Wednesday Open Thread: The Nadir of African American History

Good Morning POU. We continue our look at the Nadir of African American History, the period after Reconstruction and approximately right before the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement.

In 1893, William Frank Fonvielle, an African American student at Livingstone College in Salisbury, North Carolina, left on a summer road trip through the South. He was editor of his college newspaper and promised to report back to his classmates on racial progress and oppression. His trip came at a crucial moment. Fonvielle believed that black Americans were on the rise, becoming well educated, exercising the vote, and becoming economically self-sufficient. He wasn’t mistaken in those beliefs, but a tide of white supremacy was rising to meet and wash over those accomplishments.

In the Deep South, Mississippi had ratified a new constitution in 1890. It meant to disfranchise black voters by a literacy test that required a voter to “be able to read any section of the Constitution, or be able to understand the same when read to him, or to give a reasonable interpretation thereof.” It was actually a comprehension test, or as some called it, “an understanding clause.” White registrars would administer the law, and they would decide whether the constitutional interpretations that black voters gave qualified as “reasonable.” The new rules also required payment of a poll tax to be eligible to vote. A court case, Williams v. Mississippi, was already pending to test the law’s constitutionality. Most African Americans believed that the federal courts would never let it to stand.

In addition to wanting to see firsthand a state that would take away his right to vote, Fonvielle wanted to see something else: the new forms of segregation that were springing up across the South in transportation and public space. He had heard that in some southern states the railway stations had separate black and white waiting rooms, and that sometimes the train stopped at the state line so that the conductors could force all of the black passengers in to a separate car. They called this car the Jim Crow car, naming it for a white minstrel who performed in blackface before the Civil War. Jim Crow first become a nickname for African Americans, and then African Americans appropriated it as shorthand for white oppression, disfranchisement, and segregation.

The year before Fonvielle’s trip, 1892, had been incredibly violent: at least 230 people had been lynched, 69 of them white and 161 black. Fonvielle knew that this was a peak in the bloody record. Almost 1,000 people had been lynched in the past decade.  Most of the victims were black men, but some were black women. White southerners, particularly in the Deep South, were murdering black people who asserted their rights. The Seaboard Air Line train that Fonvielle boarded in North Carolina quickly crossed the South Carolina line. He hung out the window, eager to see a white man because he had heard that South Carolina was an especially violent place. Soon, one appeared. Fonvielle described him: “He had on but one suspender, a cotton shirt, a frying pan hat, a pair of pantaloons. . . so I sat there and wondered if this tiller of the soil, this specimen of South Carolina manhood had ever helped lynch anybody.”

Fonvielle’s generation of black men and women had poured into the South’s new black educational institutions, many of them, like Livingstone, co-educational. The first generation of African Americans born in freedom embraced education as a civil rights strategy. Since slave states had passed laws making it a crime to teach enslaved people to read and write, many saw education as the way to full citizenship, economic success, and community standing. Black literacy rates rose rapidly, from an estimated 5%-10% under slavery to 50% in 1910. Among black people born after 1860, literacy rates were even higher.  Moreover, many wanted first-class educations: the kind that white men were getting at the time. For example, Fonvielle had a classical education and read Latin. At the station in Carlisle, South Carolina, he sat reading a brand new best selling novel, when a white man came up to him and asked if he were not afraid to read so many novels. Fonvielle responded that it depended on the novel. The white man, amazed at this educated black man, began to quiz him: Have you read Dickens? Ben Hur? Shakespeare? Fonvielle pulled Shakespeare from his suitcase and offered to lend it to him.

In addition to education, black people came to own 25% of southern acreage by 1900, compared to the 3.8% that they owned in 1880. By 1910, African Americans owned between 16 and 19 million acres. Moreover, African Americans started their own businesses and factories. At Union, South Carolina, Fonvielle visited a gigantic cotton mill owned by a black man, which employed both black and white labor. A decade later, no cotton mill in the South would employ African Americans at all.

