Blair Kelley tells the story of several turn-of-the-century desegregation campaigns. Many readers will be aware that black Americans mounted successful boycott campaigns to desegregate urban transit systems, particularly from August Meier and Elliot Rudwick?s 1969 article.? Kelley looks at several of these, and takes issue with Meier and Rudwick?s depiction of them as essentially conservative and middle-class, in contrast to the more radical and mass-based Montgomery bus boycott of 1955. His story shows the complex problems that arose in black communities divided along lines of class, ideology, and complexion. Meier and Rudwick told their story in a journal article. Though Kelley provides a ?thick description? social history, he probably could …show more content…
One of Homer Plessy?s complaints against the Louisiana segregation law was that it deprived him of his reputation as a white man. (Plessy had one black great grandparent — an ?octoroon,? in the parlance of the day.) Kelley notes that this part of Plessy?s plea was ?perhaps too clever. His approach fell short of offering a more universal solution to the problem of Jim Crow? (p. 80). It also reflected the Creole elite?s failure to work with the …show more content…
Years ago, economist Jennifer Roback showed that history confirmed the economic argument that rational businessmen would oppose the costs of segregation, and that southern railroads helped fund Plessy?s challenge to the Louisiana segregation law. Kelley recognizes this, but is so patently biased against business (his heroes, after all, are the proletarians whom Meier and Rudwick neglected) that he puts the worst possible face on what he calls ?this unholy alliance? of black citizen groups with the companies who ?viewed Jim Crow cars as an expensive inconvenience? (p.
...isely. This book has been extremely influential in the world of academia and the thinking on the subject of segregation and race relations in both the North and the South, but more importantly, it has influenced race relations in practice since it was first published. However, Woodward’s work is not all perfect. Although he does present his case thoroughly, he fails to mention the Negroes specifically as often as he might have. He more often relies on actions taken by whites as his main body of evidence, often totally leaving out the actions that may have been taken by the black community as a reaction to the whites’ segregationist policies.
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.
Making Whiteness: the culture of segregation in the south, 1890-1940 is the work of Grace Elizabeth Hale. In her work, she explains the culture of the time between 1890 and 1940. In her book she unravels how the creation of the ‘whiteness’ of white Southerners created the ‘blackness’ identity of southern African Americans. At first read it is difficult to comprehend her use of the term ‘whiteness’, but upon completion of reading her work, notes included, makes sense. She states that racial identities today have been shaped by segregation, “...the Civil War not only freed the slaves, it freed American racism
Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow immediately became an influential work both in the academic and real worlds because of the dramatic events that coincided with the book’s publication and subsequent revisions. It was inspired from a series of lectures that Woodward delivered at the University of Virginia in 1954 on the Jim Crow policies that the South had reverted to in order to deal with the dynamics of its Negro population. The original publication debuted in 1955, just prior to the explosive events that would occur as part of the civil rights movement climax. Because of these developments in less than a decade, the book’s topic and audience had drastically changed in regard to the times surrounding it. Woodward, realizing the fluidity of history in context with the age, printed a second edition of the book in 1966 to “take advantage of the new perspective the additional years provide” and “to add a brief account of the main developments in ...
Hahn discusses both the well-known struggle against white supremacy and the less examined conflicts within the black community. He tells of the remarkable rise of Southern blacks to local and state power and the white campaign to restore their version of racial order, disenfranchise blacks, and exclude them from politics. Blacks built many political and social structures to pursue their political goals, including organizations such as Union Leagues, the Colored Farmers’ Alliance, chapters of the Republican Party, and emigration organizations. Hahn used this part of the book to successfully recover the importance of black political action shaping their own history.
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...
... newspaper article shown by Woodward gave a picture of how new the idea of segregation was in the South. Woodward put it best when he stated, “The policies of proscription, segregation, and disfranchisement that are often described as the immutable ‘folkways’ of the South, impervious alike to legislative reform and armed intervention, are of a more recent origin.” (65) He wanted to show how the roots of the system were not integrated with slavery. Jim Crow laws and slavery were both horrible institutions, but they existed as two seperate entities. Woodward does not claim the South to be picturesque, because the Jim Crow laws were not established in the region. The South established Jim Crow laws and made them worse than found in the North. Woodward’s goal was not to protect the South’s legacy, but to give a clearer picture of the facts regarding the Jim Crow laws.
