SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
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HISTORY 1302 Theme Five: Jim Crow |
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Peter J. Myers
Associate Professor of History
pmyers@alamo.edu
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HISTORY 1302 Theme Five: Jim Crow |
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Peter J. Myers
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Jim Crow was the name of the racial caste
system which operated primarily, but not exclusively in
southern and border states, between 1877 and
the mid-1960s. Jim Crow was more than a series of rigid
anti-Black laws. It was a way of
life. Under Jim Crow, African Americans were relegated to the
status of second class citizens.
Jim Crow represented the legitimization of anti-Black racism.
Many Christian ministers and theologians taught that Whites were the Chosen people, Blacks were
cursed
to be servants, and God supported racial segregation.
Craniologists, eugenicists, phrenologists, and
Social Darwinists, at every educational level, buttressed the
belief that Blacks were innately intellectually and culturally inferior to Whites.
Pro-segregation politicians gave eloquent speeches on the great danger of integration: the
mongrelization of the White race. Newspaper and magazine writers routinely referred to Blacks
as niggers, coons, and darkies; and worse, their articles reinforced anti-Black stereotypes.
Even children's games portrayed Blacks as inferior beings. All major societal institutions reflected and supported the oppression
of Blacks.
(NOTE: The preceding introduction is from
Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia.) 
The Jim Crow system was undergirded by the following beliefs or rationalizations: Whites
were superior to Blacks in all important ways,
including but not limited to intelligence, morality, and civilized behavior; sexual relations
between Blacks and Whites would produce a mongrel race which would destroy America; treating
Blacks as equals would encourage interracial sexual unions; any activity which suggested social
equality encouraged interracial sexual relations; if necessary, violence must be used to keep
Blacks at the bottom of the racial hierarchy.
Flyover History: Remembering Our Ignored Past
- Volume II
(Exam #2 questions are from articles 16-19 in Flyover History: Remembering Our Ignored Past- Volume II.)
16- Clarksdale
. The false promise of sharecropping leads many to migrate north.Supplemental Readings: Theme #5: Jim Crow
Theme #5: Reconstruction & Jim Crow
(A) Slave to Sharecropper
When the Civil War ended in 1865, a central element of the Southern economy -- slavery -- has been abolished. While many white southerners including author Margaret Mitchell reminisced about: There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind..., former slaves -also known as freedmen- wanted fair wages and a chance to make a living for themselves and their families. However, former masters attempted to maintain profits. Thus, an inherently unfair system of sharing labor and land developed in the post-bellum South- Sharecropping.
Most former slaves were illiterate, with little understanding of the law. Thus, they entered into "working agreements" that took complete advantage over them. And in a short period of time came Jim Crow, lynchings, and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan to keep black people "in their place." The southern economic and political culture was a caste system- an apartheid. Set up to keep people separate and unequal- economically, legally, polttically, socially, and culturally. It succeeded...if success can be marked by gross inequalities.
After reading Clarksdale from Nicholas Lemann's book- THE PROMISED LAND: The Great Black Migration and How it Changed America, answer these questions: What was the number one export in the South after the Civil War? What was sharecropping? How was sharecropping "a compromise"? Why did blacks embrace sharecropping at first? Why did this change over time? How did planters explain the poverty experienced by sharecroppers?
Read A Sharecrop Contract (1882). How was sharecropping "a trap"? What other choices did poor, illiterate people have in the post-Civil War South? Why did the victorious North not do more to reconstruct the southern racial caste system? How did Social Darwinism contribute to northern racism? Who was Thomas Nast? How did he portray the racial issues of the South? View the video clip The Negro Question for some answers.
(B) Without Sanctuary: Lynchings in America
(NOTE: If you select this assignment, it will count for two assignments for Theme #5. Submit a minimum 300 word essay, while answering the assignment questions. You will need to answer one addtional essay for this theme.)
With the 1998
dragging death of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas, American citizens
expressed their outrage that such a hate crime occurred in this day and age. View the website
site: Without Sanctuary and consider the fact that hate crimes have been an intregal part of our past. What is a lynching? How does it differ from the term murder? Describe the type of individual who would most likely be lynched in Jim Crow America. Why was such a person lynched? Why would photos of lynchings be made into postcards? What is a sanctuary? Why is this website titled Without Sanctuary?
