Crime and Punishment in the Jim Crow South

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Crime Control ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
State Power ◽  
Prison Reform ◽  
Regulatory State ◽  
The North ◽  
Jim Crow South

This collection of nine original essays explores the development of a modern criminal justice system in the Jim Crow South, from the 1890s through the 1950s. It covers key transformations surrounding the practices of policing, incarceration, and capital punishment, as municipal police departments became professionalized and as authority over criminal punishment shifted from local jurisdictions to the state. The collection’s essays address the history of segregated police forces, black-on-black crime, police brutality, organized crime and government corruption, restrictions on ex-felons’ rights, convict labor, prison reform, and the introduction of the electric chair. Together, they make a case for southern distinctiveness. Criminal justice in the Jim Crow South looked quite different than it did in the North due to white southern demands for racial control, as well as white southerners’ suspicions of centralized state power and modern bureaucracies. This collection examines these relationships between white supremacy, the modernizing state, and crime control. In doing so, it provides a more nuanced portrait of the dynamic between state power and white supremacy in the South beyond a story of top-down social control. The essays reveal stories of state institutions grappling with their expanding authority, stories of political leaders and reformers anxious to render that power modern and efficient, and stories of African Americans appealing to the regulatory state in order to push back against racial injustice.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Amy Louise Wood ◽  
Natalie J. Ring
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Crime Control ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Penal System ◽  
The South ◽  
Antebellum Era ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Jim Crow South

The introduction outlines the central themes of this collection: the problem of southern distinctiveness; the modernization of the criminal justice system and the centralization of state power; and the relationship between crime control and white supremacy in the Jim Crow South. In doing so, it offers an overview of criminal justice history in the South from the antebellum era through the rise and decline of convict leasing in the postbellum era to the development of new practices surrounding policing, incarceration, and capital punishment after 1890. It also explains the significance of this collection to the historiography on criminal justice in the South, as well as to understanding problems in our present-day penal system. Finally, the introduction summarizes each chapter in the collection.

scholarly journals North Carolina Books

2011 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 23
Author(s):  
Eileen McGrath
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Red Clay ◽  
Race Riot ◽  
The North ◽  
Race Identity ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Hill ◽  
Jim Crow South

Compiled by Eileen McGrath, the following books are included: The North Carolina Gazetter: A Dictionary of Tar Heel Places and Their History; Becoming Elizabeth Lawrence: Discovered Letters of a Southern Gardener; The Southern Mind under Union Rule: The Diary of James Rumley; A Day of Blood: The 1898 Wilmington Race Riot; Kay Kyser: The Ol' Professor of Sing! America's Forgotten Superstar; Haven on the Hill: A History of North Carolina's Dorothea Dix Hospital; Middle of the Air; Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation; Cow across America; Real NASCAR: White Lightning, Red Clay, and Big Bill France; 27 Views of Hillsborough: A Southern Town in Prose & Poetry; Twelve by Twelve: A One Room Cabin off the Grid and beyond the American Dream; and Down Home: Jewish Life in North Carolina.

scholarly journals Carson McCullers and Lillian Smith : The Intersections of Gender and Race in the Jim Crow South

2008 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 119
Author(s):  
Constante González Groba
Keyword(s):  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Southern Women ◽  
Carson Mccullers ◽  
Racial Categorization ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Lillian Smith ◽  
Relations Of Power ◽  
Jim Crow South