But by the time he got to Spartanburg, South Carolina, Fonvielle’s education in the new white supremacy began. “When I arrived at Spartanburg—which is a pretty town—I was reminded that I was in the South by the appearance of two sign boards at the station, which told me: ‘This room is for colored people.’ ‘This room is for white people.’ . . . Those signs perplexed me, for I had never seen anything like them before. Then the whole thing burst upon me at once, and I interpreted it to mean: The Negroes must stay in here and not in the other room, and the ‘superior’ civilization goes where it pleases.”

Sleeping all night on the train, Fonvielle woke up in Atlanta at 6:00 a.m. He reported, “Upon first glance, Atlanta reminds one of a Northern city; but a five minutes stay will be sufficient to knock all such silly notions out of your head.” Although Fonvielle was hungry for breakfast, he could not eat in the station restaurant. Atlanta, he told his readers, was a “mean hole . . . chained down with prejudice.” African Americans could not ride on street cars unless they took seats in the back, a policy that sparked a boycott by black riders. Numerous southern cities followed Atlanta’s lead, and numerous protests followed. Nonetheless, in 1893, it was all new to Fonvielle, and he could not believe his eyes. He marveled, “The Negroes are taxed to help keep up the city parks, the council will not permit them nor the dogs to enter.”

The imposition of rigid segregation was gradual: it started in the lower South and moved up to the upper South. Fonvielle was going to meet it. Leaving Atlanta, he had to travel on the Jim Crow car. He asked, “Did you ever see a ‘Jim Crow’ car? If you haven’t, let me describe it to you. . . . It is divided into two compartments. The end next to the baggage car is the ‘Crow’ car . . . the other end is a smoker.” African Americans paid as much to ride as whites, who sat “on cushioned seats.” Black passengers sat amid smoke and coal dust, packed in with luggage. As he toured Montgomery, Mobile, and New Orleans, Fonvielle found Jim Crow everywhere. Shaken by what he saw, still he believed that these ridiculous restrictions would be temporary. As he traveled north into Tennessee, Jim Crow disappeared. “I lay back on the beautiful plush rests, in a nice chair car, . . . [and when I saw] the Smoky Mountains . . . I thought of heaven.”

A decade later, by 1903, the conditions that Fonvielle had observed as curiosities would be institutionalized by law throughout the South, even in his own beloved North Carolina. When Homer Plessy, a black New Orleanian, refused to move to the back of the streetcar, he intended to spark a test case, because he was sure that he would win in court. But in 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that segregation was legal, as long as the accommodation provided for blacks was equal to that provided for whites. That equality was a fiction in practice. The unequal Jim Crow car became the only way that African Americans could travel in the South. Five years later, in 1901, novelist Charles Chesnutt described a trip similar to Fonvielle’s in “A Journey Southward.”

In 1898, the Supreme Court of the United States upheld voting restrictions in Williams v. Mississippi, but other southern states didn’t wait for that endorsement to follow Mississippi’s lead. They variously imposed complicated residential requirements for registering. Some put in a grandfather clause that allowed illiterate whites to vote if their grandfathers had voted. Others enacted a poll tax. Across the region, voter turnout plummeted: roughly one in five people voted, compared to four out of five in Iowa.

After all of that, if black people persisted in trying to register or vote, white people met them at the polls with racial violence. For example in 1898, a leading white man in Wilmington, North Carolina, proclaimed that he would drive African Americans out of politics, even if he had to “chok[e] the Cape Fear River with the bodies of [N]egroes.”7 After his party lost the election, he made good on his promise and led a mob that shot black citizens down in the streets. Then he fired city officials and seized the mayor’s office for himself. States also amended their constitutions to require segregation; municipalities passed laws that dictated where people could eat, live, walk, and stand.

The imposition of white supremacy and the violence that accompanied it sparked the first Great Migration of African Americans to the North after the turn of the century. It became clear to black southerners that the federal government was not going to come to their aid if they remained in the South. A black woman who witnessed the Wilmington massacre wrote to the Attorney General of the United States and begged him to send a boat for their rescue. She asked him, “Is this the land of the free and the home of the brave? How can the Negro sing my country ‘tis of thee?” William Frank Fonvielle watched in despair as his own state of North Carolina disfranchised him in a white supremacy campaign fueled by the Democratic party newspaper, the Raleigh News and Observer. Fonvielle’s final thoughts survive in the poem he wrote about this time: