Abstract
Booker T. Washington knew his white neighbours well. Southern employers and landlords might incessantly complain about their black labour force; various white southerners might repeatedly warn of the inability of African-Americans to reach the Anglo-Saxon level of civilisation; legislators might translate an ideology of racial hierarchy into spatial distance by mandating segregation. ‘But when there is work to be done about the plantation, when it comes time to plant and pick the cotton the white man does not want the Negro so far away that he cannot reach him by the sound of his voice.’1 During the half-century between emancipation and the publication of this insight in 1914, black southerners on the move tended to remain — at least metaphorically — within hailing distance. Two years later, however, a vast social movement known as the Great Migration signalled the beginning of very different, and less accommodating, patterns of African-American migration. White southerners responded in ways that reveal not only the extent of their dependence on black labour, but also the ideological, political and economic underpinnings of social relations and order in much of the South.
Too many people have read various incarnations of this essay to permit acknowledging all of my debts to colleagues. Earlier versions benefited from discussion at the Newberry Library Fellows’ Seminar, the Emory University Seminar on Comparative Industrial Societies and the Social History Workshop at the University of Chicago. I am especially indebted to Elsa Barkley Brown and Laura Edwards for their patient and thorough criticism. I am grateful as well to James Barrett, Kathleen Conzen, Rick Halpern, Hannah Rosen and Nick Salvatore.
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Notes
Booker T. Washington, ‘The Rural Negro and the South’, Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Correction, 41 (1914), 122.
Charles S. Johnson, ‘Efforts to Check the Movement’, 1, in folder marked ‘Migration Study, Draft (Final)’, Chapters 7–13, Box 86, Series 6, National Urban League Records, Library of Congress; Jackson Daily Clarion-Ledger quoted in Neil R. McMillen, Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow (Urbana, 1989), 262;
Howard L. Clark, ‘Grbwth of Negro Population in the U.S. and Trend of Migration from the South Since 1860’, Manufacturers Record, 83:4 (25 January 1923), 61; Southerner, ‘Exodus Without Its Canaan — But Not Without its Lessons’, Coal Age, 11 (10 February 1917), 258; Baton Rouge State Times, quoted in Chicago Whip, 6 November 1920.
James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago, 1989), 38–56.
Thomas C. Holt, ‘Marking: Race, Race-making, and the Writing of History’, American Historical Review, 100:1 (February, 1995), 1–20; quotations are from 18. For the most powerful statement of the distinction between class as a material reality versus race as an ideological construction that is an artefact of class relations, see Barbara Jeanne Fields, ‘Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America’, New Left Review, 181 (May–June, 1990), 95–118; and Fields, ‘Ideology and Race in American History’, in J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson, eds, Region, Race and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward (NY, 1982), 143–177. The literature on racial ideology as a psychological problem is as vast as it is outdated. An interesting place to begin is E. Franklin Frazier’s pioneering essay, ‘The Pathology of Race Prejudice’, which characterised white racism as a form of paranoia. See G. Franklin Edwards, ed., E. Franklin Frazier on Race Relations; Selected Writings (Chicago, 1968). Social, psychological and political aspects of southern racism during this period are explored in Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation (NY, 1984), 79–323, 414–482. Lawrence Goodwyn, The Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (NY, 1976) maps out a progressive and broad-based democratic political culture in parts of the South during this period, with racism as the tragic flaw undermining this strand of populism. C. Vann Woodward’s Tom Watson, Agrarian Rebel (NY, 1938) has a similarly tragic theme.
[Frank B. Stubbs], ‘Memorandum of Southern Trip’, 3 November 1923–5 December 1923, Folder 1006, Box 99, Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, Rockefeller Archives Center, Tarrytown, NY.
Edward Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (NY, 1992), 306.
C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge, 1951);
Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974).
Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975); Fields, ‘Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States’; Thomas C. Holt, ‘“An Empire Over the Mind”: Emancipation, Race, and Ideology in the British West Indies and the American South’, in Kousser and McPherson, eds, Region, Race and Reconstruction, 283–313. The quotation is from Fields, ‘Slavery, Race and Ideology’, 114. The most comprehensive treatise on the relationship between bourgeois liberalism and ideologies of race remains David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1883 (Ithaca, 1975). The classic text establishing the formative influence of English attitudes regarding race, nationality and physical attributes is Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill, 1968).
Armstead Robinson, ‘Beyond the Realm of Social Consensus: New Meanings of Reconstruction for American History’, Journal of American History, 68:1 (June 1981), 297;
W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (New York, 1935). See also Fields, ‘Ideology and Race’, 162–9;
David Montgomery, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862–1872 (New York, 1967). For some historians of this era, even when race seemed to be the central issue, as in the New York City draft riots, class tensions and imperatives lay underneath, finding expression through a language of race. See Iver Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War (New York, 1990).
