Good Morning POU! We continue reading excerpts from Remembering Jim Crow.
Jim Crow’s Effect on Poor Whites
The South does not consist only of descendants of slaves and descendants of slave owners. Whites have always outnumbered blacks by 3:1 and most slaves were owned in large groups; therefore, the vast majority of whites did not own slaves.
The white upper class maintained their hold on power by convincing the poor white majority that they had more in common with the “squires” than with the blacks.
Slavery deprived the South of a middle class. The plantation owners and bulk traders had no use for skilled and unskilled paid labor when slaves were cheaper, and since this labor lived on the plantations, towns did not grow, and so most whites were subsistence farmers. This system benefited the gentry who used race fear to keep the poor whites in line.
This legacy lives on today in the South, when you see the number of whites, who will not do “nigger work,” the type of low-skilled work that is cheerfully done in the North by all races at fair wages. This has historically held down wages and the value of work in the South.
It was in the South in the 1930s that a nascent, mostly white, labor movement was put down with far more brutality than Northern managers would have contemplated. This showed the true value that the southern moneyed class placed upon their fellow whites, and they were able to do so by using the lower class whites to keep the blacks down by staying down with them.
This strategy continues into the present time as the Republican party gained control in the South by convincing most whites that the equal rights movement was really a big government effort at taking what little they have and giving it to their “inferiors.”
Until the scholarship begins to focus upon a message to the majority of whites in the South that they have been victimized by racism and have more in common with blacks than they do with the upper class, there is going to be a race problem.
I want the reporter who went to New Iberia, LA to go back there and find a dirt-poor white trash old man, the sort of white man who would not have stepped into the street when meeting the upper class white, but who would have averted his eyes, and ask him how things were better in Jim Crow days. That would be an educating interview.
I was born and raised in the south by parents who emigrated from the north in the early 1950s, so I was raised during the civil rights movement by whites who did not see themselves as having anything to lose by it. As an adult, I moved north to the area where my parents came from, and among the white people around me I have detected differences in the way they perceive blacks, differences in the way they perceive immigrants, and, most profoundly, differences in the way they view work.
Alan Bratburd
Haymarket, VA