Jumpin' Jim Crow by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, General, Americas (North; Central; South; West Indies), Political Science, American Government, State, Social Science, Discrimination
ISBN: 9780691001937
Google: yFvjsEYP7hAC
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2000-10-29T22:33:08+00:00

Chapter 7 GRACE ELIZABETH HALE

“For Colored” and “For White”:

Segregating Consumption in the South

As the advertising industry, which is dedicated to the creation of masks, makes clear, that which cannot gain authority from tradition may borrow it with a mask. Masking is a play upon possibility and ours is a society in which possibilities are many. . . Said a very dark Southern friend of mine to a white businessman who complained of his recalcitrance in a bargaining situation, “I know, you thought I was colored, didn’t you.” . . . the “darky” act makes brothers of us all.

—Ralph Ellison

IN THE TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY South, the small-town train station often sat apart.1 Whereas the courthouse stood tall in the sky and central, fixing a town like an axle pierces a wheel, the train station hung low, attempting dignity while hugging the ground. Courthouses flaunted their authority, but as structures, southern train stations wore disguises. Their architecture often hid the importance of the transactions they sheltered, their location at the juncture of regional and national economies, their seeming stasis even as they monitored the movement between local and larger worlds.2

By the late nineteenth century, train stations and the trains that ran between them had become the first important sites of a new kind of struggle. African Americans resisted the creation of a new segregated social order not just at the courthouse and polling places where they fought with registrars and election officials to maintain an integrated franchise. They also tested each restriction of their rights in the expanding commercial spaces of the modernizing economy. On trains as early as the 1880s and later in the new commercial spaces of growing southern towns and cities, the few black southerners with the money to make purchases pushed at multiplying local and state laws and conventions. White southerners in turn elaborated more intricate regulations and put up more segregation signs. As white southerner Edgar Gardner Murphy wrote, “ours is a world of inexorable divisions. . . . Segregation has made of our eating and drinking, our buying and selling, our labor and housing, our rents, our railroads . . . our recreations ... a problem of race as well as of maintenance.” As African Americans lost the right to vote across the region and the Supreme Court in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson declared separate but equal constitutional, a new politics of consumption became more important, not as a substitute for electoral politics but as a manner of testing, a ground where segregation remained vulnerable. The marketplace, southern blacks asserted, would not join the ballot box as an arena of racial exclusion.3

This new politics of consumption became possible in large part because the expansive nature of America’s increasingly consumer-oriented economy continually generated both new products and new places to purchase them. While certainly the South did not lead this economic transformation of the country, the movement off the farm and the plantation, away from subsistence agriculture, and into sharecropping and mill work generated a demand for consumer goods among black and white southerners of all classes.

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