Discussion

The material from Week 4 asks you to think about how people experienced Jim Crow. Your responses here should show direct engagement with the assigned readings. In other words, I want to be able to tell from your responses that you are thinking critically about the material from Week 4.

1. The Higginbotham chapter and the reading from Remembering Jim Crow details the many ways that life for Black Americans was limited, circumscribed, and controlled. Which example/s from these readings were most striking to you and why did it stand out? Your response should be 2-3 sentences. 3 points.

2. Higginbotham frames his discussion of Jim Crow policies and practicing actively contributing to the “prevention of Black excellence.” What do you think Higginbotham means by “prevention of Black excellence” and what is the case in support of that argument? Why was the prevention of black excellence so important to white people? Your response should be 3-4 sentences long. 3 points.

3. What were some of the acts of violence commonly experienced by the Black population during the Jim Crow era? Why do you think such extreme violence was committed to uphold segregation? Do you think it is important for people today to learn about the incredible brutality that characterized the Jim Crow era? Why or why not? Your response should be 4-5 sentences long. 4 points.

“Indescribable Barbarism”

The Lynching of African Americans

in the Age of Jim Crow

o n j a n u a r y 3 1 , 1 8 9 3 , a sheriff’s posse captured a black man
named Henry Smith at Clow, a flag station on the Arkansas & Louisi-
ana Railway in southwestern Arkansas. They arrested the fugitive for
the rape and murder of Myrtle Vance, a three-year-old white child and
the daughter of the sheriff in Paris, Texas. Smith, a young man with
a record of mental problems, had allegedly killed the child to visit re-
venge upon Sheriff Vance, who had repeatedly brutalized him. When
the posse passed through Texarkana on its way back to Paris, an angry
crowd awaited Smith and his captors. The leaders of the posse were able
to avert a lynching, pleading with the residents of Texarkana to allow
them to return the killer to the scene of his crime, where he would be
brought to justice. The crowd deferred, but hundreds of people boarded
the train to Paris to witness the spectacle that would surely follow. For
it was understood that the posse never intended to deliver Smith to the
legal authorities for trial.

Meanwhile news of Smith’s capture had attracted a gathering of
roughly ten thousand people in Paris. Several men had erected a ten-
foot-high scaffold furnished with a chair and a small furnace. The word
justice was painted in large white letters on the front side of the scaf-
fold. The “justice” administered to Henry Smith consisted of red-hot
irons that Sheriff Vance and several members of his family applied to the
victim’s body for almost an hour. After Smith’s torturers had poked out
his eyes and burned his tongue, they doused the platform with kerosene

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Berg, Manfred. Popular Justice : A History of Lynching in America, Ivan R. Dee, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/insu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=662329.
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“indescribable barbarism” 91

and set it on fire. As soon as the flames had consumed Smith, onlookers
began scavenging the ashes for whatever parts remained of the scorched
body. Throughout the grisly act, observers had taken photographs, and
the next day newspapers on the East Coast featured graphic eyewitness
accounts of the lynching in Texas.

In her 1894 pamphlet A Red Record, the African-American anti-
lynching activist Ida B. Wells (1862–1931) called the torment of Henry
Smith an “indescribable barbarism” without precedent in the “history of
civilization.” Unfortunately the brutality of the lynching at Paris was by
no means exceptional. During the decades between the end of Recon-
struction and the 1920s, “spectacle lynchings” before large crowds, often
involving drawn out torture, mutilation, burning, and the dismember-
ment of the victim’s body, occurred regularly in the New South. Nor did
witnesses find such events indescribable; in fact they often indulged in
sickening voyeurism. In April 1899, for example, a newspaper depicted
the death of Sam Hose, a black farm worker from rural Georgia charged
with the murder of Alfred Cranford, his white employer, and the rape of
Cranford’s wife, in words that are hard to fathom: “Before the torch was
applied to the pyre the negro was deprived of his ears, fingers and other
portions of his anatomy. The negro pleaded pitifully for his life while
the mutilation was going on, but stood the ordeal of fire with surprising
fortitude. Before the body was cool it was cut to pieces, the bones were
crushed into small bits. . . . The negro’s heart was cut into several pieces,
as was his liver. Those unable to obtain these ghastly relics directly paid
fortunate possessors extravagant sums for them.”

Both contemporary opponents of lynching and historians have pon-
dered the nagging question of why “ordinary Americans” who had
families, went to church, held steady jobs, and otherwise claimed to be
law-abiding citizens were capable of perpetrating such atrocities while
showing no signs of shame or remorse. That question, however, is mis-
leading. Most acts of collective violence in history, including mass mur-
der, genocide, and war crimes, have been committed not by perverted
aberrants but by “ordinary people” acting in perfectly good conscience
because they received orders, believed in noble causes, or simply saw an
opportunity to exert power over life and death with impunity. Most par-
ticipants in lynch mobs viewed themselves as rendering an honorable
service to justice and to the safety of their communities. Thus in order

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92 popular justice

to understand lynching it is necessary to explore the cultural, social, eco-
nomic, and political forces that sustained mob violence.

The most salient chapter in the history of lynch law in America was
the lynching of African Americans in the late nineteenth and early twen-
tieth centuries. According to the most conservative estimates, slightly
more than 4,700 persons were lynched in the United States between the
early 1880s and World War II. Seventy-three percent of all victims were
blacks. In the South, where more than 80 percent of all lynchings oc-
curred, black deaths were a staggering 83 percent of the total, represent-
ing 3,245 fatalities.

The obvious answer to the question of why white Southerners lynched
African Americans is that lynching was an instrument of racial control.
By the late 1870s the “redeemers” had successfully shaken off the fetters
of Reconstruction, but most white Southerners continued to be deeply
troubled by the fact that they found themselves living amidst a large
black population no longer restrained by the institution of slavery. The
answer to their predicament was to impose a racial caste system of white
supremacy, popularly known as the Jim Crow system, designed to reduce
African Americans to a pariah class without meaningful rights. To this

The lynching of Henry Smith in Paris, Texas, 1893.

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“indescribable barbarism” 93

end, white Southerners introduced rigid racial segregation along with
“electoral reforms” such as literacy tests and poll taxes to disenfranchise
nearly all black voters.

In the last resort, however, white supremacy depended on the ability
of whites to inflict violent repression on blacks with impunity. Racial vio-
lence in the age of Jim Crow ran a broad gamut, from individual bullying
to wholesale pogroms with dozens of black victims. The so-called race
riots in Wilmington, North Carolina (1898), New Orleans (1900), and
Atlanta (1906) were the most conspicuous events of this type, but many
lesser-known incidents could be added. In 1920, for instance, a confron-
tation in the township of Ocoee in Orange County, Florida, in which a
black farmer killed two attackers in self-defense, resulted in a three-day
orgy of mob violence that left scores of African Americans dead and the
entire village destroyed. Thus the lynching of individuals or small groups
of blacks was only one manifestation of the racist violence that pervaded
life in the Jim Crow South. But lynching was highly visible and effective.

Lynchings did not have to happen every day to fill black communities
with fear and horror. As with all forms of terror, the ever-present threat
sent a powerful message of intimidation. Even slight transgressions of ra-
cial etiquette or misunderstandings might trigger fateful consequences.
When Sandy Reeves, a black youth from rural Georgia, accidentally
dropped a five cent piece in front of his employer’s three-year-old daugh-
ter in September 1918, he should have let the girl keep the nickel instead
of wresting it back from her hands. The child ran home, frantically cry-
ing that Reeves had harmed her. Her parents assumed that the young
man had sexually assaulted their daughter; Reeves was lynched the fol-
lowing night. His fate may appear extreme, but Southern blacks knew
that such incidents could happen to them too.

Lynchers made every effort to ensure that the black community
got their message. They left the bodies of their victims on display for
hours, sometimes even for days, and attached signs warning that future
offenders would meet the same fate. Spectacle lynchings, such as the
burnings of Henry Smith or Sam Hose described earlier, were frighten-
ing reminders that there were virtually no limits to what whites could
do to blacks. Although only about one-tenth of all mob killings were
mass spectacles, they nevertheless epitomized the meaning of lynching
as racist terror staged as communal ritual. Mock trials and confessions,

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94 popular justice

even if obtained under torture, were essential to underscore the legiti-
macy of the punishment and to create the impression that the lynching
was tantamount to a legal execution. Extreme cruelty like mutilation
and burning satisfied the popular desire for retribution that fit the
enormity of the crime. The practice of bystanders riddling dead lynch
victims with bullets emphasized community approval. The public exhi-
bition of body parts as trophies symbolized the triumph over a common
enemy. Because the excessive violence of spectacle lynchings was rarely
applied to white victims, no one could miss the point that the cruelty
served the purpose of dehumanizing African Americans. Replicating
a pattern that had been established during two centuries of slavery,
lynchers treated blacks as inferior “brutes” who were insensitive to any
but the most horrible physical pain.

But why did so many white Southerners believe they had to go to such
extremes in order “to keep the Negro in his place”? After all, whites
were a substantial majority of the population in most regions of the
South. They held all positions of political power and owned nearly all the
wealth. Certainly whites had absolute control of the criminal justice sys-
tem and could make sure that blacks who were accused of crimes against
whites faced severe punishment. There was also no need to use violence
in order to keep the races separate. Although African Americans wanted
political and civic equality, they had very little interest in social involve-
ment with white people because interracial contacts only reinforced their
subordinate status. At closer look it becomes clear that, in addition to in-
timidating blacks, racist mob violence in the South helped restore racial
solidarity among Southern whites.

During Reconstruction most white Southerners, regardless of social
class, had supported the struggle against “Negro rule” by all means neces-
sary. But once redemption was complete, class tensions within the white
South reemerged. A key reason was the decline of cotton prices. Many
small farmers went into debt, lost their farms, and became tenants or
sharecroppers. The agrarian crisis sparked a powerful protest movement,
known as populism, which challenged the dominance of the Southern
planter and business elites. The Populists were willing to forge inter-
racial alliances based on the common economic interests of lower-class
whites and blacks. The ruling conservative Democrats, used to manipu-
lating the black vote in their own favor, responded by waging a ruthless

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“indescribable barbarism” 95

campaign for white supremacy that once again employed lynching and
vigilantism as instruments of political terrorism. Lynching peaked in the
early 1890s, at the height of the Populist revolt and its conservative back-
lash. In the election year of 1892, at least 161 blacks were lynched, many
of whom were involved in the Populist movement.

Attempts to lynch black Populists sometimes led to amazing conse-
quences. In late October 1892 H. S. Doyle, an African-American Populist
leader from Georgia, received threats to his life and fled to the home of
Thomas Watson, the most prominent white Populist in the state. Watson
immediately summoned an army of two thousand white supporters for
Doyle’s protection. In the end, however, the divide-and-conquer strategy
of the conservative elites succeeded in driving a wedge into the fledgling
interracial alliance. The Southern Democrats first adopted key items of
the Populist program, then persuaded the white majority that “the Ne-
gro” was the source of all Southern troubles and had to be disfranchised,
segregated, and forcibly kept in his place if tranquility was to return.
As the historian C. Vann Woodward put it, the black man became “the
scapegoat in the reconciliation of estranged white classes.” Indeed, some
scholars have argued that the role of blacks as scapegoats goes a long way
in explaining Southern lynchings, pointing out that whenever cotton
prices fell, mob violence increased. Lynching, they have concluded, was
most of all a way for lower-class whites to vent their economic frustration
against their black competitors. The failure of interracial solidarity in the
Populist movement showed that for most white Southerners race came
before class. Poor whites, a disillusioned Tom Watson noted, “would joy-
ously hug the chains of wretchedness rather than do any experimenting
on the race question.“ For his part, Watson decided to stake his political
fortunes on white supremacy. He turned into a race-baiting demagogue
and a vociferous apologist of lynching.

The appeal to the joint class interests of poor whites and blacks
foundered on a powerful cultural legacy that demanded conformity on
racial issues from all Southern whites. The institution of slavery had
accustomed whites to the ideas that blacks stood outside the ordinary
law and that all whites were responsible for controlling a potentially
rebellious population of outcasts. It was no coincidence that some mob
killings of African Americans in the New South resembled the insur-
rection scares of the antebellum days. In 1901, for example, a mob of

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96 popular justice

two hundred white men hunted down and hanged two blacks in Boss-
ier Parish, Louisiana, for allegedly slaying a local white man. The two
killers, the local newspaper insinuated, had been members of a conspir-
acy ring responsible for the recent murder of several whites. Hence the
lynching was a “necessary precaution” to protect the white community
from a black uprising.

Slavery as a legal and social institution had provided white Southern-
ers with a sense of unquestionable superiority and relative safety vis-à-vis
black slaves. Emancipation had not only ended human bondage but had
made blacks equal citizens before the law. In the eyes of many whites,
this was an insult and a threat to their own status, and they made ev-
ery effort to undermine the political and civic advancement of the freed
people. Nevertheless blacks in the South now struggled steadfastly to ac-
quire a modicum of education and economic independence, challenging
the racist dogma that they were fit only for menial agricultural labor un-
der white supervision. Moreover younger African Americans who had
no personal recollection of slavery refused to wear the mask of subservi-
ence that their enslaved parents had been forced to adopt. Many whites
were deeply disturbed by what they perceived as a new black assertive-
ness. “Too many negroes,” the Atlanta Constitution warned in 1889, “are
either mad or bad, and they are increasing in number.” Supposedly these
“bad niggers” were responsible for the crime wave that seemed to plague
the South in the late nineteenth century. Black men who tried to make
a living as migrant workers faced the highest risk of incurring mob vio-
lence. The notorious black “floater,” whites complained, was roaming
the roads day and night, looking for an opportunity to steal and making
it unsafe for women to leave home without male protection.