See Dwight B. Billings, Planters and the Making of a ‘New South’: Class, Politics, and Development in North Carolina, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill, 1979), 92;
Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850–1890 (New York, 1983). See also
George M. Fredrickson, The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality (Middletown, CT, 1988), 157–8. My purpose in this essay is less to debate the roots and implications of racial attitudes among the powerless (e.g. Hahn’s yeomen) than to probe into the implications of racial ideology and class imperatives among the powerful (especially the planter class).
Particularly notable examples include Joe W. Trotter, Coal, Class, and Color: Blacks in Southern West Virginia. 1915–32 (Urbana, 1990);
Peter Gottlieb, Making Their Own Way: Southern Blacks’ Migration to Pittsburgh, 1916–30 (Urbana, 1987);
Daniel Letwin, ‘Race, Class, and Industrialization in the New South: The Coal Miners of Alabama, 1871–1921’ (PhD dissertation, Yale University, 1991).
Jonathan M. Wiener, Social Origins of the New South: Alabama, 1860–1885 (Baton Rouge, 1978).
Alex Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South (London, 1995). For a comprehensive examination of southern legislation designed to limit the mobility of black labour, see William Cohen, At Freedom’s Edge: Black Mobility and the Southern White Quest for Racial Control, 1861–1915 (Baton Rouge, 1991).
Jon Wiener, ‘Reconsidering the Wiener Thesis’, comments presented at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians, 1991, 13.
Whether one is inclined to conceptualise a ‘ruling race’ a ‘ruling class’, or some combination of these, what is clear is that both academic and popular history has tended to emphasise American slavery as a racial phenomenon. On Phillips see James Oakes, ‘The Present Becomes the Past: The Planter Class in the Postbellum South’, in Robert Abzug and Stephen Maislish, eds, New Perspectives on Race and Slavery in America (Lexington, KY, 1986), 158.
See e.g. Robert Higgs, Competition and Coercion: Blacks in the American Economy, 1865–1914 (Chicago, 1977);
Higgs, ‘Race and Economy in the South, 1890–1915’, in Robert Haws, ed., The Age of Segregation: Race Relations in the South, 1890–1945 (Oxford, MS, 1987), 111–15;
Stephen J. DeCanio, Agriculture in the Postbellum South: The Economics of Production and Supply (Cambridge, MA, 1974). Higgs (‘Race and Economy’, 90) argues that southern economic development ‘solved’ the ‘race problem’ because the system of race relations required continued isolation from the market. For a more complex analysis on the relationship between race and flawed economic institutions that relies on neoclassical models without apotheosising the market, see Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (Cambridge, 1977).
William H. Harris, The Harder We Run: Black Workers since the Civil War (New York, 1982);
Robert J. Norrell, ‘Caste in Steel: Jim Crow Careers in Birmingham Alabama’, Journal of American History, 73:3 (December 1986), 669–694;
Charles H. Wesley, Negro Labor in the United States (New York, 1927);
Sterling Spero and Abram Harris, The Black Worker: The Negro and the Labor Movement (New York, 1931);
Philip S. Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619–1973 (New York, 1974).
The seminal texts include John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town (New York, 1937);
Allison Davis, Burleigh B. Gardner, and Mary R. Gardner, Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class (Chicago, 1941); and
Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma (New York, 1944). For more sophisticated applications of this model to northern cities see Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto (Chicago, 1967); David Katzman, Before the Ghetto: Black Detroit in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana, 1973); and Kenneth Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870–1930 (Urbana, 1976).
Elsa Barkley Brown, ‘Uncle Ned’s Children: Negotiating Community and Freedom in Postemancipation Richmond’ (PhD dissertation, Kent State University, 1994), viii.
This is not to say that racial and class consciousness cannot be disentangled. Although these orientations toward social identity cannot be examined in isolation from one another, and most individuals perceive themselves in different ways at different times and in different contexts, there are occasions which require forms of behaviour or expression that imply a statement of the relative salience of various sources of identity. Moreover historians who have emphasised the salience of class as the structure of domination in the South have argued that race consciousness has been the very force impeding either effective African-American resistance or forms of class organisation against the white elite. See Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll; Robinson, ‘Beyond the Realm of Social Consensus’; Goodwyn, Democratic Promise. On the problematic aspects of the search for interracial class consciousness see Leon F. Litwack, ‘Trouble in Mind: The Bicentennial and the Afro-American Experience’, Journal of American History, 74:2 (September 1987), 317; and Fredrickson, Arrogance of Race, 156–8.
David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (Cambridge, 1987), 243;
John Bodnar, Roger Simon, and Michael P. Weber, Lives of Their Own: Blacks, Italians, and Poles in Pittsburgh, 1900–1960 (Urbana, 1982), 59;
Gerd Korman, Industrialization, Immigrants, and Americanizers: The View from Milwaukee (Madison, 1967), 44–46, 65;
John R. Commons, Races and Immigrants in America (New York, 1907), 46–49. See also
Daniel Nelson, Managers and Workers: The Origins of the Factory System in the United States, 1880–1920 (Madison, 1975), 81.
