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The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow

The segregation and disenfranchisement laws known as "Jim Crow" represented a formal, codified system of racial apartheid that dominated the American South for three quarters of a century beginning in the 1890s. The laws affected almost every aspect of daily life, mandating segregation of schools, parks, libraries, drinking fountains, restrooms, buses, trains, and restaurants. "Whites Only" and "Colored" signs were constant reminders of the enforced racial order.
                       The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow | PBS | 



In legal theory, blacks received "separate but equal" treatment under the law — in actuality, public facilities for blacks were nearly always inferior to those for whites, when they existed at all. In addition, blacks were systematically denied the right to vote in most of the rural South through the selective application of literacy tests and other racially motivated criteria.

In communities across the country, property owners signed agreements called restrictive covenants. These contracts barred African Americans and sometimes other groups-including Jews, Asians, and Latinos-from many neighborhoods. In this covenant from Arlington County, Virginia, in the 1940s, the purchasers agreed never to sell their house to "persons of any race other than the white Caucasian Race."

During the Reconstruction period of 1865–1877, federal laws provided civil rights protections in the U.S. South for freedmen, the African Americans who had formerly been slaves, and the minority of blacks who had been free before the war. In the 1870s, Democrats gradually regained power in the Southern legislatures, having used insurgent paramilitary groups, such as the White League and the Red Shirts, to disrupt Republican organizing, run Republican officeholders out of town, and intimidate blacks to suppress their voting. Extensive voter fraud was also used. Gubernatorial elections were close and had been disputed in Louisiana for years, with increasing violence against blacks during campaigns from 1868 onward.

In 1877, a national Democratic Party compromise to gain Southern support in the presidential election resulted in the government's withdrawing the last of the federal troops from the South. White Democrats had regained political power in every Southern state. These Southern, white, Democratic Redeemer governments legislated Jim Crow laws, officially segregating black people from the white population.

Blacks were still elected to local offices throughout the 1880s, but their voting was suppressed for state and national elections. Democrats passed laws to make voter registration and electoral rules more restrictive, with the result that political participation by most blacks and many poor whites began to decrease. Between 1890 and 1910, ten of the eleven former Confederate states, starting with Mississippi, passed new constitutions or amendments that effectively disenfranchised most blacks and tens of thousands of poor whites through a combination of poll taxes, literacy and comprehension tests, and residency and record-keeping requirements.  Grandfather clauses temporarily permitted some illiterate whites to vote but gave no relief to most blacks.

Voter turnout dropped drastically through the South as a result of such measures. In Louisiana, by 1900, black voters were reduced to 5,320 on the rolls, although they comprised the majority of the state's population. By 1910, only 730 blacks were registered, less than 0.5% of eligible black men. "In 27 of the state's 60 parishes, not a single black voter was registered any longer; in 9 more parishes, only one black voter was." The cumulative effect in North Carolina meant that black voters were completely eliminated from voter rolls during the period from 1896–1904. The growth of their thriving middle class was slowed. In North Carolina and other Southern states, blacks suffered from being made invisible in the political system: "[W]ithin a decade of disfranchisement, the white supremacy campaign had erased the image of the black middle class from the minds of white North Carolinians." In Alabama tens of thousands of poor whites were also disenfranchised, although initially legislators had promised them they would not be affected adversely by the new restrictions.

Those who could not vote were not eligible to serve on juries and could not run for local offices. They effectively disappeared from political life, as they could not influence the state legislatures, and their interests were overlooked. While public schools had been established by Reconstruction legislatures for the first time in most Southern states, those for black children were consistently underfunded compared to schools for white children, even when considered within the strained finances of the postwar South where the decreasing price of cotton kept the agricultural economy at a low.

Like schools, public libraries for blacks were underfunded, if they existed at all, and they were often stocked with secondhand books and other resources.  These facilities were not introduced for African Americans in the South until the first decade of the 20th century. Throughout the Jim Crow era, libraries were only available sporadically. Prior to the 20th century, most libraries established for African Americans were school-library combinations.  Many public libraries for both European-American and African American patrons in this period were founded as the result of middle-class activism aided by matching grants from the Carnegie Foundation.

In some cases, progressive measures intended to reduce election fraud, such as the Eight Box Law in South Carolina, acted against black and white voters who were illiterate, as they could not follow the directions.  While the separation of African Americans from the general population was becoming legalized and formalized during the Progressive Era (1890s–1920s), it was also becoming customary. For instance, even in cases in which Jim Crow laws did not expressly forbid black people to participate in sports or recreation, a segregated culture had become common.

In the Jim Crow context, the presidential election of 1912 was steeply slanted against the interests of black Americans. Most blacks still lived in the South, where they had been effectively disfranchised, so they could not vote at all. While poll taxes and literacy requirements banned many poor or illiterate Americans from voting, these stipulations frequently had loopholes that exempted European Americans from meeting the requirements. In Oklahoma, for instance, anyone qualified to vote before 1866, or related to someone qualified to vote before 1866 (a kind of "grandfather clause"), was exempted from the literacy requirement; but the only persons who had the franchise before that year were white, or European-American males. European Americans were effectively exempted from the literacy testing, whereas black Americans were effectively singled out by the law.

Woodrow Wilson was a Democrat elected from New Jersey, but he was born and raised in the South, and was the first Southern-born president of the post-Civil War period. He appointed Southerners to his Cabinet. Some quickly began to press for segregated workplaces, although the city of Washington, D.C., and federal offices had been integrated since after the Civil War. In 1913, for instance, Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo – an appointee of the President – was heard to express his opinion of black and white women working together in one government office: "I feel sure that this must go against the grain of the white women. Is there any reason why the white women should not have only white women working across from them on the machines?"