White supremacists concluded that the “impudence” of the first gen-
eration of freeborn African Americans proved that blacks were relaps-
ing into savagery, now that the civilizing institution of slavery had been
unwisely abolished. In their rhetoric, white racism knew no limits.
James K. Vardaman, a leading politician from Mississippi, character-
ized “the Negro” as a “lazy, lying, lustful animal which no conceiv-
able amount of training can transform into a tolerable citizen.” Works
of fiction and pseudoscientific tracts, with such titles as The Negro: a
Beast or The Negro: A Menace to American Civilization, endlessly be-
labored the purported racial deterioration of African Americans and

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“indescribable barbarism” 97

their mortal threat to white Americans in general and white Southern-
ers in particular. Freedom, the proponents of this ideology contended,
had unleashed the supposedly insatiable sexual appetite of black males,
driving them to rape white women at every opportunity. Thus lynch-
ing was essential for the protection of white women because only the
sight of instant and merciless revenge could impress potential black
rapists with sufficient terror. Furthermore no true white man could
resist the impulse to avenge outrages against helpless women, regard-
less of legal constraints. “Whenever the Constitution comes between
me and the virtue of white women,” South Carolina governor Coleman
Blease boasted, “I say to hell with the Constitution.”

It is difficult to exaggerate the pervasiveness of the “Negro-as-savage-
rapist” theme in debates over lynching in the age of Jim Crow. To be
sure, these notions of uncontrollable black male sexuality and the need
to preserve the “purity of the white race” were not new. In the late nine-
teenth century, however, black-on-white rape became an obsession. The
historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall has called it “a kind of acceptable folk
pornography,” which the white Southern press circulated with great rel-
ish. Some scholars have speculated that the fascination with the black
rapist mirrored the repressed sexual fantasies of white men who vicari-
ously punished black men for their own secret desires. The specter of
the black rapist also helped cement the patriarchical dominance of white
men over their wives and daughters at a time when traditional family
life on the farm was giving way to a situation of more and more white
women seeking wage labor outside the home. To gain protection against
the menace of rape, women had to yield to male authority and accept
strict limitations of what they could do and where they could go.

The idea that white women might voluntarily agree to sexual rela-
tions with black men was anathema to white men. To maintain the
pretense of white racial and moral supremacy over black depravity,
any sexual contact between a black man and a white woman had to be
rape. For white men who discovered a female family member having
a consensual affair with a black man, the obvious way to protect the
honor of the family was to lynch the black “rapist.” For white women
who had engaged in interracial sex, sacrificing their lovers by bringing
rape charges could be a way to escape shame and ostracism. Sometimes
women were left with no other choice. In her 1892 anti-lynching treatise

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98 popular justice

Southern Horrors, Ida B. Wells reported the harrowing story of a mob in
Texarkana that forced a white woman to accuse her lover of rape before
the man was burned to death.

In addition to denying the possibility of consensual sex between a white
woman and a black man, many white Southerners entertained paranoid
notions of what constituted sexual assault. Because black men were said
to be constantly lusting after white females of any age, there could be
no innocuous situations. In 1917 an illiterate black man in Georgia was
lynched because he had asked a little white girl to read a letter to him.

Black men occasionally did rape white women. But most certainly
the wave of black-on-white rape that the apologists of lynching claimed
threatened the white womanhood of the South was a racist fantasy, albeit
a powerful one. Therefore anti-lynching activists worked hard to dis-
credit the argument that rape was the root cause of lynching. According
to various statistics they collected for the decades between the 1880s and
World War II, in roughly 75 percent of all lynching cases sexual assault
was not even alleged, let alone affirmed. All the same, rape dominated
the public perception of lynching. Not surprisingly, Southern race baiters
ignored the evidence that most lynchings had nothing to do with sex-
ual crimes. Yet the rape myth also found widespread acceptance among
white mainstream Americans outside the South.

Typically, Northern opinion leaders condemned lynching as unac-
ceptable lawlessness. But they conceded that rape was its main cause
and called upon the black community to curb sexual crime. In 1904
President Theodore Roosevelt, in a speech in Little Rock, Arkansas,
pontificated that “the worst enemy of the Negro race is the Negro
criminal of that type . . . and every reputable colored man owes it as
his first duty to himself to hunt down that criminal with all his soul
and strength.” Even prominent supporters of black civil rights joined
the chorus. In 1901 the influential white social reformer Jane Addams,
who eight years later helped found the interracial National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp), declared that she was
willing “to give the Southern citizens the full benefit of their position”
on the rape issue. Most academic works on lynching, either explicitly or
implicitly, accepted the causal link between rape and mob violence. As
late as 1933 the sociologist Arthur Raper (ironically named in this in-
stance), in his study The Tragedy of Lynching, alluded to the rape myth

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“indescribable barbarism” 99

when he suggested that “Negroes can contribute much to the eridica-
tion of lynching, by demonstrating the ability, character, and good citi-
zenship of the race.” Thus white mainstream opinion placed African
Americans in a double bind by blaming lynching on black rapists and
at the same time burdening the black community with the responsibil-
ity for eliminating its alleged cause.

The discrepancy between the popular obsession with rape on the one
hand and the claim of anti-lynching groups that charges of sexual crime
played a role in only one of four lynchings requires a closer look. The
available numbers on the precipitating events of lynchings provide the
following picture: Charges of homicide were by far the single most im-
portant trigger, accounting for 41 percent of all incidents, followed by
rape and attempted rape (25.3 percent), robbery and theft (4.9 percent),
felonious assault (4.3 percent), and insult to a white person (1.8 percent).
More than one in five lynchings (22.7 percent) fell into the category of
“other reasons.” The overriding significance of murder is not a surprise
given that the Southern states in the late nineteenth century had by far the
highest homicide rates in the country, exceeding those of New England
by ten to thirty times. Contemporary observers blamed the high level of
personal violence on the traditional Southern code of honor that led to
countless violent confrontations with a fatal ending. Because many white
Southerners saw their criminal justice system as weak and inefficient,
they believed they had no alternative to taking the law into their own
hands, either by seeking individual revenge or by meting out communal
punishment. Blacks who killed whites almost invariably provoked com-
munity outrage and became likely targets of mob violence.

Yet the story of black-on-white murder as a cause of lynching requires
no less critical scrutiny than the rape myth. African Americans killing or
assaulting whites represented but a tiny fraction of all violent crime, if
only for the fact that most acts of personal violence occur among friends
and family members. Still, whenever a black person committed homicide
or assault against a white person—or was suspected to have done so—
mob violence became highly likely regardless of whether the suspect had
already been taken into custody. Given the racist prejudice of the times,
blacks accused of violent crimes against white people had little chance of
receiving a fair trial. In many cases public rage against the black mur-
derer obscured the evidence of what had actually happened. Numerous

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100 popular justice

blacks who were lynched for murdering a white person may have been
perfectly innocent of any crime or acted in legitimate self-defense.

