THE SOUTH IN PERSPECTIVE

...The conservative rulers who dominated politics in this period, solicited or bought or coerced Negro votes for their own purposes, and, in effect, entered into a curious alliance with the Negro, based on an attitude toward him which was a heritage of plantation paternalism...

...But the great majority were impoverished sharecroppers and farm hands who never had the opportunity to test such rights...

...But the resistance, if no longer so "massive," is still powerful...

...It is only with that period in mind that one can understand the stubborn defiance, the outbursts of hysteria, and the flares of violence that have characterized the South's resistance...

...Far more explicitly than the surreptitious and extra-legal discrimination, such as the stuffed ballot box, the doctored jurors list, or the sly literacy test, the Jim Crow system openly proclaimed the white man's determination to keep the Negro "in his place...

...It is significant that three of the justices who joined in the unanimous opinion handed down on that latter date were Southerners...

...The significant period is rather the half century after the nation repudiated or abandoned its Civil War promises of Negro rights and racial equality...

...But the rise of Booker T. Washington and his almost unrivaled leadership of American Negroes from 1895 until his death in 1915 was interpreted by many whites as an invitation to further assaults on the Negro...

...The Nation described them as "a varied assortment of inferior races which, of course, could not be allowed to vote...

...Yet it was not the overthrow of Reconstruction which ushered in the era of Jim Crow...

...Was not a hundred years enough time, after all, to adjust to the law of the land and the claims of conscience...

...they still have far to go to attain their goals and achieve the full constitutional rights promised them a hundred years ago...

...Southern whites lived in the presence of large numbers of colored people, and continued to hold nine-tenths of them as chattel long after slavery was repudiated by most of the Western world...

...This was the imposed obligation of abandoning the racial assumptions of a lifetime and uprooting dogmas deeply embedded in regional culture...

...Thus the Twentieth Century dawned upon a new era of harmony between white people, North and South, on race...

...The Populist experiment in interracial harmony and political alliance, precarious at best and handicapped from the start by suspicion and prejudice, was another casualty of the political and economic crisis of the period...

...But even if the most hopeful prognosis were acceptable, even if the great thaw were upon us and the Jubilee Year at hand, it would still be appropriate at this time to ask an accounting of the South...

...On the rational level, the South "accepted" both defeat and emancipation and proclaimed the acceptance repeatedly...

...A wave of race riots and lynchings without precedent in American history swept across the country in 1919, and violence flared in all sections...

...On the contrary, it was a period of race conflict and violence, brutality and exploitation, and it was then that the crime of lynching reached its peak...

...One in particular who should be remembered is a former slave owner from Kentucky, John Marshall Harlan, who served on the U.S...

...Hatred, jealousy, fear, and fanaticism had long been present in the South...

...disbarment from jury service...

...In reality, there was no such tradition to which the South could return...

...And beyond that, what manner of people is it who can cling so tenaciously to Nineteenth Century attitudes well past the middle of the Twentieth Century...

...THE SOUTH IN PERSPECTIVE by C. VANN WOODWARD the one-hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation inevitably draws fresh attention to the South, the historical theater for the drama of emancipation...

...What right had the South to be surprised and shocked at reasonable demands for rights that had been promised the Negro a century ago...

...While slave revolts sometimes preceded and abetted liberation, slavery was abolished by other nations and their colonies without revolution and civil war...

...Those were the years of reaction when the Court was curtailing the power of the Federal government to protect civil rights, thereby preparing the way for disfranchisment and segregation of the Negro...

...In the years following World War 1, the impulses of racism surged powerfully through the North and West...

...But on a deeper level, acceptance was blocked off and rejected, and the rejection was pushed below the threshold of consciousness, beyond the reach of rational appeal...

...When it became apparent that their opponents would stop at nothing to divide the racial alliance and would steal the Negro votes when they could not buy them, the bi-racial partnership of Populism began to dissolve...

...But when Twentieth Century racial extremists undertook a defense of their policies, they invented the theory that the rigid and harsh policies of exclusion and proscription and segregation were actually of ancient origin, brought to perfection in slavery days, and sanctioned by centuries of usage...

...Supreme Court for nearly thirty-five years, from 1877 to 1911...

...In the mind of the South this historic trauma has been lodged for a century, fatefully associated with the accompanying experience of emancipation...

...It was a means used by Negroes to gain control over some of their most important institutions...

