. L., Beginning and endings: life stories and the periodization of the civil rights movement in Journal of American History Sokol, J., There goes my everything: white southerners in the age of civil rights, 1945-1975 (USA, 2006) p. William Harris, “Etiquette, Lynching and Racial Boundaries in Southern History: A Mississippi Example,” in American Historical Review 100:2 (Apr. 1995): 387-410. JSTOR Internet Sources Shepard & B. Stonaker, ‘Segregation’ (www.kawvalley.k12.ks.us/brown_v_board/segregation.htm) (19 Mar. 2011). Films All the King’s Men (1949) February One (2003)
Hale, Grace Elizabeth. Making whiteness: the culture of segregation in the south, 1890-1940. New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1998
The book, “My Soul Is Rested” by Howell Raines is a remarkable history of the civil rights movement. It details the story of sacrifice and audacity that led to the changes needed. The book described many immeasurable moments of the leaders that drove the civil rights movement. This book is a wonderful compilation of first-hand accounts of the struggles to desegregate the American South from 1955 through 1968. In the civil rights movement, there are the leaders and followers who became astonishing in the face of chaos and violence. The people who struggled for the movement are as follows: Hosea Williams, Rosa Parks, Ralph Abernathy, and others; both black and white people, who contributed in demonstrations for freedom rides, voter drives, and
As an unabridged version of his other book, Eric Foner sets out to accomplish four main goals in A Short History of Reconstruction. These points enable the author to provide a smaller, but not neglectful, account of the United States during Reconstruction. By exploring the essence of the black experience, examining the ways in which Southern society evolved, the development of racial attitudes and race relations, and the complexities of race and class in the postwar South, as well as the emergence during the Civil War and Reconstruction of a national state possessing vastly expanded authority and a new set of purposes, Foner creates a narrative that encompasses some of the major issues during Reconstruction. Additionally, the author provides
Neil McMillen’s book, Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow categorically examines the plight of African Americans living in Mississippi during the era of Jim Crow. McMillen, a professor at the University of Southern Mississippi, describes the obstacles that African Americans dealt with in the fields of education, labor, mob violence, and politics. Supplementing each group with data tables, charts and excerpts from Southern newspapers of the day, McMillen saturates the reader with facts that help to understand the problems faced by black Mississippians in the years after Reconstruction.
The original edition of The Strange Career of Jim Crow had as its thesis that segregation and Jim Crow Laws were a relative late comer in race relations in the South only dating to the late 1880s and early 1890s. Also part of that thesis is that race relations in the South were not static, that a great deal of change has occurred in the dynamics of race relations. Woodward presents a clear argument that segregation in the South did not really start forming until the 1890s. One of the key components of his argument is the close contact of the races during slavery and the Reconstruction period. During slavery the two races while not living harmoniously with each other did have constant contact with each other in the South. This c...
Although some of Woodward’s peripheral ideas may have been amended in varying capacities his central and driving theme, often referred to as the “Woodward Thesis,” still remains intact. This thesis states that racial segregation (also known as Jim Crow) in the South in the rigid and universal form that it had taken by 1954 did not begin right after the end of the Civil War, but instead towards the end of the century, and that before Jim Crow appeared there was a distinct period of experimentation in race relations in the South. Woodward’s seminal his...
Assumptions from the beginning, presumed the Jim Crow laws went hand in hand with slavery. Slavery, though, contained an intimacy between the races that the Jim Crow South did not possess. Woodward used another historian’s quote to illustrate the familiarity of blacks and whites in the South during slavery, “In every city in Dixie,’ writes Wade, ‘blacks and whites lived side by side, sharing the same premises if not equal facilities and living constantly in each other’s presence.” (14) Slavery brought about horrible consequences for blacks, but also showed a white tolerance towards blacks. Woodward explained the effect created from the proximity between white owners and slaves was, “an overlapping of freedom and bondage that menaced the institution of slavery and promoted a familiarity and association between black and white that challenged caste taboos.” (15) The lifestyle between slaves and white owners were familiar, because of the permissiveness of their relationship. His quote displayed how interlocked blacks...
In Melton A. McLaurin’s “Separate Pasts; Growing Up White in the Segregated South,” segregation is the obvious theme for the whole book. In the 1950s south, segregation was not uncommon and seen as normal. The 1950’s though, were on the verge of change. Change meaning the civil rights movement and the fight for the walls of segregation to be knocked down. However, McLaurin gives powerful insight to segregation in his hometown of Wade, North Carolina, where it “existed unchallenged and nearly unquestioned in the rural south” in the early 1950s. McLaurin portrays segregation as a normal way of life from a white viewpoint, which I believe he does effectively through memories of his childhood.
During the four decades following reconstruction, the position of the Negro in America steadily deteriorated. The hopes and aspirations of the freedmen for full citizenship rights were shattered after the federal government betrayed the Negro and restored white supremacist control to the South. Blacks were left at the mercy of ex-slaveholders and former Confederates, as the United States government adopted a laissez-faire policy regarding the “Negro problem” in the South. The era of Jim Crow brought to the American Negro disfranchisement, social, educational, and occupational discrimination, mass mob violence, murder, and lynching. Under a sort of peonage, black people were deprived of their civil and human rights and reduced to a status of quasi-slavery or “second-class” citizenship. Strict legal segregation of public facilities in the southern states was strengthened in 1896 by the Supreme Court’s decision in the Plessy vs. Ferguson case. Racists, northern and southern, proclaimed that the Negro was subhuman, barbaric, immoral, and innately inferior, physically and intellectually, to whites—totally incapable of functioning as an equal in white civilization.
Bynum, Victoria E. “”White Negroes” in Segregated Mississipi: Miscegenation, Racial Identity, and the Law.” The Journal of Southern History 64.2 (1998) 247-276.
Before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, segregation in the United States was commonly practiced in many of the Southern and Border States. This segregation while supposed to be separate but equal, was hardly that. Blacks in the South were discriminated against repeatedly while laws did nothing to protect their individual rights. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ridded the nation of this legal segregation and cleared a path towards equality and integration. The passage of this Act, while forever altering the relationship between blacks and whites, remains as one of history’s greatest political battles.
The African-American Years: Chronologies of American History and Experience. Ed. Gabriel Burns Stepto. New York: Charles Scribner 's Sons, 2003.
Harrison, Robert Pogue. “The Civil Rights Movement” . Chicago: U of Chicago, 2014. 98-111. Print.
Schneider, M. (2002). We return fighting : the civil rights movement in the Jazz Age. Boston: Northeastern University Press
During this time, the idea of segregation was a very controversial topic among the c...