Carson McCullers and Lillian Smith openly rejected a false conception of loyalty to fantasies like southern tradition or white supremacy, a loyalty that veiled a persistent lack of self-analysis. They exposed the cracks in the South’s pretended “unity” and homogeneity and criticized the self-destructive resistance to acknowledge that, as a socially constructed category, race is linked to relations of power and anticipated the instability of racial categorization that would be underscored by historical and scientific research later in their century. These two southern women writers opposed the insistence of their culture on racial purity as vehemently as its demands for rigid sexual definition and its suppression of any deviant form of sexuality. The characters in their fiction are victims of a dichotomic culture that resists the acknowledgement that black and white have always been as inextricably linked as male and female. In Killers of the Dream and Strange Fruit, Lillian Smith showed the interactions of racial and sexual segregation, which she saw as parallel emblems of the South’s cultural schizophrenia. She was one of the first to detect the psychosexual damage inflicted on southern women by the racial discourse, and established a most interesting parallel between the segregated parts of the female body and the segregated spaces of any southern locality. Like any system of differentiation, segregation shapes those it privileges as well as those it oppresses. Excluded from the white parameters of virtue and even from the condition of womanhood, the black woman’s body became the sexual prey of the white man who could not demand sexual satisfaction from his “pure” wife. The culture of segregation privileged the white woman but it also made her powerless; the very conventions which “protected” her deprived her of contact with physicality and locked her into bodilessness.

Epilogue

2014 ◽  
pp. 115-118
Author(s):  
Heather Andrea Williams
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Fourteenth Amendment ◽  
First Century ◽  
The North ◽  
The Right

Despite the abolition of slavery with the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, notions of black inferiority and white supremacy still persisted in both the North and the South. The ‘Epilogue’ outlines the profound struggles by African Americans to make their freedom meaningful. In 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment granted citizenship to African Americans and promised equal protection under the law and, in 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment gave black men the right to vote. The modern civil rights movement of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s began to impact on the discriminatory Jim Crow laws and practices, but for many African Americans, struggles for equality, justice, and fairness continue into the twenty-first century.

Rural Wanderings

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonja D. Williams
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Home State ◽  
The North ◽  
The Town ◽  
Jim Crow South

This chapter recounts Richard Durham's early years and education. Alternatively known as Isadore, Izzy, Vern, Dick, the young Durham explored as much of the land around his family's house, located on eighty acres of rural farmland just outside the town of Raymond in Hinds County, Mississippi. His father, Curtis George Durham, cultivated the farm's cotton crops and cornfields but also worked several odd jobs to supplement the family's income. Aside from helping her husband cultivate their farmland, Durham's mother, Chanie Tillman Durham, worked as a teacher in Hinds County's Negro schoolhouse and engaged in the hairstyling business. This chapter discusses the importance of education for the Durham children, the death of Isadore's younger sister Maudeline, the family's constant struggle to survive in their home state, and the Durhams' decision to relocate to Chicago during spring 1923, joining the great exodus of African Americans who left the bubbling heat and stifling racism of the Jim Crow South for the promise of opportunity and freedom in the North.

Daily Life in the Jim Crow South, 1900–1945

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Ritterhouse
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Natural Order ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Jim Crow South ◽  
Over Time

Distinctive patterns of daily life defined the Jim Crow South. Contrary to many observers’ emphasis on de jure segregation—meaning racial separation demanded by law—neither law nor the physical separation of blacks and whites was at the center of the early 20th-century South’s social system. Instead, separation, whether by law or custom, was one of multiple tools whites used to subordinate and exclude blacks and to maintain notions of white racial purity. In turn, these notions themselves varied over time and across jurisdictions, at least in their details, as elites tried repeatedly to establish who was “white,” who was “black,” and how the legal fictions they created would apply to Native Americans and others who fit neither category. Within this complex multiracial world of the South, whites’ fundamental commitment to keeping blacks “in their place” manifested most routinely in day-to-day social dramas, often described in terms of racial “etiquette.” The black “place” in question was socially but not always physically distant from whites, and the increasing number of separate, racially marked spaces and actual Jim Crow laws was a development over time that became most pronounced in urban areas. It was a development that reveals blacks’ determination to resist racial oppression and whites’ perceived need to shore up a supposedly natural order that had, in fact, always been enforced by violence as well as political and economic power. Black resistance took many forms, from individual, covert acts of defiance to organized political movements. Whether in response to African Americans’ continued efforts to vote or their early 20th-century boycotts of segregated streetcars or World War I-era patterns of migration that threatened to deplete the agricultural labor force, whites found ways to counter blacks’ demands for equal citizenship and economic opportunity whenever and wherever they appeared. In the rural South, where the majority of black Southerners remained economically dependent on white landowners, a “culture of personalism” characterized daily life within a paternalistic model of white supremacy that was markedly different from urban—and largely national, not merely southern—racial patterns. Thus, distinctions between rural and urban areas and issues of age and gender are critical to understanding the Jim Crow South. Although schools were rigorously segregated, preadolescent children could be allowed greater interracial intimacy in less official settings. Puberty became a break point after which close contact, especially between black males and white females, was prohibited. All told, Jim Crow was an inconsistent and uneven system of racial distinction and separation whose great reach shaped the South’s landscape and the lives of all Southerners, including those who were neither black nor white.