...Within the South itself leaders of the white supremacy movement thoroughly grasped and gladly expounded the implications of the new imperialism for their domestic policies...

...Hard on defeat came the experience of Reconstruction, with all the attendant shocks of military rule, rebel disfranchisement, Negro enfranchisement, and social upheaval...

...The law regards man as man, and takes no regard of his surroundings or his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are invoked...

...They yielded only temporarily to superior force, and as soon as they were able—by ruse or craft or force—they overturned the entire enterprise...

...infringement of political rights of all kinds...

...On the surface, the sense of unity and approval within the nation that the South had gained by 1900 was still enjoyed without serious disturbance four decades later...

...This intention could be read not only in the Jim Crow statutes...

...A significant shift in leadership among Negroes themselves tended to encourage the impression of vanishing resistance...

...This was not true in the South nor was it to be for a generation to come...

...Conservative spokesmen would continue to protest from time to time against racial injustice, but they had undermined their own moral authority and influence on race policy, and they would never again be listened to with the same respect...

...These assumptions and dogmas were sustained by a Western culture built on the idea that white men, Europeans and Americans, were destined to rule the earth...

...Avoiding the patronizing approach that both the Radical Republicans and the conservative Democrats adopted toward Negroes, the Populists appealed to them from a platform of common economic interests and grievances, and with the promise of political and civil rights...

...Withdrawal of Negroes from the churches, however, was voluntary...

...In one of his famous opinions, the dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, he reminded the Court sharply: "Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens...

...That was the period when civil rights for Negroes became a dead letter, when disfranchisement enjoyed Federal approval and support, when Plessy v. Ferguson was the law of the land, when progressivism was for whites only, and when racism was a national creed and not a regional peculiarity...

...In the free states before the Civil War, according to historian Leon Litwack, in virtually every phase of existence, "Negroes found themselves systematically separated from whites...

...Then, in 1898, in the case of Williams v. Mississippi, the Supreme Court completed the opening of the legal road to disfranchisement by giving its approval to the Mississippi plan for depriving Negroes of the vote...

...Liberal acquiescence in the Compromise of 1877, when Carl Schurz and Frederick Douglass joined President Rutherford B. Hayes's Administration, meant that liberals agreed to leave the freedman to the custody of the conservative redeemers on the promise that they would protect his constitutional rights...

...Throughout that period Justice Harlan protested and dissented, vigorously and eloquently, against this trend...

...Unlike the majority of Western whites, the U.S...

...The United States was the only Western nation in which slavery was abolished at the cost of a prolonged and bloody civil war that ended in a crushing and catastrophic defeat of the slaveholders...

...But in proposing the retirement of the mass of Negroes from the political life of the South and in stressing the humble industrial role his race was destined to play, he would seem to have encouraged an impression of submissiveness on the part of the Negro...

...In doing so they were appealing to the very forces of fanaticism and racism they had sought to restrain...

...It is a participant in the movement with a shared commitment to its goals...

...The decision upholding the legality of segregation against which Harlan dissented in 1896 was not reversed by the Supreme Court until May 17, 1954...

...Reconstruction, according to this theory, only served to prove how hopeless it was to change or abolish ancient customs and folkways by legislation and idealistic reform...

...The hope for fulfillment of the various Supreme Court orders against segregation by the centennial anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, making 1963 a Jubilee Year, has long been doomed to disappointment...

...Supreme Court was also engaged in a policy of reconciliation, but reconciliation between state and Federal jurisdiction, as well as between North and South, both achieved, again, at the expense of the Negro...

...Former abolitionists and pre-Civil War champions of the slave grew acquiescent or silent...

...The low point came still later, probably not until the Twentieth Century...

...The Northern liberal retreat on the race issue dated from the Liberal Republican revolt against President Ulysses S. Grant's Administration in 1872...

...that, being inferior, they were in some degree subordinate to the white will, and that, being subordinate, they were destined to serve white interests...

...It is also a source of leadership, white and colored, and on the effectiveness of that leadership depends in large measure the success of the whole movement...

...Whatever other factors may have brought the Negro to his present status, the white man's rule in the South bears a heavy share of responsibility, as attested by the Southern record—denial of equal justice before the law...

...This may be a valid belief, and there is certainly some truth in it...

...After the collapse of Populism, agrarian discontent among Southern whites was a seed-bed rather than an antidote for racist propaganda...

...Their experiments with integration in the schools were rare, successful only in New Orleans, and even there only temporarily...

