The Jim Crow Laws and Racism in United States History (4 page)

An 1890 Louisiana statute segregated races on trains. Passengers could enter only those cars assigned to their own race. The Louisiana train law was not unusual in the South, but it was particularly notable. Blacks and whites had lived in relative harmony in New Orleans. The city had many residents of mixed blood. These creoles were often quite wealthy. Before the Civil War, some had owned slaves.

Louisiana’s 1890 law posed a threat to the security of these relatively well-off citizens. They decided to fight the act. Louis Martinet, a black lawyer and newspaper man, took action. He gathered sixteen other black Louisianans and established the Citizens Committee to Test the Constitutionality of the Separate Car Law. On October 10, 1891, the committee hired lawyer James A. Walker to handle the case in Louisiana courts. Albion Tourgee, a white attorney from Ohio, would argue the case if it went to the United States Supreme Court.

Daniel F. Desdunes, the son of a committee member, volunteered to be arrested and brought to court. The court, however, dismissed his case. Desdunes had bought a ticket for a destination outside of Louisiana. The Louisiana Supreme Court ruled that the law did not apply to interstate travel.

The committee then selected Homer Plessy. This time, it made sure the rider had a destination in Louisiana. It is possible that the train company knew about and approved of this action. After all, the law was costing train companies money. Extra cars placed on a train to preserve segregation cost money, even if those cars were not first-class accommodations.

Martinet expressed confidence that a court would strike down the discriminatory law. “Jim Crow is dead as a door nail,” he predicted.
¹

On June 7, 1892, Homer Plessy boarded a car reserved for whites on the East Louisiana Railway. When he refused to leave, Plessy was arrested and taken to the local jail. The case went before Judge John H. Ferguson of the criminal court of the Parish of New Orleans. Walker claimed the decisions against Plessy were unfair on several grounds. First, the law itself was unclear. It was unclear where light-skinned blacks belonged. Second, the lawyer said the law gave unwarranted powers to train conductors, who had to determine the race of passengers. Finally, Plessy’s lawyers claimed that the law violated the Fourteenth Amendment, because it put blacks in a lesser position in society. Plessy’s lawyer charged that the segregation law was passed in order to promote the comfort of whites only, not the “general comfort” specified in the law. After all, black nurses were allowed on “whites only” cars—if they were taking care of white passengers. The state’s attorneys argued that the law was created to avoid fights between blacks and whites in railroad cars.

That November, Judge Ferguson ruled against Plessy. The
New Orleans Times-Picayune
commented, “It is hoped that what [Judge Ferguson] says will have some effect on the silly Negroes who are trying to fight this law. The sooner they drop their so-called crusade against ‘the Jim Crow car’ . . . the better for them.”
²

Plessy’s attorneys expected this loss. They likewise were expecting defeat in the Louisiana Supreme Court. After all, Chief Justice Francis Nicholls was the former governor who had signed the segregation bill into law. He along with the other justices upheld the Louisiana law in December 1892. Justice Charles Fenner said it was not discriminatory because whites, as well as blacks, could not enter the other race’s car. He did not mention that few, if any, whites would want to go to an inferior facility.

Tourgee planned to appeal the case to the United States Supreme Court. But he was in no hurry to do so. Tourgee commented to Martinet in 1893 that at least five justices were opposed to their cause. Only Justice John Harlan appeared to favor blacks’ rights. Besides, appeals cost money. Tourgee and his allies had to continue fundraising efforts.

Tourgee submitted the case to the United States Supreme Court in 1895. It was argued on April 13, 1896. A month later, the Court announced its decision. By a 7–1 vote, it upheld the Louisiana law.

Judge Henry Billings Brown wrote the majority opinion. Biographer Francis A. Helminski claimed that Brown held a low opinion of blacks, women, Jews, and immigrants. Brown said that blacks and whites should have equal facilities, but “If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane.”
³

Harlan, the Kentucky-born former slave owner, cast the dissenting vote. “There is no caste system here,” he wrote. “Our Constitution is color blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect to civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.”
⁴
He added, “The thin disguise of ‘equal’ accommodations for passengers in railroad coaches will not mislead anyone, nor atone for the wrong this day done.”
⁵

Homer Plessy paid the twenty-five-dollar fine, then disappeared into history. His name lives on in a decision that influenced the nation for half a century. The doctrine that emerged from
Plessy
v.
Ferguson
became known as separate but equal. Blacks could be kept away from whites, as long as both races had comparable facilities. Southern governments strictly enforced the “separate.” They all but ignored the “equal.”

Chapter 5

ACTION OR ACCOMMODATION

Booker T. Washington had reason to be nervous on September 18, 1895. The young college president was about to give a major speech. He would address the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta. He gave the speech as though he were speaking to other blacks. However, the speech was really directed to whites. “Cast down your bucket where you are,” he said, advising blacks not to leave the farms where they worked.
¹
He also advised blacks not to worry about segregation: “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the five fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”
²
This speech was widely quoted. It helped make Washington a national figure and black spokesman.

Washington believed that, through hard work and economic achievement, blacks could achieve equal status with whites. The formula had worked for him. Born to a slave woman and an unknown white man, he took the surname Washington after George Washington. When his mother told him that whites discouraged blacks from reading, he became determined to learn how to read and write. At sixteen, after working several jobs, he walked five hundred miles to attend Hampton Institute in Virginia.