In 1903 a mob lynched Jennie Steers, a black domestic, for poisoning
the daughter of her employer, a wealthy Louisiana planter. Whether the
girl had died as a result of natural causes or a devious crime remained
unclear. But the traditional fears of Southern planters that their black
servants were constantly plotting to poison them made Jennie Steers an
expedient scapegoat for the unexpected loss of a loved family member.
Accusing an African American could also be a convenient way to cover
up a crime. In 1918 James Cobb, a black man from Cordelle, Georgia,
was lynched for the murder of Mrs. Simmons, a white woman, though
the victim’s father suspected his son-in-law to be the real culprit. Of
course Cobb’s demise precluded further investigation.

Other murder charges grew out of interracial confrontations in which
blacks often acted in self-defense. In the case of Sam Hose, the black
farm worker burned to death in Georgia in 1899, private investigators
hired by anti-lynching groups contested the widely publicized reports
that Hose had crushed Alfred Cranford’s head while the unsuspecting
man was eating his supper, and then raped Mrs. Cranford. According
to their findings, Hose and his boss had been arguing over the worker’s
request for an advance. When Cranford grew angry and drew his pistol,
Hose flung his axe at him, killing him on the spot. Sensationalist news-
paper stories, however, quickly portrayed the black man as a monstrous
killer and sexual predator for whom only the most gruesome torture was
fitting retribution.

It is impossible to determine if Hose killed Cranford in self-defense.
Obviously the opponents of lynch law had a stake in claiming that the
victims of mob killings either were innocent or had acted under miti-
gating circumstances. In contrast, white Southerners who cherished their
own right to self-defense would not countenance the idea that blacks
also had a right to protect themselves, their families, their property, and
their honor against provocations from whites. Southern planters, in par-
ticular, took black deference for granted and continued to assume that
they had a right to discipline their “insolent” black laborers and share-
croppers. Whenever blacks defied the authority of white employers or
fought back, the situation was bound to escalate. In 1904 a black tenant
farmer in Georgia killed his landlord in an altercation that resulted from

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“indescribable barbarism” 101

the tenant insisting on his right to sell his crop to a merchant of his own
choice. A mob promptly lynched the black “murderer.”

Many historians have argued that lynching in the New South served
the interests of the planter class. The reliance on extralegal punishment
preserved part of the unfettered personal power the planter aristocracy
had enjoyed in the days of slavery. Rural elites could easily instigate
mob violence against “bad niggers” but could also protect their black
clients if they saw fit. In 1894 a white mob pretending to act as a posse
hunting down black criminals went on a lynching spree in Brooks
County, Georgia, and massacred five African Americans. When the
lynchers began molesting the black tenants of Mitchell Brice, one of the
leading planters in the area, Brice halted the mob by threatening retali-
ation and prosecution. In addition to their traditional paternalism and
the desire to maintain their personal authority, wealthy landowners oc-
casionally took steps to curtail mob violence because they were afraid
that their black workers would leave the area if life became intoler-
able. Ironically, though lynching was an instrument of racial terror that
helped sustain the status quo in favor of the old elites, the frequency of
mob violence was relatively low in many of the rural black belt counties
of the Deep South where wealthy landlords exerted their paternalistic
rule over a majority population of poor blacks.

In contrast, small towns where African Americans comprised about
one quarter of the population had the highest incidence of lynchings. As
both black and white Southerners moved to urbanizing areas in search
of industrial work, the competition between the races for jobs intensi-
fied while anonymous interracial social encounters heightened the risk of
violent clashes. As African Americans sought more personal freedom in
towns and cities, whites saw the need to reassert white supremacy, insist-
ing on strict racial segregation in the public sphere and on preferential
treatment in the labor markets. Characteristically, lynching in Louisiana
was most prevalent not in the northern rural black belt of the state but
in the parishes neighboring on the city of New Orleans, which in the
late nineteenth century underwent rapid industrialization and black and
white in-migration.

One of the most spectacular lynchings in the urban South occurred
in Waco, Texas, in the spring of 1916. In many ways this city of more
than thirty thousand, including almost ten thousand African Americans,

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102 popular justice

epitomized the vision of the modernizing New South. Waco was a major
railway hub and had a thriving industrial sector, notably a bottling plant
for the Dr Pepper soft drink. It boasted the tallest building in Texas, a
skyscraper owned by the Amicable Life Insurance Company. Its residents
enjoyed the benefits of electricity, streetcars, telephones, and public librar-
ies. In fact Waco was particularly proud of its vibrant cultural and educa-
tional life, calling itself the “Athens of Texas.” Not all citizens, however,
appreciated the opportunities for base amusements, such as saloons and
brothels, that the city also offered and that many whites associated with
“Negro crime.” Under the surface of Waco’s bustling New South image,
racial tensions simmered and from time to time boiled over. In 1905 a mob
had lynched a black man charged with raping a white woman, hanging
him from a bridge over the Brazos River. The confluence of a vigilante
tradition, racism, and the ferment of brisk social change created a climate
in Waco that was highly conducive to racist mob violence.

The moment arrived when on May 8, 1916, the dead body of Lucy
Fryer, a fifty-three-year-old mother and immigrant from England, was
discovered on the farm of her family in Robinson, a small village about
eight miles outside Waco. The investigation quickly concentrated on
Jesse Washington, a seventeen-year-old black youth who worked on the
Fryer farm. After Sheriff Samuel Fleming arrested the teenager at his
home, he brought him to the jail in Waco. At first Washington, who was
illiterate and possibly mentally retarded, denied the charges, but later
he confessed to having slain Lucy Fryer following an argument over his
treatment of a team of mules that belonged to the Fryers. Possibly his
interrogators forced a confession from the black youth, but there was
nevertheless strong evidence against the suspect. His clothes were stained
with blood, and he led the police to the place where he had concealed
the hammer he had used to crush his victim’s head. It is thus quite likely
that Washington killed Mrs. Fryer, though the black press later insinu-
ated that her husband George Fryer had either committed the murder
himself or incited his worker to do the job for him. It remained unclear
if the black man had also raped his victim, which the Waco newspapers
reported in lurid detail.