Information sources:
 www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/freedom-riders-jim-crow-laws/
 www.americanhistory.si.edu/brown/history/1-segregated/jim-crow.html
 Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sarah Wallace reports on Black Lives Matter lawsuit 8 29 17

Rosa Lee Ingram

                                      Rosa Lee Ingram

    When Rosa Lee Ingram and her two sons received the death penalty in 1948 for murdering a white landowner in rural Georgia, civil rights activists from across the nation rushed to her defense.  The Ingram case represented an example of the emerging Cold War politics of racial protest and helped trigger local challenges to Jim Crow in the southwest corner of Georgia.

Rosa Lee Ingram, was an African American sharecropper and widowed mother of 12 children, was the center of one of the most-explosive capital punishment cases in history near the small town of Ellaville Ga.In 1948 in a one-day trial, Ingram and two of her teenage boys were sentenced to die by the electric chair, after an altercation with a White landowner in the state of Georgia.

On November 4, 1947, Rosa Ingram farmed adjoining lots with white sharecropper John Ed Stratford. Ingram bred Stratford’s livestock.  Stratford confronted Ingram, accusing her of allowing her livestock to roam freely on his land. When Ingram reminded Stratford that both the livestock and the land were owned by their landlord, he struck her with a gun.  Several of Mrs. Ingram’s sons came to her defense. Mrs. Ingram, along with her sons Charles (age 17), Wallace (age 16), Sammie Lee (age 14), and James (age 12) were arrested. James was eventually released. . John Stratford was armed with a shotgun and pocket knife when he went to have his word with Ingram. When Ingram’s boys overheard their mother yelling then rushed over to her armed with farm instruments. Later, the 64-year-old man was found dead by way of blows to the head according to the investigation.

In several accounts and most notably in author Janus Adams‘ “Sister Days: 365 Inspired Moments in African-American Women’s History,” it was said that Stratford struck Ingram in the head with the butt of his rifle after threatening to shoot her mules that allegedly invaded his cornfield. Other historical accounts state that according to later testimony, though, Stratford threatened Ingram with sexual assault before striking her.

The sentencing of Ingram and her two sons to die in the electric chair was handed down by an all-white jury on February 7, 1948. When their executions were scheduled for February 27, 1948, less than three weeks later, the country erupted in protests against the trial, which had been conducted in haste and secrecy, and the sentences.

The Ingram case received national press attention during the post-World War II era when the southern justice system and Jim Crow itself were under new scrutiny.  Members of the Atlanta chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) rushed down to appeal the verdict, providing support to local white lawyer appointed to the case, S. Hawkins Dykes.  The Civil Rights Congress (CRC), a left-based organization, also became involved in raising funds for the Ingrams and publicizing their cause but also generating tensions with the NAACP which harkened back to the political splits seen in the Scottsboro cases of the 1930s.  When the Ingrams appealed in 1948, Georgia courts reduced the death sentences to life imprisonment but refused to take further action.  The NAACP and the CRC’s formal protests thus increasingly stalled due to both strategy conflicts and the continuing power of the southern legal system.

A second wave of protests ensued after the Georgia Supreme Court upheld the Ingrams’ life sentences.  Despite continued protests from Civil Rights organizations on the basis of the extenuating circumstances (e.g. that Mr. Stratford had sexually assaulted Ingram and her children were responding in self-defense), in 1952, the Georgia pardon and parole board refused to free Ingram and her two sons.  When Sojourners for Truth and Justice came to visit Georgia governor Herman Talmadge in January 1953 to plead for the Ingrams’ release, they were turned away by the governor’s wife, who told them the governor was out hunting.  In 1955, the Ingrams were again denied parole. The State Board gave no reason for denying parole.

At this point, female activists emerged as a critical political voice on behalf of Rosa Lee Ingram and her sons, often working across traditional alliances of race and class.  For example, the CRC supported the creation of the National Committee to Free the Ingram Family which was headed by Mary Church Terrell, long a leader of the black women’s club movement. This group petitioned the United Nations to address the Ingram case as both a matter of human rights and women’s rights.  Other groups such as the Sojourners for Truth and Justice linked the Ingram case to the failures of the southern legal system, calling upon President Harry Truman to take action.

The Ingrams were defended by the Civil Rights Congress, as well as Sojourners for Truth and Justice. As historian Erik S. McDuffie notes, the case galvanized black left feminists, highlighting the specific forms of oppression experienced by poor black women, as well as foregrounding the history of white men’s sexual violence against black women. According to McDuffie, “Ingram’s case represented in glaring terms the interlocking systems of oppression suffered by African American women: the painful memories of and the continued day-to-day sexual violence committed against black women’s bodies by white men, the lack of protection for and the disrespect of black motherhood, the economic exploitation of black working-class women, and the disfranchisement of black women in the Jim Crow South.” Black progressive women were the leaders of the global campaign to free the Ingrams.

 The Ingrams were finally released on parole in 1959 after having been judged to be “model prisoners.”  The activism surrounding the case revealed real tensions over leadership and left-based politics but it also demonstrated women’s efforts to highlight gendered critiques of Jim Crow.

Wallace Ingram (from left) stands with Rosa Lee Ingram, Samuel Ingram and Clayton R. Yates.

  Information sorces:
   BlackPast.org , Wikipedia the free encyclopedia , newsone.com , The  American Journal of Legal History ,