“We of the North were thoroughly wrong”

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Desmond S. King ◽  
Rogers M. Smith
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Racial Politics ◽  
World War ◽  
New Era ◽  
The North ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Jim Crow Era ◽  
Over Time

This chapter talks about the complex patterns of racial alliances that emerged during the Jim Crow era. It shows that, shaped by the interactions of a wide range of groups, the patterns and practices of white supremacy during the Jim Crow years varied from state to state, town to town, even neighborhood to neighborhood, and shifted over time in differing ways in all these locales. Within this new era of American racial politics, diminished but determined racially egalitarian actors, groups, and institutions remained important players in American politics, and over time new ones emerged. From their own efforts, aided by changes in a range of domestic and international circumstances, they would gradually grow more powerful through the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, especially during and after World War II.

scholarly journals “Did Emmett Till Die in Vain? Organized Labor Says No!”: The United Packinghouse Workers and Civil Rights Unionism in the Mid-1950s

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 8-40
Author(s):  
Matthew F. Nichter
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Labor Unions ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Organized Labor ◽  
Red Scare ◽  
Union Activists ◽  
Jim Crow South

Abstract Emmett Till's mangled face is seared into our collective memory, a tragic epitome of the brutal violence that upheld white supremacy in the Jim Crow South. But Till's murder was more than just a tragedy: it also inspired an outpouring of protest, in which labor unions played a prominent role. The United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) campaigned energetically, from the stockyards of Chicago to the sugar refineries of Louisiana. The UPWA organized the first mass meeting addressed by Till's mother, Mamie Bradley; packinghouse workers petitioned, marched, and rallied to demand justice; and an interracial group of union activists traveled to Mississippi to observe the trial of Till's killers firsthand, flouting segregation inside and outside the courtroom. Analysis of antiracist unions like the UPWA can help rectify a weakness in the “whiteness” literature by illuminating the contexts and strategies that have fostered durable interracial working-class solidarity. The UPWA, which managed to survive the Red Scare of the late 1940s and early 1950s relatively unscathed, represents an important link between the “civil rights unionism” of the 1930s and 1940s and the civil rights movement of the mid-1950s and 1960s.

Perils of Accommodation: The Case of Joseph W. Holley

2007 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 806-852
Author(s):  
Thomas V. O’Brien
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Liberal Education ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Racial Uplift ◽  
The North ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Black School ◽  
Jim Crow South ◽  
Industrial School ◽  
Lincoln University

This study examines accommodationism, a tactic of racial uplift used by black school founders and teachers in the Jim Crow South. For founders, accommodationism was a dangerous process of collaboration, resistance, and compromise. The subject under study is Joseph Winthrop Holley. Born in South Carolina, Holley studied in the North at Phillips Academy and Lincoln University. Despite a liberal education, Holley returned to the South and founded a Bible and industrial school. Holley was the most conservative founder of his day. His life and work take us beyond the Washington–Du Bois paradigm and help to clarify the work and meaning of accommodationism. The study also evaluates the degree to which conservative forms of schooling became a means for social control.

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