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
Jim Crow Laws: The Segregation of the African-American in the United States of the 19th Century Perhaps one of the most discussed events of the history of the United States is undoubtedly the situation of African-American individuals during the 19th and the first half of the 20th century. From the moment the first black slaves arrived to Virginia in the first part of the 17th century, racism and unjustified violence and
The optical business and the element of glass here appear once again to depict the domain of whites as superior to what a black person is expected to know and learn. In Part 3 of the essay, glass appears again in the form of a weapon in the hands of white people. The narrator is hit with an empty whisky bottle by drunk white men who at first appear helpful.
E.B. DuBois arose as a prominent voice calling for more direct civil confrontation. It is impossible to judge who was right given the context in which the two sides were working, but an analysis of how history played out reveals both the wisdom and the shortcomings of Washington's approach to equality. Given that it took half a century following Washington's death for the passage of the Civil Rights Act, especially when
One of the major components of these Jim Crow laws was disenfranchisement which was "largely the work of rural and urban white elites who sought to reassure" whites in the south that white supremacy was the law of the land. As a result, lynching and other forms of violence against blacks were endorsed, encouraged and rationalized in the minds of most southern whites (Rabinowitz, 168). A prominent spokesman against African-American
Civil Rights Jim Crow Jim Crow laws were a set of "black codes" designed to perpetuate a system of racism and near-slavery for African-Americans, predominantly in the South. The Jim Crow laws existed from the end of the Civil War until the Civil Rights movement -- nearly a century. Jim Crow laws represent a clear case of how racism becomes institutionalized. In the case of the Jim Crow laws, racism was embedded
When he became president through the assassination of President Kennedy, he not only accepted the civil rights agenda of President Kennedy but he was successful in passing pivotal legislation. Through shrewd deal making and lobbying of senators he was able to get a bill passed which prohibited segregation in places involved in interstate commerce. The following year when attempts were made to restore voting rights to blacks in the south
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