Jim Crow and Civil Rights in North Carolina

Jim Crow and Civil Rights in North Carolina
Segregation shaped black-white interactions in the post-Civil War North Carolina, where it reigned from the white supremacy revolt of 1898 until the 1960s. Jim Crow period was a crucial phase of race relations in American society. However, racial segregation had far deeper roots in the North Carolina past. Before the Civil War, slaveholders needed few regulations to isolate slaves and free people of color, who were kept apart by custom. After the Civil War, a white backlash against the former slaves began to legalize the customary distance between blacks and whites.
Planters intended to defy the emancipation guaranteed by the Thirteenth Amendment and exploit ex-slave workers. White employers flogged and even killed freed people who dared to assert their new liberties, even in the face of Union garrisons and Republican authority. While the state constitution of 1868 confirmed abolition and legitimated previous black and mixed-race births, it plainly stated that Black children and white children should study in different public schools (Franklin 73).
Despite the presence of federal and state militias, the Ku Klux Klan terrorized Republican voters and officeholders, black and white. In 1870, when conservative Democrats regained a legislative majority, Klansmen murdered 16 Republicans and whipped at least 121 (Franklin 88). An act of 1874 proclaimed that no white child could be apprenticed to a black adult. The amended state constitution in 1875 prohibited between white people and African-Americans and it reiterated the requirement for dual schools (Evans 55). The legislature soon established industrial and normal colleges for blacks, but it ignored the terror that drove thousands of them to Kansas and Indiana in 1879-80.
Blacks continued to vote and hold office in much of eastern North Carolina, backing "the Party of Lincoln" despite facing dangerous opposition (Anderson 37). For instance, between 1868 and 1889, fourteen black Republicans were elected to seventeen state house and six state senate terms from New Hanover County, home of Wilmington (Evans 54). Between 1874 and 1890, three blacks also won terms in Congress from the Second Congressional District, "a Republican and black stronghold." (Anderson 34).
Legislators in 1892 proposed to segregate railway travel, as eight other Southern states already had done. Republican and Populist assemblymen opposed the enabling bill.
Oppression increased as black North Carolinians persevered. Their votes enabled Fusion men to gain 74 of the 120 General Assembly seats in 1894 and win the governorship in 1896, while electoral reforms passed by the Fusionist legislature helped blacks to regain numerous local offices (Anderson 93). By 1897, in Wilmington, four aldermen, an audit board member, a justice of the peace, the deputy clerk of court, and the coroner were black (Edmonds 162). Clearly, 1898 marked a turning point in Jim Crow. The election that year brought into relief not only extreme white racism, but also fallout from the legal disfranchisement of blacks in South Carolina (1895) and the Supreme Court's "separate but equal" decision in Plessy v. Ferguson ( 1896) (Edmonds 165). Klansmen and White Supremacy Clubs frequently demonstrated at black and Fusion rallies, intimidating the crowds by a show of guns. In 1897-99 seven lynchings were reported in North Carolina, and racial intimidation and terrorism reached into even the most remote crossroads and towns during the fall of 1898 (Evans 87). Democrats reclaimed five of the state's nine congressional seats; Republicans retained three seats, reelecting the nation's only black congressman, George H. White, from the Second District (Evans 88). In state contests Democrats took ninety-four house and forty senate seats to the Republicans' twenty-three (four black) and seven (one black) and Populists' three and three (Evans 95).
During the Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 legally selected Republicans were overthrown by white Democrats. As the result, Democrats established the government which was based upon white supremacy (Wilmington Race Riot 1). It symbolized the creation of a codified and brutal color line, one that would last through the first half of the twentieth century.
In 1899 lawmakers adopted voting restrictions based on the Louisiana model of a literacy test, poll tax, and grandfather clause. Scheduled for a referendum in 1900, the suffrage amendment promised significant reduction of the black electorate, thereby undermining a multiracial or working-class challenge to Democratic and white dominance. Adult illiteracy then was 40 percent for black males, compared to 20 percent for white males (Edmonds 180). Registrars did not expect or permit black men to read and explain a section of the state constitution as specified in the amendment. Nor could most blacks afford to pay poll taxes, for they earned only subsistence incomes. Virtually none had grandfathers who voted prior to January 1867, so, as descendants of freedmen, they lost by fiat the protection given to illiterate white men.
The assault on democratic citizenship quickened. At least two acts proscribed racially mixed fraternal orders and mental hospitals; five empowered the utilities commission to enforce Jim Crow in transport. In 1900 black leaders issued "An Address to the White People of North Carolina" protesting the imminent passage of the constitutional amendment that would disfranchise blacks (Edmonds 195).
Legal separation proceeded apace. The state required the board of education to operate all-black school districts and dictated that school librarians "fit up and maintain a separate place for the use of the colored people who may come to the library." (Jim Crow Laws, Libraries). One statute allowed for relief and pension benefits to "fire companies composed exclusively of colored men." (Edmonds 199). Furthermore, a "person of negro descent to the third generation, inclusive" was defined as black (Jim Craw Laws, Intermarriage). Any officer who failed to confine black and white prisoners separately should be considered guilty, according to an order on prisons. Three orders similarly charged operators of streetcars and trains.