C. Vann Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow looks into the emergence of the Jim Crow laws beginning with the Reconstruction era and following through the Civil Rights Movement. Woodward contends that Jim Crow laws were not a part of the Reconstruction or the following years, and that most Jim Crow laws were in place in the North at that particular time. In the South, immediately after the end of slavery, most white southerners, especially the upper classes, were used to the presence and proximity of African Americans. House slaves were often treated well, almost like part of the family, or a favored pet, and many upper-class southern children were raised with the help of a ‘mammy’ or black nursery- maid. The races often mixed in the demi- monde, and the cohabitation of white men and black women were far from uncommon, and some areas even had spe...
Does the name Jim Crow ring a bell? Neither singer nor actor, but actually the name for the Separate but Equal (Jim Crow) Laws of the 1900s. Separate but Equal Laws stated that businesses and public places had to have separate, but equal, facilities for minorities and Caucasian people. Unfortunately, they usually had different levels of maintenance or quality. Lasting hatred from the civil war, and anger towards minorities because they took jobs in the north probably set the foundation for these laws, but it has become difficult to prove. In this essay, I will explain how the Separate but Equal Laws of twentieth century America crippled minorities of that time period forever.
Blair L. M. Kelley’s Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy V. Ferguson tells stories of different desegregation movements on trains and streetcars at the turn of the twentieth century. Her book is the first account that connects the roots of segregation and dissent in the antebellum North, the legal efforts against segregated rails in New Orleans, and the streetcar boycotts in several southern cities. She not only describes the events but also deals with the questions of culture, gender, and leadership and their significant roles in black protests against segregation.
Success was a big part of the Civil Rights Movement. Starting with the year 1954, there were some major victories in favor of African Americans. In 1954, the landmark trial Brown vs. The Board of Education of Topeka Kansas ruled that segregation in public education was unfair. This unanimous Supreme Court decision overturned the prior Plessy vs. Ferguson case during which the “separate but equal” doctrine was created and abused. One year later, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. launched a bus boycott in Montgomery Alabama after Ms. Parks was arrested for not giving up her seat in the “colored section”. This boycott, which lasted more than a year, led to the desegregation of buses in 1956. Group efforts greatly contributed to the success of the movement. This is not only shown by the successful nature of the bus boycott, but it is shown through the success of Martin Luther King’s SCLC or Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The conference was notable for peacefully protesting, nonviolence, and civil disobedience. Thanks to the SCLC, sit-ins and boycotts became popular during this time, adding to the movement’s accomplishments. The effective nature of the sit-in was shown during 1960 when a group of four black college students sat down at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in hopes of being served. While they were not served the first time they commenced their sit-in, they were not forced to leave the establishment; their lack of response to the heckling...
People who were not European back in the 1800s, were considered a lower class than them, they later enslave people from Africa just because and for the next hundreds of years they were slaves. Many people tried to end slavery because the concept was inhuman.And at 1865 the United States banned slavery, but still had the right to mistreat people of color. One of the people who stood up to these rights, Homer plessy, who was ⅛ African because his great-grandmother was from Africa. Plessy was light enough to considered white, but when he people ask him if he was a man of color, he would gladly answer yes. Furthermore, because of Plessy’s actions, it help solidifies the establishment of the Jim Crow era.
San Antonio, Texas is no exception to the inherent racism and Jim Crow law that dictated African American lives soon after Reconstruction. However, one question needs to be asked when analyzing racism, what enables the justification of racism in society? By analyzing the San Antonio Traction Company Correspondence, one can view firsthand accounts of Jim Crow law enforcement and gain insight towards the reasons for the justification of racism. In the early 1940s, the San Antonio Traction Company enforced the racist Jim Crow laws rather than face the consequences of breaking a law, upsetting whites, and opposing the normalized racism in the south at the time.
However, by the end of the 20th Century, women, blacks, and other minorities could be found in the highest echelons of American Society. From the corporate offices of IBM, to the U.S. Supreme Court bench, an obvious ideological revolution bringing integration and acceptance of a variety of human beings had taken place, but only at the expense of great amounts of sweat and blood.... ... middle of paper ... ... Blacks walked miles to work, organized carpools, and despite efforts from the police to discourage this new spark of independence, the boycotts continued for more than a year until in November 1956 the Supreme Court ruled that the Montgomery bus company must desegregate its busses.
Robinson, Jo Ann Gibson, and David J. Garrow. The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: the Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson. Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 1987. Print.