Never Been a Time (6 page)

The maverick Georgia populist Tom Watson, defeated in an 1892 bid for reelection to Congress by a white supremacist Bourbon Democrat, cried out to poor Southerners, black and white alike, “You are made to hate each other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of financial despotism which enslaves you both … [and] perpetuates a monetary system which beggars you both.”
²⁵

Beginning in 1890 with the infamous “Mississippi Plan,” a noxious mixture of high poll taxes, rigged literacy tests, and various color-coded standards of ancestry and supposed character, the states of the South one by one made it legally impossible for the great majority of blacks to cast a ballot. But the assault on African Americans was not just political. The murder of Southern blacks rose dramatically in the 1890s. According to the cautious tabulation begun in 1882 by the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, lynching of blacks exceeded one hundred a year for the first time in 1891 and remained in the hundreds for all but two of the following ten years. The worst states were Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana, and the worst year was 1892, when 161 blacks were lynched, almost twice as many as in 1890 and three times as many as in the years of the early 1880s.
²⁶

Sociologists E. M. Beck and Stewart Tolnay, in a close statistical study of the period, have shown a correlation between the politics and economics of the 1890s and the rise in lynching. They write, “The broad historical sequence is uncontested: The peak of black lynchings in the early 1890s coincided with a softening demand for southern cotton, the rise of populist and agrarian protest, and the birth of radical racism. The bloody 1890s were followed by several years of rising cotton prices and an apparent decline in violence against southern blacks.”
²⁷

Poverty and economic fear among poor whites—out of work and desperate, with time heavy on their hands and no food on their tables—bred seething anger, and racist politicians made certain that the anger was directed at the blacks on the lowest rung of the societal ladder rather than upward at the political and economic moguls perched on the top step. Anthropologist Ruth Benedict succinctly described this kind of displaced rage, as it was played out in Nazi Germany, in her illuminating study,
Race: Science and Politics
:

Desperate men easily seize upon some scapegoat to sacrifice to their unhappiness; it is a kind of magic by which they feel for the
moment that they have laid [down] the misery that has been tormenting them. In this they are actively encouraged by their rulers and exploiters, who like to see them occupied with this violence, and fear that if it were denied them they might demand something more difficult. So Hitler … exhorted the nation in 1938 to believe that Germany's defeat in 1919 had been due to Jewry, and encouraged racial riots.
²⁸

Lynching became so commonplace in the South in the 1890s that, in some cases, there was no need for sociological or anthropological analysis to detect economic factors at work. In March of 1892, three black grocers were lynched on the outskirts of Memphis. Outraged, Ida B. Wells, the twenty-nine-year-old editor of a black Memphis newspaper called the
Free Speech and Headlight
, charged in an editorial what most local people, black and white, already assumed (or knew) was true—that the grocers were lynched because they were successfully competing against a white-owned store in the same black neighborhood. Wells urged Memphis's African Americans to “save our money and leave a town that will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts when accused by white persons.” Wells was fearless and fierce in her racial pride. At the age of twenty-one, she
had unsuccessfully sued the Chesapeake, Ohio and Southwestern Railroad in Tennessee for violating her civil rights by forcing her (with some difficulty; she bit the hand of a conductor) to move to a “colored” car.
²⁹

Ida B. Wells

Barely two months after her inflammatory editorials on the murder of the grocers, Wells became infuriated by the lynching in Southern states of several black men for allegedly raping white women, and wrote a thunderous editorial calling the rape charges a “threadbare lie” that hid—or exposed—the abiding white fear that white women were attracted to black men. Wells was fortuitously—or wisely—visiting New York when a mob descended upon the paper's office and demolished it. Threatened with lynching if she returned to Memphis, she remained in the North and became a leader in the antilynching movement, her personal experiences adding to the power of her speeches as she swayed large crowds in America and on tours of England.
³⁰

Militant leaders like Ida B. Wells found themselves in direct opposition to the increasingly influential Booker T. Washington, a growing force for caution, gradualism, self-reliance, and accommodation to whites in the improvement of the African American condition. Unlike Ida B. Wells, Washington accepted the reality of a segregated rail system, and had once written a rail company praising it for having first-class cars for both blacks and whites.
³¹

In 1895, at the age of thirty-eight, the educator made the most important speech of his speech-filled life before a large audience in a convention hall at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, a minor world's fair where the accomplishments of blacks were relegated to the Negro Building. The speech, proffering what came to be known as the Atlanta Compromise, made Washington nationally famous and would influence white attitudes and policies toward blacks for decades to come.

Booker Taliaferro Washington was the founder and principal of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, which focused on vocational education. Having spent his childhood as a slave in Virginia—he proudly would title his autobiography
Up from Slavery
—Washington had worked long hours as a stevedore and saved his money by sleeping under an elevated sidewalk to pay for college at all-black Hampton Institute. He stayed in the South as an educator. “Cast down your bucket where you are,” the famous advice he gave for the first time in his 1895 Atlanta speech, was a typically humble-sounding, backcountry metaphor for a conservative position he had advocated for years: Blacks should stay in the South, work hard to better themselves, concentrate
on vocational training rather than academic education, and not make trouble by pushing for rights the white man was not willing to give them.
³²

Booker T. Washington

Comparing the black race to a ship lost and adrift at sea, he intoned, “Our greatest danger is that in the great leap from slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by the production of our hands, and fail to keep in mind that we shall prosper as we learn to dignify and glorify common labor … It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top.”