Columbia, SC State, 1917, quoted in Emmett J. Scott, Negro Migration During the War (New York, 1920), 156;
Lawrence J. Nelson, ‘Welfare Capitalism on a Mississippi Plantation in the Great Depression’, Journal of Social History, 50:2 (May 1984), 227. Leroy Percy quoted in
Bertram Wyatt-Brown, ‘Leroy Percy and Sunnyside: Planter Mentality and Italian Peonage in the Mississippi Delta’, in Shadows over Sunnyside: An Arkansas Plantation in Transition, 1830–1045 (Fayetteville, 1993), 88; Mississippi employer quoted in McMillen, Dark Journey, 159. See also Jones, The Dispossessed, 120. This sentiment outlasted the legal framework of Jim Crow. As late as 1971, a study of Mississippi could observe that ‘even today many planters will admit they still prefer Negroes as tractor drivers and farm workers to whites, for they are less troublesome and can be fired if necessary, with fewer repercussions’. See James Loewen, The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White (Cambridge, MA, 1971), 201.
Harold Woodman, ‘Post-Civil War Southern Agriculture and the Law’, Agricultural History, 53:1 (January 1979), 319–37.
Tobias Higbie, ‘Indispensable Outcasts: Harvest Laborers in the Wheat Belt, 1895–1925’, paper presented at Newberry Seminar in Rural History (1993), 20, 26.
Letter from Peg Leg Williams to Atlanta Constitution, quoted in Ray Stannard Baker, Following the Color Line: American Negro Citizenship in the Progressive Era (New York, 1964; orig. pub. 1906), 80. Landlords’ sense of tenants as ‘their niggers’ is discussed in McMillen, Dark Journey, 125.
Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th-Century America (New York, 1979), 236;
Josef Barton, ‘Capitalism and Community: Mexican Peasants and Southwestern Migrants, 1880–1930’, paper presented at Newberry Seminar in American Social History (1992), 27–9.
David Brody, Steelworkers in America: The Nonunion Era (Cambridge, MA, 1960);
David Carlton, Mill and Town in South Carolina, 1880–1920 (Baton Rouge, 1982), 112. The quotation is from Ayers, Promise, 430.
Jacqueline Dowd Hall, James Leloudis, Robert Korstad, Mary Murphy, Lu Ann Jones, and Christopher B. Daly, Like A Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (Chapel Hill, 1987).
Arthur Raper, Preface to Peasantry: A Tale of Two Black Belt Counties (Chapel Hill, 1936), 122.
Carlton, Mill and Town, 92–103; James P. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1880–1935 (Chapel Hill, 1988), 96; McMillen, Dark Journey, 93.
Charles Flynn Jr, White Land, Black Labor: Caste and Class in Late Nineteenth-Century Georgia (Baton Rouge, 1983); Mississippi State Extension Director R.S. Wilson quoted in McMillen, Dark Journey, 122.
According to the historian of Birmingham’s Sloss Furnace, what mattered about the management there around the turn of the century was that it came ‘from a plantation background’ and therefore was ‘imbued with what can only be described as racist attitudes common at the time’. Lewis has correctly identified the culture of labour relations that influenced the management at Sloss, but has too readily attributed it merely to racism, rather than a combination of ideas about race and ideas about managing labour. W. David Lewis, ‘Sloss Furnaces: The Heritage and the Future’, paper presented at Sloss Furnaces National Historic Landmark, Birmingham, Alabama, 5 March 1992.
On management reform in the North see Montgomery, Fall of the House of Labor, 236; David Montgomery, ‘Workers’ Control of Machine Production in the Nineteenth Century’ in Workers’ Control in America (New York, 1979), 32–3.
Edgar Gardner Murphy, quoted in Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York, 1971), 287.
Little Rock Gazette, 1 June 1880.
Quoted in Thomas C. Holt, ‘The Lonely Warrior: Ida B. Wells-Bamett and the Struggle for Black Leadership’, in John Hope Franklin and August Meier, eds, Black Leaders of the Twentieth Century (Urbana, 1982), 47.
Stephen Whitfield, A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till (New York, 1988), 4.
Clark Wissler, ‘Report of the Committee on the American Negro’, Hanover [NH] Conference, 10–13 August 1926, 4, Folder 1020, Box 101, Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Rockefeller Archives Center, Tarrytown NY; Booker T. Washington, ‘Rural Negro and the South’, 122. See also Jay R. Mandle, The Roots of Black Poverty: The Southern Plantation Economy after the Civil War (Durham, 1978), 69, 75.
Robert E. Park, ‘The “Money Ralley” at Sweet Gum. The Story of a Visit to a Negro Church in the Black Belt, Ala.’, typescript (ca. 1912), 11, Folder 10, Box 1, Robert E. Park Papers, Regenstein Library, University of Chicago, Chicago IL.
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Grossman, J.R. (1997). ‘Amiable Peasantry’ or ‘Social Burden’: Constructing a Place for Black Southerners. In: Halpern, R., Morris, J. (eds) American Exceptionalism?. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25584-9_10
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