View the Interactive Map- and link to Lynching By State and Race: 1882-1968. Where did lynchings occur in the greatest numbers? Who was more apt to be lynched in the South? in the North? Why the difference? Consider the Interactive Map- Population and Migration to answer this question. What have you learned from doing this assignment?
(C) Who was Ida B. Wells?
(NOTE: If you select this assignment, it will count for two assignments for Theme #4. Submit a minimum 300 word essay, while answering the assignment questions. You will need to answer one addtional essay for this theme.)
I was working on my laundry as I was reading for my information on the essay I am now writing. I was sitting across from an elderly black woman. She said she was 96 years of age and was from Alabama, "borned and raised" were her exact words. I started a conversation with her by asking her if she knew who Ida B. Wells was. She was so polite, spoke so softly and had a very worn but sweet face. She looked at me, smiled and said "of course of knowed who she is". She was like a Rosa Parks. Then she proceeded to tell me that Jim Crow was a period when they were still fighting for their freedom. This said she had been fighting all her life. The only difference between she and I was her color. In my collective thoughts, I couldn't imagine in my wildest dreams how someone could hurt her solely because of her color. I wondered how many innocent people as herself had been done injustice and judged by others because they were of their color.
-Karen Armstrong (Palo Alto College web student- 2003)
Ida B. Wells was the most outspoken of African American critics of lynching.
Yet few contemporary Americans
have ever heard of her and what she attempted to do- end the terrorist murders committed primarily
by southern white citizens on minorities.
(View
The History of Lynching for text and photos of such atrocities.)
However, with all that Ida B. Wells said, wrote, and did she has been relegated to
the footnotes of American history. In Wells's 1892 pamphlet
Southern Horrors, Wells told her own
story and drew on numerous other examples related to lynching. After reading Against All Odds, consider whether or nor you ever learned about Ida B. Wells before? If you did, how did you hear about
her and from whom? If you had not, why do you suppose Wells's name has not been discussed with
the likes of such Civil Rights people as Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr.?
What life experiences led Ida B. Wells into a life of activism against injustices? What did Wells's investigation and documentation of lyniching in America uncover? Why did it astoinish some and enrage others? What issues do you feel passionate enough about today that would cause you to actively work for those causes in the tradition of Ida B. Wells?
(D) Strange Fruit (song)
Billie Holiday's signature song,
Strange Fruit, written by Lewis Allen in 1938, described the racial hatred that
afflicted America. What is the song's message? Research the history of the song through the recent PBS documentary
Strange Fruit. Watch Biilie Holiday's rendition of
Strange Fruit. Link to Protest Music . What historical events have triggered
protest music?
What issues was the music designed to address? How effective has protest music been through American history? Who is a recent recording artist that has been (is)
considered "daring" for bringing a social issue to public attention via his or her music?
What might still be a "taboo" issue today? Why?
(E) "All right then, I’ll go to hell" - and tore it up.
Why was (and still is) Mark Twain's work The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Huckleberry Finn has been debated, attacked and censored ever since its publication in 1885. Written in dialect, Huckleberry Finn’s power lies in the characters’ own "voices." As the story begins, Huck says:
You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly...
Set before the Civil War, it is the story of two runaways - a white boy, Tom’s friend Huckleberry Finn – who is fleeing civilization – and a black man, Jim, who is running away from slavery. Huck’s experiences with Jim make him question everything he has been taught about black people and slavery, about right and wrong, good and evil.
When Huck awakens to hear Jim crying for his lost children, he realizes for the first time that
I guess Jim misses his family the way white folk’d do their’n.
Later, Huck feels he has been wrong to help Jim escape and writes a letter to Jim’s owner
telling him where his fleeing property can be found. But before mailing it he hesitates,
remembering Jim’s kindness on their trip on the river and how Jim had said that Huck was the
best friend he’d ever had in the world, "and the only one he’s got now..."
Huck continues: ... and then I happened to look around and see that paper. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: "All right then, I’ll go to hell" - and tore it up.
(NOTE: If you select this assignment, it will count for two assignments for Theme #5. Submit a minimum 300 word essay, while answering the assignment questions. You will need to answer one addtional essay for this theme.)
No crime in American history-- let alone a crime that never occurred-- produced as many trials, convictions, reversals, and retrials as did an alleged gang rape of two white girls by nine black teenagers on a Southern Railroad freight run on March 25, 1931. Over the course of the two decades that followed, the struggle for justice of the "Scottsboro Boys," as the black teens were called, made celebrities out of anonymities, launched and ended careers, wasted lives, produced heroes, opened southern juries to blacks, exacerbated sectional strife, and divided America's political left.
The Tuskegee Syphilis Study
is one of the least known episodes within twentieth century American history.
While Americans are inundated with the successes of Black America during the month of February...
from the abolishment of slavery through Jackie Robinson's Brooklyn Dodger debut and Rosa Parks
successful campaign for the desegregation of the buses to Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A
Dream" speech, we seldom are taught about the Tulsa Race Riots or lynchings in the United States
or The Tuskegee Syphilis Study.
Read the
The Tuskegee Syphilis Study:
A Hard Lesson Learned
and the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer transcript-
An Apology 65 Years Late.
Suppose you are a high school social studies teacher and were
given the task to teach The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, how would you prepare a lesson plan for sixteen
year olds? Include your goal/s for teaching the lesson and the materials you would utilize in the
classroom.
Visit the Jim Crow Museum of Racist
Memorabilia. Take a Virtual Tour of the Jim Crow Museum.
Read the complete article- What was
Jim Crow?. The following are the
Objectives of the Jim Crow Museum:
In what ways do you think that this website serves its stated objectives? In what ways do you
see room for improvement on the site? What suggestions would you offer to the website's authors?
The Tulsa Race Riot Commission has actively been studying the Tulsa Burning
incident over the past few years. Link to
The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. What new information and
evidence has been uncovered since Jonathan Z. Larsen wrote his article Tulsa Burning?
Why did the white population in Tulsa, Oklahoma rise up against fellow citizens? Why was the Black community such an easy target? What finally brought an end to the violence?
Explain the reasons why this incident in American history has been covered up
for so many years. Why might the people of Tulsa wish to remember and chronicle the terror of these events? Listen to a March 2005 report on National Public Radio regarding "Tulsa Burning":
Tulsa Riot Descendants Look to Reparations. Research if the 2005 United States Supreme Court decided to hear the Tulsa Race Riot Case. If so, what did the Court decide?
I knew if a white woman accused a black man of rape, he was as good as dead."
-Clarence Norris
-Douglas O. Linder, Professor, University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law
From the website
Famous Trials, read about
"The Scottsboro Boys" Trials 1931-1937. What was the evidence presented to convict "The Scottsboro Boys"? How did the prosecution plead the case? Who defended the Scottsboro Boys in the trials? How fair were the trials? Read the United States Supreme Court ruling in
Norris vs. The State of Alabama (1935). On what grounds did the Supreme Court overrule the lower courts' rulings? Do you think that the ultimate outcome of "The Scottsboro Boys" case signified the beginning of the end of Jim Crow and the birth of the Civil Rights movement? Explain.
~ a survivor ~ 
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
W.E.B. DuBois predicted in his 1903 book
The Souls of Black Folk that the problem of the
20th century is the problem of the color-line.
Based on the readings
, what you know about more recent historical events (e.g. Civil Rights struggles of the 1950's and 1960's),
current events, and perhaps through personal experience, the twentieth century did not solve the
problem. Agree or Disagree. Include historical reasoning for your answer. What do you think will be THE DOMESTIC PROBLEM of the 21st century? Provide your reasoning. 
View the 1915 film Birth of a Nation
This D.W. Griffith film was one of the first full length feature films ever made. The plot
surrounds the era of Reconstruction in the South (1865-1877). It's clear from the start that
the former Confederate states were given a raw deal in the aftermath of the Civil War (1861-1865).
According to the film, an organization of men rise to take the South back from Yankee carpetbaggers
and freedmen (former slaves). This fraternal group is the Ku Klux Klan. What is the filmmmaker's
intent? How might a 1915 audience react to Birth of a Nation? What does this film tell
you about white America at the time? Why would President Woodrow Wilson say after seeing the film
that: "It's like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all terribly true."?
How did this film lay the groundwork for such "historically accurate" works like
Gone With the Wind in 1939?