Anticipating mob action, Sheriff Fleming had the prisoner trans-
ported to Dallas County for safekeeping. Predictably, as soon as news of
the murder spread, a mob took control of Fleming’s jail and left only

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after learning that Washington was not there. The sheriff assured mob
leaders that the culprit would be put on trial in Waco as soon as possible.
Indeed, the trial commenced just one week after the murder, on May 15,
before a crowd of fifteen hundred spectators who raucously voiced their
opinion that no court was needed. At least the judge managed to retain
a façade of due process until the jury, after deliberating for fewer than
five minutes, rendered a guilty verdict. At this point the mob grabbed
the defendant and began driving him toward the bridge where the 1905
lynching had been carried out. But several men insisted that burning was
the appropriate method of execution and built a pyre in front of the city
hall. With a mesmerized crowd of ten thousand gaping at events, the
lynchers tied their victim to a chain they tossed over the branch of a tree.
They then lit a fire under his feet, repeatedly pulling him up and down
to prolong his suffering. Shortly before Washington died, his tormentors
cut off his fingers, toes, and genitals. Finally a man on horseback dragged
the corpse through the streets of Waco, followed by a throng of young
boys. Some of the body parts were sold to onlookers, others ended up on
display in Robinson, the scene of Washington’s crime.

Although the risk of mob violence had been evident for days before
the trial, the Waco police department took no precautions to prevent
the lynching. On the contrary, Sheriff Fleming, who faced reelection in
the fall, ordered his men not to resist the mob and himself watched the
spectacle alongside the mayor of Waco. The sheriff also allowed a local
photographer to take pictures from a window of the city hall; the photo-
graphs subsequently became coveted souvenir items. But the appalling
image of Jesse Washington’s charred body chained to a tree, one of the
most infamous visual documents of American history, also ensured that
the “Waco Horror” received nationwide attention and condemnation.
The lynching, commented the New York Times, brought “disgrace and
humiliation” on the entire country, for in no other civilized nation “could
a man be burned to death in the streets of a considerable city amid the
savage exultation of its inhabitants.” The naacp sent Elizabeth Freeman,
a white suffragist, to investigate the Waco affair and later published a
special edition of its monthly magazine Crisis, featuring a photograph of
Jesse Washington’s disfigured corpse on the cover. To make sure that
white Americans took note, the organization sent copies to hundreds of
newspapers and to every member of Congress.

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104 popular justice

Facing strong criticism from around the country, the white leaders
of Waco mounted the usual defense. The lynch mob had been much
smaller than the estimated ten thousand, they claimed, even though the
pictures left little doubt about the enormous size of the gathering. The
photographs also would have made possible the identification of the mob
leaders, but no one was ever prosecuted for participation in the public
murder. In as much as Waco leaders talked about the ghastly incident at
all, they agreed that the lynching had been the deed of madmen coming
from “the lowest order of society.” Of course this was a blatant distortion
of the facts. Not only had the crowd included men and women from all
walks of life, but, as Freeman found, the mob leaders were solid work-
ing-class and middle-class men who had every reason to believe they were
acting with the full approval of Waco’s white citizenry. In this respect the
“Waco Horror” of 1916 was not different from many other lynchings in
the New South. As countless photographs document, neither active per-
petrators nor onlookers made any effort to conceal their identity because
they had no reason to fear criminal prosecution. Even when lynchers had
their pictures taken with dangling and disfigured bodies, the coroners

Jesse Washington’s charred corpse after the infamous 1916 lynching in Waco, Texas

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“indescribable barbarism” 105

would later declare that the victims had suffered “death at the hands of
parties unknown.”

Not all lynchings were the work of mass mobs carrying out sadis-
tic rituals. There were also smaller mobs, ranging from a handful of
participants to perhaps two or three dozen, that acted furtively, killing
their victims in remote places at night without further ado. Like mass
mobs that staged spectacle lynchings, small mobs claimed to avenge
crimes for which the law allegedly offered no adequate punishment.
Unlike mass mobs, however, small mobs often sought secrecy because
they could not be sure of widespread support from the larger commu-
nity. Typically this was the case when the lynchers sought personal
revenge for offenses that had not triggered much public outrage. For
instance, in 1912 members of a white family in Columbus, Georgia,
lynched a young black man who had accidentally shot one of their own
and was later convicted of manslaughter. Apparently the local white
community had been satisfied with this outcome, but no one questioned
the family’s desire for harsher retribution. Lynchings by private mobs
may have accounted for roughly one-third of all lynchings. They were
especially common in cases when whites or blacks executed members of
their own race outside the law. As demonstrations of white supremacy
and communal justice, however, they were of minor importance com-
pared to the spectacle lynchings by mass mobs.

Most of the participants in lynching parties were members of the
white rural and urban working classes—small farmers, sharecroppers,
construction workers, or saloonkeepers. Nevertheless mass mobs usu-
ally included people of all social backgrounds and certainly were not
confined to the proverbial “riffraff.” On the contrary, the legitimacy of
popular justice depended on the involvement of “respectable citizens.”
Southern newspapers often rejected lynching in the abstract but cited
the presence of the “best citizens” of the community—without providing
specific names—in order to justify a particular lynching. Local luminar-
ies supposedly ensured order and embodied the consent of the people.
In combination with the rape myth, the participation of Southern elites
helped make Northern opinion receptive to the apology for extralegal ex-
ecutions. In 1901 the Harvard University scientist Nathaniel Southgate
Shaler published the essay “American Quality,” in which he condemned
mob rule but insisted that most lynchings were carried out by “decent

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106 popular justice

men of American, law-abiding type.” Such lynchings, Shaler suggested,
were the equivalent of legal executions, not “a sign of real lawlessness,
nor of a people given to savage outbursts of fury.”

Approval from elected officials lent added respectability to mobs.
Southern demagogues such as James Vardaman, Tom Watson, and
Coleman Blease were notorious for their defense of lynching as legiti-
mate popular justice. Sometimes public officeholders even participated
in lynchings. In 1911, for example, Joshua W. Ashley, a member of the
South Carolina state legislature, led a mob in Anderson County that
hunted down Willis Jackson, a black man accused of attacking a white
child. The lynchers hanged Jackson by his feet and then riddled him
with bullets. Governor Blease not only refused to prosecute the mob
leaders but declared that, rather than sending the militia to protect the
alleged child rapist, he would have resigned his office and come to An-
derson County and led the mob himself. For public officials to take a
determined stand against lynching carried the risk of alienating voters.
In 1926 a Florida judge who had presided over a lynching investigation
lost his bid for reelection.

As a rule the execution of popular justice was the domain of men. But
if black-on-white rape was the alleged offense, women could become key
players in lynchings. To begin with, women provided their men with
moral support. As one of the vigilantes who set out to hunt down Jesse
Washington phrased it: “When we left home tonight our wives, daugh-
ters and sisters kissed us good bye and told us to do our duty, and we’re
trying to do it as citizens.” Yet, far from being limited to the role of pas-
sive objects of male chivalry, women participated in manifold ways. In
most cases women had to report the initial crime of rape. Although false
accusations were sometimes made, especially to cover up a consensual af-
fair, for a Southern white woman to admit publicly that she had been
sexually abused by a black man was no easy step. Even though no one
was likely to question the veracity of her charges, rape, also known as
“the fate worse than death,” always left a stain of shame on the victim.
Moreover every white woman who accused a black man of sexual assault
knew that he was doomed.