In a year in which blacks throughout the South were continuing to lose what little remained of their civil and political rights, a year in which, according to the educational institution he headed, 113 members of his race had been lynched, Booker T. Washington in his Atlanta speech advised blacks not to “underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern white man, who is their next-door neighbor.” Washington dismissed blacks who tried to force integration, saying, “The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera house.”
³³

In essence, Washington chose jobs over justice. Openly concerned about unemployment and deep poverty among blacks, alarmed about blacks losing
jobs to immigrants—”those of foreign birth and strange tongues and habits”—and having no reason to believe, either philosophically or pragmatically, that organized labor would provide relief, Washington said blacks would accept segregation in most aspects of life as long as they were given a chance to earn a living. What one observer described as “a delirium of applause” rose from the packed auditorium as Washington held his right hand high above his head, fingers splayed widely apart and then clenched into a fist as he said, “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”

Earlier that year, Frederick Douglass, the embodiment of black pride and a tenacious foe of segregation, had died. After the Atlanta speech, the much more conservative Washington became the most prominent black man in America, a nation where public visibility is often equated with leadership. For whites at least, the time was right for the man who became known as the Great Accommodator. Enthusiastic white reaction to the speech was typified by President Cleveland's comment that the speech offered“s new hope” for blacks and by the
Atlanta Constitutions
editorial judgment: “The speech stamps Booker T. Washington as a wise counselor and a safe leader.” White business leaders across the country agreed enthusiastically.
³⁴

Many prominent and successful blacks praised the speech as well, in part perhaps because of the singular nature of the event—a black man speaking of such important matters to a large audience of whites deep in the South, and bringing that audience to its feet. Even young W. E. B. Du Bois, teaching at Wilberforce University in Ohio, in the very early stages of his transition from intellectual elitist to radical populist, wrote to congratulate Washington on “a word fitly spoken” and said his proposal could be “the basis for a real settlement between whites and blacks in the South.” Du Bois would later change his mind, to say the least.
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But some more militant blacks reacted to the speech with contempt, realizing that Washington had come dangerously close to confirming the belief of many whites that Americans of African descent were inferior to those whose ancestors had come from Europe, suited only to the most menial kind of labor, content with segregation, and happy to live off the crumbs that spilled from the white man's table. “He said something that was death to the Afro American and elevating to the white people,” wrote W. Calvin Chase, editor of the
Washington Bee
. “What fool wouldn't applaud the downfall of
his aspiring competitor?” Ida B. Wells accused Washington and his followers of advising blacks “to be first-class people in a Jim Crow car” instead of “insisting that the Jim Crow car be abolished.”
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In fact, it would be decades before the Jim Crow cars on Southern trains and the segregation they symbolized were abolished. Lawsuits against the segregated rail coaches, like the one initiated by Wells, failed to advance beyond state courts until 1896, when the United States Supreme Court heard a suit filed by a black man against segregated seating in Louisiana and reached a decision that would prove to be disastrous to African Americans, embedding the legality of segregation in federal law for generations to come. In
Plessy v. Ferguson
, the court ruled that separate accommodations could also be equal accommodations, and thus were not unconstitutional. Justice John M. Harlan, although a Southerner and a former slaveholder, begged to differ. The Great Dissenter wrote that the proposition that “colored citizens are so inferior and degraded that they cannot be allowed to sit in public coaches occupied by white citizens” was a despicable and unconstitutional one that was certain to “arouse race hate” and “stimulate aggression, more or less brutal and irritating, upon the admitted rights of colored citizens.”
³⁷

The separate but equal doctrine quickly was used to justify and enforce segregation in almost all aspects of public life in the South and to some extent in the North, where blacks were generally segregated by custom—sometimes brutally enforced—rather than by law. Racism was on the rise across America and blacks were portrayed negatively at all strata in the dominant culture. On one level, minstrel shows and “coon songs” enjoyed a revival in Northern cities and blacks were routinely portrayed as bumblers and crooks of low intelligence in the popular press. On a higher intellectual plane, at the august Smithsonian Institution, at the Museum of Natural History in New York, and at the best universities—including Harvard, as 1890 graduate W. E. B. Du Bois was infuriated to discover—distinguished academics espoused a variety of social Darwinism that placed blacks a bare notch above the ape. These notions were popularized in the extensive ethnographic exhibits at the world's fairs that were so popular in the period. At the gargantuan expositions in Chicago in 1893 and St. Louis in 1904, as well as at the lesser ones, including the Cotton States and International Exposition in 1895 in Atlanta, American Indians and tribal peoples from what would later be called the third world—living human beings—appeared in a kind of human zoo that
was meant to represent the evolution of humans from the lowest (and darkest) half-naked primitives toward the pinnacle of human development, the well-appointed northern European white men and women who attended the fairs in the tens of millions.