Hampton was the nation’s leading industrial (vocational) school for blacks. Washington appreciated his time there. In 1881, he became president of a small industrial school in Tuskegee, Alabama. Washington worked to make the Tuskegee Institute follow the Hampton model. Tuskegee had only two small buildings and a few teachers when Washington took over. His work turned it into the largest black institution in the country. By 1906, it would have fifteen hundred students and a staff of five hundred.

The institute did not teach fine arts, philosophy, or languages. Instead, Tuskegee taught male students to become blacksmiths, bricklayers, and carpenters. The school improved many farming skills. George Washington Carver, the nation’s leading agricultural scientist, taught there. Women took classes in cooking and sewing.

Washington’s school taught social skills such as cleanliness, promptness, good manners, and character building. It also taught blacks to show proper respect to whites, obey contracts, and respect private property. These were the lessons Washington considered necessary to get along in a white-dominated world.

Booker T. Washington’s influence showed in more than Tuskegee. In 1900, he founded the National Negro Business League. This group offered funds and advice to help black businesses prosper, In many cases, the league was very helpful. In 1900, there were only four blackowned banks. That number grew to fifty-six in 1911.

“One of the Most Wonderful Men”

The lessons and philosophy taught at Tuskegee were what Booker T. Washington explained in his Atlanta speech. For the next twenty years, he would repeat the same themes thousands of times in articles and speeches. He stressed industrial education, self-help, and good character. Only with economic strength, Washington claimed, would blacks gain respect and power from whites.

Washington practiced what became known as accommodation. He did whatever had to be done to get along with whites. He seldom wasted an opportunity to praise anything whites did to help African Americans. He largely kept publicly silent about injustices. He told blacks that their best friends were the “better class” of whites.
³
However, he often criticized other blacks. His speeches mentioned black responsibilities but seldom black rights. He occasionally told “darkie” stories, using negative racial stereotypes. He once wrote, “There was much in slavery besides its hardships and cruelties, much that was tender, human, and beautiful.”
⁴

Some leading African Americans in the early 1900s called for voting rights and an end to segregation. Booker T. Washington was not one of them. He did not oppose literacy tests for would-be black voters, as long as those standards also applied to whites. Nor did he speak out against laws that kept blacks out of restaurants or first-class train cars. Washington himself was not a victim of these injustices. He traveled in first-class train cars with white passengers. While Alabama kept almost all blacks from the ballot box, Washington and other Tuskegee leaders were allowed to register and vote. This new breed of blacks seemed nonthreatening to Southern whites.

Washington was widely acclaimed after the 1895 speech. Harvard University gave him an honorary doctorate in 1896. He became the first African American to be so awarded. President Theodore Roosevelt invited him to dine at the White House in 1901. The president made Washington his unofficial advisor regarding black affairs. Roosevelt and successor William Howard Taft followed Washington’s guidance on black political appointments. Washington’s autobiography,
Up from Slavery
, became a best-seller.

Northern donors turned to the Tuskegee president. Oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller donated to the university. Steel magnate Andrew Carnegie gave $600,000 in bonds. Carnegie described Washington as “certainly one of the most wonderful men living or who has ever lived.”
⁵

Washington shared the philanthropic spoils. He recommended white donations to other schools, but only those that shared his philosophies.

Washington also had great power in the black press. He often claimed it would be improper for him to run a newspaper (even though he was part owner of the influential
New York Age
). However, he was known to make generous “donations” (critics would call them bribes) to papers that supported his views.

There was another side to Washington that the public did not see. He secretly funneled thousands of dollars to help court cases on issues such as black voting rights and the right of blacks to serve on juries. He quietly helped a lobbyist block a bill that would have allowed railroad segregation in the North.

When Booker T. Washington died in 1915, he received a great deal of praise. But his philosophy of accommodation to whites largely died with him. Although some might have regretted the passing of the man, few mourned his philosophy. If he expected white approval of black economic advancement, he was mistaken. Jim Crow was just as alive in 1915 as it had been in 1895.

Fighting “the Rope and the Torch”

Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart typified Booker T. Washington’s philosophy. They worked hard and led clean lives. The three owned the People’s Grocery in a Memphis, Tennessee, suburb. This new grocery cut into the business of a white-owned store.

In 1893, a group of boys was playing marbles in front of a store. A squabble among the boys grew into a fight involving black and white adults. Police arrested the three grocers. A mob seized them in jail, then murdered the three outside of town.

The killings appalled Ida B. Wells, a young African-American newspaper editor. Wells, of the Memphis
Free Speech,
had been a friend of Moss’s. She proclaimed, “He was murdered, with no more consideration than if he had been a dog, because he as a man defended his property from attack.”
⁶

Wells spoke out against the grocers’ deaths and other lynchings in her paper. She became the most vocal critic of segregation in the 1890s. She wrote, “Nowhere in the civilized world save the United States of America do men, possessing all civil and political power, go out in bands of 50 to 5,000 to hunt down, hang, or burn to death a single individual, unarmed and absolutely powerless.”
⁷
When Wells refused to retract her statements, white supremacists destroyed her newspaper office.

Wells formed the African-American Council in 1899. This group stressed action rather than accommodation. The organization criticized Booker T. Washington for statements the council claimed seemed to excuse lynchings. Washington’s tactics alienated many black leaders, including his most influential rival.

In 1895, William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Du Bois became the first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard. The following year, he published
The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870
, a study of efforts to stop the slave trade. In 1898, Du Bois became a professor of history and economics at Atlanta University. There, he organized an annual conference to discuss black problems. Unlike Washington, Du Bois stressed liberal arts at his university. He sought training for the “talented tenth,” the most promising black students.
⁸