In 1896 the Reconstruction era was unequivocally dead when the U.S. Supreme Court officially sanctioned Jim Crow in Plessy v. Ferguson. The result was a very dark and scary period for blacks in America. Some scholars have even argued that this period was worse than slavery. Under slavery blacks were considered property and their masters had an interest in protecting their investments against the cruelties of other whites. However, during Jim Crow, there was no such incentive and blacks were free to be brutalized.
As a result, the law was able to victimize blacks by being paradoxically proactive in some instances and passive in others. The law proactively harmed blacks when it increased the restrictions placed on them and worsen the punishment for crimes. Conversely, it was a tool of victimization in its passivity, or complicity, in the acceptance of white brutality against blacks. The law seldom, if ever, punished the extra-judicious actions, such as lynching, committed by whites against blacks. What the law achieved in its proactive and passive stance, and what I will discuss further below, was the re-enslavement of blacks via the criminalization of blackness and the continued oppression of blacks through white terrorism. However, the laws harshness and complicity also led to the successful political mobilization of blacks during the civil rights movement.
Re-enslavement Of Blacks And The Rise Of The Myth Of Black Criminality
In order to understand the re-enslavement of blacks, you have to first look at the very law that freed blacks. The 13th Amendment is the shortest of all the amendments, but has been so crucial to black freedom not because of what it prohibited, but because of what it did not prohibit. The 13th Amendment outlaws involuntary servitude except for those convicted of a felony. Whether intentionally or unknowingly, the Amendment provided the means by which former slave masters, and the white population at large, could re-enslaved blacks: by turning them into criminals.
This was achieved through the creation of legislation such as vagrancy laws. Vagrancy was the offense of being unemployed or unable to prove employment at a given moment.[1] Although these laws were not explicitly restricted to blacks, they were almost exclusively applied against blacks. By the end of 1865, every southern state except Arkansas and Tennessee had passed laws outlawing vagrancy.[2] These laws included such requirements that blacks workers enter into a contract with white farmers by January 1 of every year or risk arrest; or black workers could not legally be hired until they produced discharge papers from their former employer.[3]
The potential penalty awaiting all those who did not adhere to the capricious requirements of the vagrancy and similar laws was to be hired out as laborers. This is what was known as convict leasing.[4] Whenever a black worker, primarily black men, were accused and then convicted of crimes, they were sentences to jail time. While serving their time, private parties would lease the prisoners out to serve as laborers. This saved the jail money in housing cost, and it brought in revenue. The prisoner would serve the duration of his sentence, or a significant portion of it, with private enterprises working as cheap labor.
In addition to black workers being forced to work for white businessmen and farmers, there was the rise in the perception of black criminality. By 1890 the prison population grew to 19,000 in the South with blacks constituting 90% of that population. This was not due to a spike in black lawlessness, but the result of the law encroaching upon black life. Crime became associated with blackness. Sadly, that remains a perception vestige of the legacy of this period. This perception also validated the continued reign of white terrorism during this period.
Continued White Terrorist Activity
The era of Jim Crow, on one hand criminalized blackness, but on the other hand it decriminalized white lawlessness. In light of the removal of federal troops in the south, and failure of the federal government to adequately prosecute the KKK, whites were emboldened to continue their terror as they sought to redeem the lost cause of the civil war.[5] They engaged in terrorism in numerous ways, but two are important to note here: (1) Devastation of thriving black communities and (2) lynchings.
Despite the terror and inequalities that plagued blacks during this period, there existed many successful black communities. These included cities like Durham, North Carolina, Goldsboro, Florida and Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma. All these cities had vibrant, self-sustaining black communities at one point. Perhaps the most successful was Greenwood, a community in Tulsa, also known as Black Wall Street. Founded by a distant relative of mine, O.W. Gurley, Greenwood held great wealth, culture and innovation.[6] It was precisely the type of environment set to produce generational wealth and success; a bastion of how life could be for blacks. Unfortunately, the hope that fueled Greenwood and cities like it, also served to fuel white fear and violence.