...The Negro still bore the stigma of slavery so plainly, in his speech, his manners, and his person, that segregation was still unnecessary to set him apart as an inferior in status...

...As inevitable and belated as this movement was, it nevertheless caught the South unprepared...

...it glared out from thousands of conspicuously postC. VANN WOODWARD was professor of history at Johns Hopkins until recently when he joined the faculty of Yale University...

...The North was impatient with the South's reaction...

...Their leaders were frequently identical...

...But for nearly two decades after the end of Reconstruction, the zealots were held in check and their harsh demands for ostracizing the Negro and separating the races were denied...

...Progress continues to be halting, and there would seem to be few signs of acceleration...

...With a sense of acceptance and unity with the national temper such as it had not enjoyed since the Jacksonian period, the South marched into the progressive movement under the banner of white supremacy...

...exclusion from public office...

...no longer denounce the suppression of the Negro vote [in the South] as it used to be denounced in Reconstruction days...

...They helped confirm the view that the South had little to fear from Northern critics, and while they doubtless did much to foster the reconciliation of the estranged North and South, they did so at the expense of the Negro...

...On the other hand, in the Northern states which had abolished slavery, quite an elaborate and thoroughgoing system of segregation had been established before 1860 to define the status that slavery had once defined for the Negro...

...That was not to come until near the end of the Nineteenth Century...

...both have begun, if only covertly and brokenly, to talk and think together...

...Some attitudes have softened...

...One of these was that the Negro continued to vote in most parts of the South for many years after Reconstruction...

...The paradoxical combination of racism and progressivism was still generally respectable in political circles...

...There it was, for all the world to see...

...More than that, they constituted a defense against criticism, an evasion of responsibility, and a release from guilt...

...During the Thirties, tension between the races eased perceptibly...

...There was also a temporary barrier to racism constructed by Southern radicals, the Populists of the Nineties...

...The end of slavery brought a readjustment in racial relations, but not so drastic a readjustment as is generally attributed to Reconstruction...

...The historical development that completed the merging of Southern and national racial outlook, however, was America's plunge into imperialism in 1898...

...A "New Negro" and a new generation of whites have opened the choked channels of communication and established new contacts...

...In Plessy v. Ferguson, decided in 1896, the Court formally subscribed to the doctrine that "legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts" and laid down the "separate but equal" rule in defense of segregation which was to be the law of the land until 1954...

...These Southern progressives left their stamp on the Wilsonian New Freedom in the form of segregation, downgrading, and dismissal of Negro employes in the Washington bureaus...

...Mugwumps and Liberals of the East were attracted to the cause of sectional reconciliation between North and South...

...The efforts of the Radicals to establish racial equality and civil rights for the freed-men were frustrated not only by resistance in the South but by insufficient support in the North...

...In spite of traditional antagonisms, they succeeded in temporarily patching together a political reconciliation of normally irreconcil-ables with which to wage a fight for mutual rights against the conservatives...

...The Court drastically curtailed the power of the Federal government to intervene in the states to protect the right of Negroes, and to all intents and purposes nullified the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments as they affected the freedmen...

...The natural corollary of this idea was that colored people were inferior to white people...

...In three significant fields—the military services, the new public schools, and the churches—Reconstruction actually fostered segregation...

...The defeat not only freed the slaves but destroyed a social order and a ruling class...

...Losses had to be reckoned not merely in money, but in blood and pride and prestige and inner security, and they were not confined to a slave-holding minority but shared by a whole people...

...Why has it taken so long to begin...

...To do so would be to forget some of the most fearless champions of racial justice and Negro rights that this country has ever had...

...My purpose is rather to place their record in the historical perspective that the past century affords and to derive a degree of understanding from the process...

...Peaceful emancipation was accomplished by the English, Dutch, Danish, Spanish, and Portuguese people in the New World, and while the French suffered some violence, it was not drawn-out...

...it broke up in bitterness and frustration...

...The conservative rulers of the Southern states in the Nineties found themselves under heavy attack and their regime in jeopardy, principally because of the unpopularity of their business policies among the depressed farmers...

...It was in that period that the South built up the expectation and assurance of continued national approval...

...The new Ku Klux Klan, which reached its crest in the mid-Twenties, attracted a following outside the South even larger than within...

...disfranchisement...

...In the South, for the first time, both races joined the same political party, and that party appeared to be honestly trying to improve the lot of the colored man as well as that of the white man...