If the identity of the rapist was in doubt, identification by the victim
became a centerpiece of the mock trials that often preceded the execu-
tion. The defenders of lynch law insisted that the crime of rape did not

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“indescribable barbarism” 107

belong in regular courts because no white woman should have to suffer
the ordeal of having to confront her attacker face-to-face. Neverthe-
less positive identification by the rape victim lent a legitimacy to mob
executions that few dared to question. In 1885 a Georgia mob brought
a suspect before a young wife and mother, repeatedly admonishing
her that the man’s life depended on her word. After she had confi-
dently recognized him as the culprit, the leaders suggested she choose
the mode of execution. Although some men called for a burning, the
woman wanted the man hanged, and got her will. Of course, most
lynchers considered identification a mere formality and were perfectly
satisfied if the outraged woman declared that the man they dragged
before her could have been the rapist.

Some white women who joined lynch mobs inflicted physical violence
on the victims voluntarily and eagerly. They cheered on others, brought
ropes or fuel, ignited torches, or pumped bullets into bodies, dead or alive.
The desire to take an active part in lynchings was by no means limited to
women who had been raped or otherwise suffered personal injury. In
1916 an Oklahoma sheriff who prevented the lynching of two black men
accused of murder testified “that there were women in the crowd and
that they were no less eager for the blood of the negroes than the men.”
Women too scavenged for body parts and wanted their pictures taken
with the victim’s body. In mass mobs it was not uncommon to see moth-
ers with their children. At the burning of the alleged black rapist Lloyd
Clay in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1919, eyewitnesses observed a woman
and several children pouring gasoline over the man.

Black critics of Southern lynch law condemned the participation of
white women in mob violence as the epitome of depravity and hypocrisy,
belying the adulation of white women as torchbearers of Christian civi-
lization. Then again, most Southern white women believed in the myths
and privileges of white supremacy, especially in their right to protection
from sexual assault. In contrast to the antebellum era, when the wor-
ship of white Southern womanhood had been confined to ladies of social
standing, the white supremacist ideology of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries also incorporated poor white women into the “rul-
ing race.” Furthermore, inflicting violence on a perceived enemy of the
community could be an empowering experience for women no less than
for men. In a perverse and sordid manner, the assertive roles that women

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108 popular justice

played in lynch mobs may have mirrored the efforts of Southern women
to carve out a larger degree of power and independence for themselves.

The most prominent and articulate white Southern woman defender
of lynch law was Rebecca Latimer Felton (1835–1930) of Georgia. An
advocate of women’s suffrage and temperance and a reform-minded
supporter of the Populist movement, Felton, like her fellow Georgian
Tom Watson, initially denounced lynching and backed political rights
for blacks. She switched sides after many Populist candidates, including
her husband, lost to the white supremacy campaign waged by Southern
Democrats in 1894. Three years later Felton’s speech on the “Needs of
Farmers’ Wives and Daughters,” in which she blamed white men for
failing to protect their female family members from black rapists, gained
national notoriety. For the most part her speech was a harsh critique of
the corruption of male-dominated Southern politics. By courting the
black voter on election day and befuddling him with liquor, she ex-
plained, white politicians “make him think he is a man and a brother,”
thus encouraging sexual assaults on white women.

Felton called for moral and educational reforms that would benefit
poor rural girls and women. Yet, as long as political and moral corrup-
tion exposed hapless females to shame and fear, extralegal justice must
continue: “If it needs lynching to protect woman’s dearest possession
from the ravenous human beasts, then I say lynch a thousand times a
week, if necessary.” White supremacist opinion leaders in the South cel-
ebrated Felton as a “true southern woman” while conveniently ignoring
the feminist aspects of her speech. At the same time Northern criticism
prompted Felton to close ranks with Southern white men and radicalize
her statements. When a Georgia mob lynched Sam Hose in April 1899,
Felton commented that a mad dog being shot was “more worthy of sym-
pathy.” The same year, lynching in Georgia reached its peak. Of course
not all white women of the South approved of lynching, and only a small
minority participated in mobs. But it was extremely diffcult for white
women to speak out against racial violence. Those who did so inevitably
faced reproach for betraying their race and depriving helpless and inno-
cent girls of male protection.

The specter of the black rapist did not offer a plausible excuse for
the lynching of black women. Mob executions of black females enjoyed
much less popular support than those of men, and they occurred much

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“indescribable barbarism” 109

less frequently. Still, they were not rare exceptions. Estimates vary from
at least 75 to 130 African-American women who fell victim to lynch law
between the 1880s and the 1920s. The use of brutal violence to discipline
black women had been commonplace under slavery, regardless of the
sentimental images white slaveholders held of their black “mammies.”
When black women, like men, claimed freedom and independence from
white control in the decades after the Civil War, they appeared increas-
ingly defiant and aggressive in the eyes of Southern whites. Thus when
black women were accused of especially shocking offenses, white lynch-
ers insisted that they deserved the same rough justice as black men.

Most African-American women were lynched for the crime of mur-
der, and many of them were killed in summary executions along with
male family members. Typically such multiple killings resulted from
confrontations with police officers. In 1911 Laura Nelson and her son
were hanged from a bridge in Okemah, Oklahoma, because she had
shot and killed a deputy sheriff who had intruded into her home. In
1918 a mob, acting as a posse, shot down the entire Cabiness family in
Walker County, Texas, including the mother and one daughter. Accord-
ing to an affidavit sworn by a surviving daughter, the Cabiness family
was unarmed when the posse began firing. Press reports, however, de-
picted them as a dangerous gang of criminals staging a deadly shoot-out
with the forces of the law. In 1926 a mob seized eighteen-year-old Bertha
Lowman, along with her brother Demon and her cousin Clarence Low-
man, from a jail in Aiken, South Carolina, and shot them “like rats,”
as one newspaper report put it. Earlier the Lowman family had killed a
sheriff in self-defense.

When a black woman was lynched, the white press usually assumed
her guilt and defamed her character, similar to its reporting on black
male lynch victims. Even anti-lynching activists sometimes hesitated to
protest mob violence against women who were known for their “bad
character” and had a reputation for lewdness. When Marie Scott, a
seventeen-year-old black woman living in Wagoner, Oklahoma, was
charged with stabbing to death a young white man named Lemuel
Pearce in March 1914, newspapers immediately concluded that she was
guilty of murder. Supposedly Scott had attacked Pearce for no appar-
ent reason. Hours after she had been arrested, a mob of about a hun-
dred men overpowered the jailer in the middle of the night and hung

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110 popular justice

Scott—who desperately fought for her life—from a telephone pole.
When the naacp inquired into the circumstances, a local attorney in-
dicated that Scott had been a resident of the “red light district.” But he
refused to give the “revolting and shocking” details of Pearce’s death
to the naacp’s white secretary May Childs Nerney because he would
not discuss them with a lady. naacp leaders concluded that Marie Scott
was a prostitute and therefore that her lynching would not arouse pub-
lic sympathy. Several weeks later, however, the naacp obtained a let-
ter from a black informant telling a different story. Two white men,
including Lemuel Pearce, were roaming the neighborhood, the letter
reported, and spotted Marie Scott alone in her room. They broke into
the family’s home and raped her. Scott’s brother came to her rescue
and killed Pearce with a knife. The young man then ran away and was
smuggled by black sleeping-car porters to Mexico. His sister remained
as the obvious murder suspect and suffered the wrath of the mob.

