“The Foul Odors of Blacks”

2021 ◽  
pp. 95-114
Author(s):  
Peter Irons
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
South Carolina ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
State Action ◽  
The Public ◽  
Civil Rights Act ◽  
White Resistance ◽  
Blacks And Whites ◽  
Reconstruction Period

This chapter covers the post-Reconstruction period and the Supreme Court’s rejection of laws to protect Blacks’ use of “public accommodations” on an equal basis with Whites, and the Court’s later upholding of Jim Crow laws that required segregation of Blacks and Whites. Congress had passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875, barring discrimination against Blacks’ access to places such as restaurants, theaters, hotels, and railway coaches. Ruling in 1883 in five cases from Kansas, California, Tennessee, New York, and Missouri under the caption of Civil Rights Cases, the Court struck down the “public accommodations” provision, holding that “private” businesses could not be regulated without a showing of “state action” in their operation. This ruling drew a sharp dissent from Justice John Marshall Harlan, who argued that businesses serving the public are subject to regulation. The chapter also recounts violent White resistance to Black voting, with South Carolina senator “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman as leader of a White group known as Red Shirts in murdering Blacks. The chapter concludes with discussion of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1895, holding that Louisiana could provide “separate but equal” railway coaches for Blacks and Whites, over another solitary dissent by Justice Harlan, arguing the Constitution is “color-blind” and protects Blacks from state-imposed discrimination.

scholarly journals “The Negro's Peculiar Work”: Jim Crow and Black Discourses on US Empire, Race, and the African Question, 1877–1900

2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 330-357 ◽  
Author(s):  
JEANNETTE EILEEN JONES
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
South Carolina ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
West Indians ◽  
Present Generation ◽  
Take Back ◽  
The Us ◽  
Emancipation Proclamation ◽  
Keynote Speech

In 1887, T. Thomas Fortune published an editorial, “The Negro's Peculiar Work,” in the black newspaper theNew York Freeman, wherein he reflected on a recent keynote speech delivered by Reverend J. C. Price on 3 January in Columbia, South Carolina, to commemorate Emancipation Day. Price, a member of the Zion Wesley Institute of the AME Zion Church, hailed from North Carolina and his denomination considered him to be “the most popular and eloquent Negro of the present generation.” On the occasion meant to reflect on the meaning of the Emancipation Proclamation (which went into effect on 1 January 1863) for present-day African Americans, Price turned his gaze away from the US towards Africa. In his speech “The American Negro, His Future, and His Peculiar Work” Price declared that African Americans had a duty to redeem Africans and help them take back their continent from the Europeans who had partitioned it in 1884–85. He railed,The whites found gold, diamonds, and other riches in Africa. Why should not the Negro? Africa is their country. They should claim it: they should go to Africa, civilize those Negroes, raise them morally, and by education show them how to obtain wealth which is in their own country, and take the grand continent as their own.Price's “Black Man's Burden” projected American blacks as agents of capitalism, civilization, and Christianity in Africa. Moreover, Price suggested that African American suffering under slavery, failed Reconstruction, and Jim Crow placed them in a unique position to combat imperialism. He was not alone in seeing parallels between the conditions of “Negroes” on both sides of the Atlantic. Many African Americans, Afro-Canadians, and West Indians saw imperialism in Africa as operating according to Jim Crow logic: white Europeans would subordinate and segregate Africans, while economically exploiting their labor to bring wealth to Europe.

Uncontrollable Blackness

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas J. Flowe
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
African American Men ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
Domestic Spaces ◽  
Racial Injustice ◽  
Lawful Conduct ◽  
The Relationship

Early twentieth-century African American men in northern urban centers like New York faced economic isolation, segregation, a biased criminal justice system, and overt racial attacks by police and citizens. In this book, Douglas J. Flowe interrogates the meaning of crime and violence in the lives of these men, whose lawful conduct itself was often surveilled and criminalized, by focusing on what their actions and behaviors represented to them. He narrates the stories of men who sought profits in underground markets, protected themselves when law enforcement failed to do so, and exerted control over public, commercial, and domestic spaces through force in a city that denied their claims to citizenship and manhood. Flowe furthermore traces how the features of urban Jim Crow and the efforts of civic and progressive leaders to restrict their autonomy ultimately produced the circumstances under which illegality became a form of resistance.Drawing from voluminous prison and arrest records, trial transcripts, personal letters and documents, and investigative reports, Flowe opens up new ways of understanding the black struggle for freedom in the twentieth century. By uncovering the relationship between the fight for civil rights, black constructions of masculinity, and lawlessness, he offers a stirring account of how working-class black men employed extralegal methods to address racial injustice.

Jim Crow on Christian Campuses

2021 ◽  
pp. 68-97
Author(s):  
J. Russell Hawkins
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
South Carolina ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
School Administrators ◽  
Southern Culture ◽  
Furman University ◽  
White Evangelicals ◽  
The Church

Chapter 3 highlights the continued influence of segregationist theology in evangelical circles even as explicit segregationist rhetoric began losing purchase outside that sphere in the mid-1960s. The centerpieces of this chapter are parallel narratives detailing the desegregation of Wofford College and Furman University, the respective flagship institutions of the Methodist and Baptist denominations in South Carolina. In describing the battles between school administrators who sought to desegregate their institutions and the laity of the state’s two largest denominations who resisted such measures, this chapter emphasizes white evangelicals’ continued opposition to black civil rights even as the broader southern culture was forced by the federal government to acquiesce on integration in institutions of higher education. Segregationist theology remained influential for a majority of white Baptists and Methodists who voted against desegregating the church schools in the mid-1960s and who withdrew their support when the colleges integrated against these Christians’ desires.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document