The legal and informal contours of Jim Crow covered a wide domain. The restrictions betrayed white fears of black-Indian cooperation, black educational progress and competition for jobs, interracial sex, and blacks' political dissent. To wit, the state reordered the segregation of Indians in jails, homes of the aged, and hospitals. It warranted a curriculum of only "practical agriculture and the mechanical arts and such branches of learning as relate thereto" for black colleges (Murray 332). Toilets had to be "lettered and marked in a distinct manner, so as to furnish separate facilities for white males, white females, colored males and colored females." (Murray 339). Indeed, by the eve of World War I, almost every visible space had been separated. During the war, the state stopped the "organization of colored troops . . . where white troops are available, and while permitted to be organized, colored troops shall be under the command of white officers." (Murray 342). Even a breach of the color line among convicts meant a fine or jail sentence for their jailers.
A sample of legislative acts from 1917 to 1945 can be useful to suggest the vagaries of Jim Crow. Of sixty-one Jim Crow statutes enacted in that period, three concern black aliens (Anderson 90). Education is the subject of nineteen, including a 1935 stipulation that "books shall not be interchangeable between the white and colored schools, but should continue to be used by the race first using them." (Murray 331) An act detailing punishment for violations of the toilet restriction applies to all categories of labor. Seventeen measures relate to provisions for the handicapped, and fifteen cover buses and trains (Murray 338). Not until 1947 did the state restrict cemeteries, which had long been separated by tradition.
State permission to segregate the races resonated locally. Cities and towns tended to replicate the Winston-Salem housing pattern. Winston-Salem's black residents had been segregated overwhelmingly into its southeastern corner by the 1920s. Black population clusters, always cordoned off by a main street, railroad track, or similar fixed barrier, shaped the social geography of every city and town. Hayti in Durham and Gilmer in Greensboro typified the urban ghettos (Woofter 67). In their segregated communities, veiled from white society, blacks forged a world of aspiration (Woofter 79).
Ordinances on accommodations (restaurants, theaters) and common spaces (auditoriums, stadiums) multiplied greatly. Lest there be trespassing, "White Only" and "Colored" signs policed entrances, exits, and seats. Banks, railroads, textile and tobacco factories, and other places of employment regularly exceeded statutory requirements. Tobacco plants in Durham, Reidsville, and Winston-Salem assigned "Negro and white workers to separate parts of buildings, or to different workrooms even when performing the same tasks, or to separate sides of the same room, or even to separate rows in the same room." (Woofter 100).
Many African Americans struggled against Jim Crow laws and promoted dignity and liberty of Black people. For example, Charlotte Hawkins Brown whose grandparents were slaves made substantial contribution to the development of African American education and established the North Carolina State Federation of Negro Women's Club (Charlotte Hawkins Brown Museum 1).
The other examples include Murray and Mebane who were emblematic of the black men and women who survived Jim Crow and struggled for protection of African-American civil rights. In 1938 the University of North Carolina denied Pauli Murray admission for graduate study. Two years later at Petersburg, Virginia, she was arrested for sitting in the front seat of an interstate bus.
Blacks such as Murray and Mebane responded to Jim Crow by pursuing an array of community-building activities to soften segregation's harshest edges and build autonomy and self-respect. Within "autonomous institutions"--including the family, education, religion, cultural expression, labor, business, and politics--blacks built a sense of hope. Consider post-riot Wilmington: by 1930 institutions within the black community included one of five hospitals in the city, two of thirteen homes for the elderly, two of nine cemeteries, twenty-eight of fifty-two churches and four of fourteen public schools (Wilmington Directory 700).
Black colleges and universities which were founded after the Civil War contributed substantially to black North Carolina education. There are eleven Black higher institutions in North Carolina (Historically Black Colleges and Universities 1). Among them are Bennett College, Barberia-Scottia College, North Carolina A&T State University and others. These colleges also cultivated ambition and self-esteem in their students.
In 1960 a group of Black students from North Carolina A&T University was not served during lunch; they protested against such discrimination by their refusal to leave the lunch counter. The Greensboro sit-ins were started by four African-American activists such as Ezell Blair, David Richmond, Joseph McNeil and Franklin McLain (Greensboro sit-ins, Timeline, 1). This non-violent protest has continued to take place in many cities. Thus, within the period of two months the lunch counter sit-ins took place in 54 cities in 9 states (Greensboro sit-ins, Timeline, 2). Later the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was organized to support Sit-Ins (Six Years of the SNCC 2).
Thus, Black activists participated in college boycotts and other forms of nonviolent direct action, helping to catalyze the emergent civil rights movement in North Carolina. Their fight on the home front to abolish Jim Crow bequeathed a significant legacy of hope to the next generation. Due to the courage and high aspirations of those Black Carolinians of the post-Civil War Era, African-Americans in North Carolina can enjoy civil rights and liberties which they have today. Individuals on both sides of the color line started to take each other seriously, with neither preordained stereotypes nor false etiquette.
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