...President Wilson himself defended segregation in the Federal government as "distinctly to the advantage of the colored people themselves...

...Slavery itself was quite sufficient to define the Negro's inferior status...

...Until lately their progress has been slow...

...There were still other restraints that held extremists and segregationists in check...

...Just as conspicuous and harsh was" the enforcement of segregation in private business establishments, in trains, busses, streetcars, hotels, theaters, and playing fields...

...It is certain that Washington did not intend his "Atlanta Compromise" to constitute such an invitation...

...In the process, however, the hated symbols of humiliation— Federal bayonets, martial law, carpetbaggers, and disfranchisement of Southern whites—were fatefully associated in the disturbed mind of the South with the more laudable social objectives of Reconstruction, including equal justice, civil rights, political equality, public education, and racial democracy for the Negro...

...He so rarely had the economic means for enjoying such things as hotels, theaters, decent housing, amusements, and restaurants—or even trains and steamboats—that there was no pressing incentive to exclude him...

...denial of equal opportunity in public and private employment, of equal pay for equal work, of equal education...

...Furthermore, the overthrow of Reconstruction was pictured as a festoration of normal conditions, a return to sanity—a return, therefore, to the Jim Crow system...

...At the same time, however, the wall of segregation remained unyielding—in fact, its defenses were virtually unchallenged...

...Some of the Populists understood that the Negro was merely one of the hapless victims rather than the author of the party's downfall...

...The New Deal scored modest gains for both races...

...Thus the real and fancied humiliations of Reconstruction were combined with the traumatic shame of defeat to crystallize the rejection of emancipation and civil rights for Negroes and to constitute for decades to come a barrier to a rational approach to all questions of race relations...

...A century ago, Southern whites were given a momentous assignment by history, a role that was not to be required of the dominant white throughout the Western World until our own time...

...Segregation, in any modern sense of the word, was not only unnecessary under slavery, it was impracticable as well...

...Seen in this light, the whole episode of Reconstruction constituted a brief and unfortunate interruption of the "normal" relations between the two races...

...The strong contingent of Southern progressives which promoted Woodrow Wilson's campaign for the Presidential nomination, managed his race for election, and filled high offices in his Administration, carried to Washington its racial policies as well as its reform bills...

...In their frantic efforts to protect their power by stopping the revolt led by the Populists, the conservatives lost their heads and sought to reenact the triumph of the Seventies by which they had overthrown the carpetbaggers and gained control of the South...

...The removal of internal checks went far toward making the Negro a victim of racial aggression, but his adversaries were also encouraged by the relaxation of those restraints which Northern opinion had imposed for the protection of freedmen...

...His many works on the South include "Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel," "Origins of the New South (1877-1913)," "Reunion and Reaction," and "The Strange Career of Jim Crow...

...ed signs—"White" and "Colored"— that marked off the color line...

...Under its direction racial aggression was organized on a nationwide scale...

...If the stronger and cleverer race," asked the Atlantic Monthly, "is free to impose its will upon 'new-caught, sullen peoples' on the other side of the globe, why not in South Carolina and Mississippi...

...Negro opinion itself had long ceased to be a significant deterrent to white aggression...

...In the Forties, however, the South's sense of security was abruptly shattered by a barrage of agitation for Negro rights and an avalanche of demands, denunciations, and opprobrium descending from above the Mason-Dixon line...

...These tactics were successful in crushing the Populist revolt, but the methods the conservatives used made a mockery of their old plea for moderation and fair play in race relations...

...The low point of race relations in the South and the extremes of race policy, however, did not coincide with either of the traumatic experiences of military defeat or Reconstruction, nor was it reached in the period immediately following...

...Lynchings declined rapidly and almost disappeared...

...Since the Negro was the symbol of sectional antagonism, they often deplored further agitation in his behalf and took an indulgent attitude toward the less extreme racial policies of the South...

...The facts were quite different...

...In the pages of Harper's, Scribner's, Century, the North American Review, and the Atlantic Monthly in the closing decades of the Nineteenth Century can be found all the shibboleths of white supremacy...

...Segregation on a racial basis was incompatible with the efficient management, the round-the-clock policing, and on-the-job supervision which "the peculiar institution" required...

...In the meantime, the U.S...

...A party of agrarian reform, the Populists challenged the conservative claim of Negro support with an appeal of their own...

...The explanation is not simple...

...Conservatives openly regarded Negroes as inferiors, but felt so secure in their own status they saw no reason to ostracize, segregate, or humiliate them...

