Policing Jim Crow America: Enforcers’ Agency and Structural Transformations

This is a critical historiographical essay animated by the research question of how the decisions of police and sheriffs illuminated and drove the transformation of white supremacy through different forms from emancipation to the end of Jim Crow segregation. It situates this focus amidst current methodological trends that stress structural oppression and argues that law-enforcers’ agency could illuminate discussions among historians and other scholars about the relationship between formal and informal law alongside the rise of the modern criminological state. The historical importance of enforcers is accentuated in the story told in each section—the shifting demographics of enforcement during Reconstruction; the inequalities of policing alongside lynching in the last decades of the nineteenth century; the complex interplay between policing and segregation statutes, colorblind criminal law, and mob violence in the Jim Crow South; the concurrent modernization of racialized policing nationwide; and the displacement of informal mob law and formal racial caste by a national regime of extralegal police violence, unequal patterns of incarceration and execution, and federal protections of civil liberties and civil rights.

An invisible operational mortar

The contribution seeks to apply the principles of J. L. Austin’s speech-act theories to the study of local business segregation in the Jim Crow South. In particular, it borrows the notions of illocutionary and perlocutionary force when examining the seemingly bland and prosaic statements that are often used to normalise segregation within the business of commercial entertainment. For purposes of expanding the complexity of typical Manichaean (i.e., Black vs White) ethnic studies, this analysis was developed within the context of tri-racial segregation as applied to rural moviegoing within Robeson County, North Carolina during the first half of the twentieth century. Notably, the development of Robeson’s historical cinema-exhibition spaces eventually resulted in a highly unusual venue – i.e., the three-entrance theatre – whose physical architecture reflected tensions between local ethnic demographics and desired social hierarchies. Yet even in the face of these unusual physical constructs, this study contends that seemingly everyday objective/descriptive and non-demonising language remained an essential component in enforcing segregation.

The Dialectics of Race: Proletarian Literature, Richard Wright, and the Making of Revolutionary Subjectivity

As the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács noted, class has both an objective and a subjective quality: workers are reified as alienated commodities while at the same time they perceive their interests as qualitatively different from those of the capitalist who purchases their labour-power. This essay will argue that one of the most complex theorisations of the material production of working-class subjectivity emerges from Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices, a second-person collective narrative of the African-American Great Migration. Wright locates African-American subjectivity in the contradiction of its formation, at once trapped in the neo-feudal relations of the Jim Crow South, and brutally thrust into the matrix of Northern racialised and ghettoised industrial production. This produces for Wright acute misery, but also a proletarian revision of Du Bois’s Hegelian concept of ‘double consciousness’, as Black workers have a unique insight into the totality of the capitalist world-system.

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

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.