The lynching of four young African Americans between the ages of
fifteen and twenty, two men and two women, in Shubuta, Mississippi,
in December 1918 also prompted very different accounts of what had
happened. Indisputably the four youngsters had killed their employer,
a retired dentist and farmer named Dr. E. L. Johnston. One white Mis-
sissippi newspaper related that the four had ambushed and murdered
Johnston because he had discharged them from his farm. In contrast, an
investigator for the naacp claimed that Johnston had sexually abused the
two sisters, Alma and Maggie Howze. When Maggie Howze and Ma-
jor Clark, who was working on Johnston’s farm along with his brother
Andrew, disclosed their desire to marry, Johnston told the young man to
leave “his woman” alone. A scuffle ensued, and Major Clark accidentally
shot his employer, according to the naacp report. Although the dentist,
a notorious drunkard, was not popular in the white community, a mob
seized the four young blacks from jail and hanged them from a bridge
across the Chickasawhay River. Reportedly the two women were visibly
pregnant at the time of their deaths.

Mary Turner, the victim of one of the most brutal lynchings involv-
ing a black woman, was also pregnant when she and her husband be-
came caught up in what the naacp aptly called a “lynching orgy,” which
occurred in Brooks and Lowndes counties, Georgia, in May 1918. The
murder of Hampton Smith, a white farmer, sparked hysteria among the

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white population of the area. Within a week mobs and posses killed up
to eleven African Americans believed to have been involved in the slay-
ing. Among the victims was Hayes Turner, a black farm laborer who
had worked for Smith. When his wife Mary announced that she would
press for the prosecution of her husband’s murderers, she herself became
the target of the mob. Walter White, the naacp field secretary who per-
sonally investigated the events, reported that the eight-months-pregnant
woman was hanged with her head downward, doused with gasoline and
set on fire. While she was still alive, one of the lynchers grabbed a knife
and cut the unborn infant from her womb. Another man then crushed
the baby’s head with the heels of his boots. Finally the mob unloaded
their guns into the dead woman’s body.

The lynching frenzy in Georgia provoked condemnation throughout
the United States. As American soldiers were fighting German “Huns”
to make the world safe for democracy, observers emphasized, lynching
did enormous harm to the war effort. President Woodrow Wilson, who
held profound sympathies for white Southern views on race, admonished
his countrymen that “every mob contributes to German lies about the
United States.” Southern apologists responded that German spies had
caused the trouble in the first place by fomenting insurrection among
the black population of southwestern Georgia. But even in the hysterical
climate of World War I, few people outside the Deep South took such
ridiculous excuses seriously.

In the early twentieth century many Americans came to see lynch-
ing as a peculiar Southern problem. They viewed the region as painfully
backward and isolated, and populated largely by semi-literate “red-
necks” whose favorite pastimes were to guzzle moonshine liquor, engage
in brawls, and abuse black people. In 1917 Baltimore’s acerbic journalist
H. L. Mencken spurned the South as “almost as sterile, artistically, intel-
lectually, culturally, as the Sahara Desert.” Lynching, Mencken thought,
was a “popular sport . . . because the backward culture of the region de-
nied the populace more seemly recreations” such as brass bands, sym-
phony orchestras, or athletic contests.

Critics of the South tended to ignore that lynchings also occurred in
other parts of the country. Northern mobs, too, killed African Americans,
and they targeted them for the same reasons as Southern whites. One in-
cident of particular callousness occurred in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, in

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112 popular justice

August 1912, after a black man named Zachariah Walker had killed a
white police officer in a saloon scuffle. While a posse was pursuing Walker,
the fugitive tried to shoot himself but merely injured his jaw. The police
brought him to a hospital where, the following night, a mob seized him.
Although the black man desperately pleaded that he had shot the police-
man in self-defense, his abductors burned him alive before a crowd of
five thousand men, women, and children. In similar fashion a mass mob
overpowered police headquarters in Duluth, Minnesota, in June 1920 to
seize three young black men held for the alleged rape of an eighteen-year-
old white woman. The lynchers then stripped their victims to their waists
and hanged them from a lamppost in the city center. A newspaper from
Valdosta, Georgia, the scene of the Mary Turner lynching two years ear-
lier, gloatingly pointed out that the incident had taken place in a state that
prided itself on “its great love for the poor friendless colored man and has
criticized the Southern people for not living on terms of social equality
with the blacks.”

In these episodes there were nevertheless significant differences be-
tween North and South: the lynchings in Pennsylvania and Minnesota
resulted in serious efforts to bring the perpetrators to justice. In the
Coatesville affair, officials launched a thorough investigation and were
able to obtain indictments against eight men, including the police chief
and his deputy, for neglecting their duty to uphold the law. Eventually
a local jury acquitted all defendants. Incensed by this mockery of justice,
the governor of Pennsylvania threatened to revoke the town charter of
Coatesville, though he never followed through with his announcement.
Prosecution in the Duluth case was more successful. The governor of
Minnesota immediately dispatched the National Guard to the city, and
the commanding general began a preliminary investigation. A photogra-
pher who had displayed images of the lynching was charged with exhib-
iting “indiscreet and obscene pictures.” Ultimately more than a dozen of
the lynchers were indicted. In September 1920 a jury convicted two men
for rioting and sentenced them to up to five years in prison. A juvenile
defendant served time in the state reformatory. The authorities also pros-
ecuted thirteen black men for their alleged involvement in the gang rape
of the young white woman. But lawyers hired by the naacp obtained re-
leases or acquittals for all but one of the defendants, who was sentenced
to thirty years in prison but paroled in 1925. In fact there was consider-

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able doubt that a rape had occurred at all. A medical examination was
inconclusive, and suspicion surfaced that the young woman and her boy-
friend may have made up the rape story to conceal a sexual liaison.

In both these cases the outcomes of the criminal prosecutions were dis-
appointing. Yet they compared favorably to situations in most Southern
states where lynchers had virtually nothing to fear from the authorities.
When in 1918 naacp representatives called upon Mississippi governor
Theodore Bilbo to take action against the lynchers of the four black
youngsters in Shubuta, Bilbo responded they should “go to hell.” Because
African Americans could not expect protection from law enforcement
or political leadership in the South, they had to wage their own struggle
against lynching. But what could people who personally encountered ra-
cial violence do to fight lynching?