...The rise of progressivism coincided with the crest of the wave of racism and merged with it in the South—and sometimes outside the South—to such an extent that the two movements were often indistinguishable...

...Southern segregationists could count themselves New Dealers in good standing almost as readily as their fathers had been accepted as good Wil-sonians...

...The majority of Southern whites did not accept this sequel of defeat on any plane, conscious or otherwise...

...The true perspective on the South's contemporary reaction, however, is not revealed by the entire century since emancipation...

...It would be untrue to history and unfair to the South to leave the impression that Southern resistance is monolithic or that the white people of the South are now, or ever have been, a solid unit on race policy...

...American adventures in the Pacific and Caribbean rather suddenly and unexpectedly brought under the jurisdiction of the United States some eight million colored people in addition to those within its continental borders...

...The more hopeful believe that the long ice age of race relations in the South might be approaching an end, and that the great thaw has at last begun...

...The Civil War legacy for the South was, in the words of Robert Penn Warren, "The Great Alibi...

...Their defenders maintained that such practices were the inevitable consequence of the association of two races of different characteristics and cultural attainments...

...In the new reconstruction movement designed to realize racial justice, the South is not merely a theater of operations for outsiders and intruders...

...In recent years some of those signs have been taken down, some of the Jim Crow laws have disappeared from the books, and still others are slated to go...

...The last quarter of the century, however, was no golden age of race relations...

...These included not only the internal restraints imposed by the prestige and influence of the Southern conservatives and the interracial alliance formed by the Southern radicals, but also the external restraints of Northern opinion, the liberal press, the U. S. Supreme Court, and Federal law...

...Schools, hospitals, prisons, parks, welfare establishments, every public institution proclaimed the rigid rule of separation...

...The necessity of it under the supreme law of self-preservation is candidly recognized...

...Until 1901, except for one term, there was always at least one Negro Congressman from the South...

...When the promise was forgotten and the Negro's rights were violated, little protest was heard from the liberals...

...I do not propose to excuse or explain away the faults and guilts of Southern white people...

...Toward the end of the century, the delicate balance of forces in the South and North that had held back the triumph of intolerance broke down...

...The white man's responsibility for the frustration of the Negro's hopes is spelled out most elaborately in the system of segregation...

...What unleashed them upon society was the almost simultaneous collapse or decline of the numerous restraints that had hitherto combined to hold the forces of racial extremism in check...

...Persuading themselves that the crisis of the Nineties was as desperate as that of the Seventies, they resorted to the same expedients of fraud, intimidation, and violence, and used the propaganda of race to unify white support...

...It is there that the large majority of the liberated Negro slaves and their descendants have labored to achieve the full status of freedom and fulfill the old promise of equality...

...The New York Times remarked in an editorial of May, 1900, that "Northern men...

...But for the majority it came much easier to blame the Negro, to make him the scapegoat, and to vent upon him all the pent-up bitterness and frustration they felt against the real offenders who contrived to escape their wrath...

...Their presence had obvious implications for the Negro's status...

...On the highest Federal judicial authority the South was informed that the law of the land offered no substantial impediment to the policies of white supremacy...

...The South's ideology was an anachronism well before the middle of the Nineteenth Century, but Southerners clung to their dogmas all the more desperately and fiercely because of the intellectual isolation in which they found themselves...

...The few Negroes who did have the means often used such facilities without hindrance or segregation...

...Moreover, the fanatical advocates of segregation, disfranchisement, and racial ostracism were already at work...

...Alarmed by the success the Populists were enjoying with their appeal to the Negro vote, the conservatives revived the cry of "Negro domination" and the slogan of "white supremacy...

...In fact, the typical Southern reformer rode to power on a platform designed to deprive the Negro of his vote...

...While they shared most of these racial attitudes, the great majority of Europeans and Americans lived beyond personal contact with Africans and Asians, and before the middle of the Nineteenth Century they had repudiated slavery as an acceptable form of colored subordination, though they by no means repudiated subordination of the colored in other forms...

...In two decisions especially, both handed down in the Nineties, the Supreme Court paved the way for the curtailment of Negro rights, disfranchisement, and a full-blown system of segregation...

...Such concessions were eagerly seized upon, reprinted, and played-up by the Southern press...

...The Negro usually was pictured as innately inferior, shiftless, and hopelessly unfit for the responsibilities of civilization...

...When, if ever, is full compliance with the law to be expected...