Many black cities were destroyed by white action either through violence or political maneuvering. In Durham, for instance, the white political structure was able to stymie black progress by building Highway 147 down the middle of the city. In Goldsboro, Florida, the white lawmaker Forrest Lake stole the land by dissolving the city’s charter and incorporating it into the city of Sanford, Florida. Greenwood’s demise was as grandiose as its existence.
In 1921 the white residents of Tulsa committed a racial pogrom on the blacks of Greenwood, burning and destroying property as well as killing approximately three hundred people, with most being blacks. This attack was so egregious that the whites used planes to drop bombs on the black community. The great wealth and promise of the community was lost, never to be rebuilt again. These acts were not just bad because they killed people and destroyed the community. They were also egregious in that they disrupted legacies and potential for generational wealth. Many families were faced with a major setback when their wealth was lost and they had to start again.
In addition to the destruction of black communities, white terrorism used lynching as a method of oppression. Lynchings were extra-judicious acts of violence enacted by whites against blacks. While whites believed their actions propagated justice, lynching was about control not justice. As Ida B Wells, a great anti-lynching activist, stated lynching was “an excuse to get rid of negroes who were acquiring wealth and property.” These acts of terror were often committed on Sunday’s after church in a somewhat religious fashion. Rarely were the instigators of such violence prosecuted. Indeed, law enforcement officers were frequently present and partook in lynchings.
Although lynchings were a part of the nadir in black history, this horror also helped spark political and social activism and mobilization. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), for instance, was an organization founded to address, among other issues, the horrors of lynching. The NAACP helped pave the way for later activism, grooming future leaders like Rosa Parks. Parks served as a secretary in her local NAACP chapter, investigating rape accusations by black women against white men. Later, her civil disobedience on a bus one day in 1955 led to what is commonly known as the Civil Rights Movement, a period of great black political mobilization.
Black Political Mobilization
Blacks have been politically mobilized at least since Reconstruction. As noted in Part IV(b) of this series, it was the mobilization of the Committee of Citizens in Louisiana that led to the Plessy decision. Unfortunately, their efforts were unsuccessful. Nonetheless, the will and ability to engage in collective action were there within the black community.
It would not be until about fifty years after Plessy that black political mobilization would again reach the US Supreme Court and address the issue of segregation in a major way. In 1954, the Supreme Court held in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation was unconstitutional; that separate was inherently unequal. This brought an end to de jure segregation.
Despite the court’s pronouncement, whites were in no rush to integrate. That is why the next year Rosa Parks protested Montgomery’s segregated bus system and started the Montgomery Bus Boycott, that grew into the Civil Rights Movement. By the end of the movement Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which were much like the ones enacted nearly one hundred years prior. Although the movement brought great progress, it was also coupled with white backlash (whitelash) and hostility that is currently spilling out into our country’s political landscape.
As I move to the final installment of this series, we must wonder how secure are the laws of the Civil Rights Movement? If they are, in some respects, a recapitulation of previous laws that were overturned or ignored, then what solace should we find in them? Is it just enough to have laws? We will consider this as we look to the current state of these laws and uncover how they have already been greatly eroded.
–Until Next Time–
Palooke
[1] Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name, 1. Anchor Books: New York. 2008. See also film adaptation Slavery by Another Name.
[2] Ibid at 53.
[3] Ibid.
[4] See Blackmon, supra note 1, for further information on convict leasing.
[5] The Lost Cause, refers to idea by southerners and southern sympathizers that the civil war should have never been fought. That the federal government should have allowed the south to exercise states rights. This idea also alludes to the “good old days” during slavery when everyone knew their place. See Dr. Brent Morris lecture on Reconstruction.
[6] For further information refer to The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Riot of 1921 by Tim Madigan.
This article was originally published on November 18, 2016. It is part Part V in a six part series on the history of Black Rights in America.