Despite black poverty and powerlessness, racist terror did not cow all
African Americans into silence and submission. Resistance encompassed
a broad spectrum of behavior ranging from gestures of defiance to armed
self-defense. One conspicuous way blacks demonstrated their opposi-
tion was to refuse responsibility for burying the victims. Following the
Shubuta murders, local blacks reportedly declared that “the white folks
lynched them and they can cut them down.” To express their protest,
African Americans also boycotted the businesses of lynchers or refused to
work for them. Sometimes mob violence triggered a black exodus. In the
aftermath of a triple lynching in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1892, the city’s
black population fell by two thousand. Following the Georgia lynching
spree of 1918, observers warned that the South was driving its black labor
force northward. If fear or protest caused blacks to leave, lynching was
perhaps one of the “push factors” in the Great Migration north that be-
gan during World War I.

Blacks also found other ways to resist mob violence. These included
hiding a fugitive from a mob or perhaps setting fire to the property of
lynchers. Such forms of resistance were extremely dangerous because they
invited instant retaliation if discovered. Clearly the most confrontational
way to stand up to lynching was armed self-defense. African American
leaders unanimously insisted that blacks had not only a right but a duty
to fight back when attacked by a mob. “A Winchester rifle should have a
place of honor in every black home,” Ida B. Wells famously proclaimed,
“and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.”

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114 popular justice

Many blacks who faced a mob put up a last-ditch fight. Perhaps the
most legendary of these stands occurred in New Orleans in July 1900 af-
ter Robert Charles, a black worker in his mid-thirties, had wounded a
police officer in self-defense and then fled the scene. When the police,
accompanied by a swelling mob of several thousand whites, found his
hiding place, he barricaded himself behind a window and took aim at his
pursuers with his rapid-firing rifle. In a gun battle lasting several hours,
the injured fugitive supposedly killed seven whites and wounded twenty
more before he was smoked out and felled by volleys from policemen
and vigilantes. Enraged by the death toll Charles had exacted among his
opponents, white mobs staged a major riot that claimed the lives of more
than a dozen African-American residents of the Crescent City.

The incident demonstrated that armed self-defense carried a high risk
of provoking massive retaliation against the larger black community.
The black press nonetheless celebrated African Americans who fought
back as heroes. “May his ashes rest in peace for protecting his manhood,”
the Chicago Defender eulogized Tom Brooks of Sommerville, Tennessee,
who in May 1915 killed two white lynchers before he was hanged.

In contrast to individual acts of valor, collective armed self-defense
had a greater chance of success. In 1911 rumors in Stanford, Kentucky,
indicated that whites planned to seize two African Americans from the
local jail. This prompted leaders of the black community to organize
an armed sentinel to guard the prisoners. When the would-be lynchers
spotted the patrol, they dispersed. Twelve years earlier a similar event
in Darien, Georgia, had led to what local whites perceived as a “Negro
insurrection.” When a black man accused of raping a white woman was
arrested, a large group of armed black men rushed to the jail for his pro-
tection. Evidently deterred by the presence of the sentry, no mob showed
up. But the picket remained watchful and refused to allow the sheriff to
remove the prisoner, fearing he would surrender him to a lynching party.
Whites became so frightened by the apparent black takeover of the town
that they called in the militia. The black guards agreed to hand over the
prisoner to the militia but resisted the arrest of their leaders, wounding
two white men. A major confrontation was barely avoided. Eventually
the alleged rapist was acquitted while twenty-three of the so-called “in-
surrectionists” went to prison for “rioting.”

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“indescribable barbarism” 115

Although they often were outgunned, outmanned, and risked harsh
retribution, African Americans, no less than whites, cherished the eth-
ics of self-defense, honor, and vengeance. After the Shubata lynching,
the Baltimore Daily Herald, a black newspaper, defended Major Clark
for killing Dr. Johnston because the latter had abused two young black
women. Noting correctly that African-American women lacked legal
protection from white aggressors, the paper criticized the youngster only
for ambushing Johnston—as the white press had reported—rather than
confronting him “in an open and manly fashion” and then fighting him
to the death. Such conduct would have made Clark “a martyr to the
cause of Negro womanhood.”

Reared in a culture of violence, many blacks were not opposed to
lynching in principle. Primarily they resented its racist thrust. Even Ida
B. Wells admitted that she had condoned mob violence in reaction to
rape before she became an anti-lynching campaigner. If Judge Lynch
acted in an ostensibly color-blind fashion, blacks found reasons to ap-
plaud his work. In 1919 a mass meeting of the black community in Lex-
ington, Georgia, endorsed the action of whites who had lynched “Obe”
Cox, an infamous black criminal, for assaulting and murdering a white
woman. Allegedly Cox had earlier raped a black woman too.

Between the 1880s and the late 1920s roughly 150 African Americans
fell victim to lynch mobs that were either racially integrated or all-black.
In many ways black-on-black lynching mirrored the general trends of
mob violence in the age of Jim Crow. It peaked in the 1890s and gradually
declined afterward, and it was most prevalent in the states of the Deep
South. Moreover nearly three-fourths of all blacks executed by mobs of
their own race were accused of murder and rape. Often the crime had
been of a particularly heinous nature. In 1885 a group of black vigilantes
dispatched a man from Jones County, Mississippi, for murdering a black
woman and her two children to whom the killer was a half-brother. He
had also allegedly raped his half-sister before slaying her. Although less
frequently than white mobs, black lynchers occasionally displayed ex-
treme cruelty, burning their victims or throwing them into boiling water.

While the rationale of white supremacists that lynching was neces-
sary because the law treated black-on-white crime too softly was patently
absurd, black Southerners indeed had reason to complain about law

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116 popular justice

enforcement. The authorities not only refused to protect them against
white mob violence but also cared little about black-on-black crime. Ac-
cording to a late-nineteenth-century remark attributed to a Southern po-
lice chief, there were three types of homicides: “If a nigger kills a white
man, that’s murder. If a white man kills a nigger, that’s justifiable ho-
micide. If a nigger kills a nigger, that’s one less nigger.” Punishment of-
ten depended on white interests. When labor was scarce, planters were
inclined to intervene on behalf of workers charged with a crime against
another black person in order to keep them out of prison. Because many
white men regarded black women as fair game, the white-dominated
criminal justice system paid little attention to black-on-black rape. More-
over if black men lynched other black men for raping black women, such
acts merely confirmed for whites their view that the menace of the “black
brute” had become intolerable even to his own people.

Although racial hatred obviously played no role in black-on-black
lynchings, participants in black mobs shared with white supremacists
some of the key beliefs in popular justice. Most important, lynchers
maintained they were agents of communal self-defense necessitated by a
weak system of official criminal justice. Southern racism in the age of Jim
Crow radicalized these ideas by creating the specter of the black rapist.
But in principle, popular justice had never been limited to the purpose of
racial terror. Its adherents continued to mete out extralegal punishment
to other groups as well.

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Preventing Black Excellence between
Plessy and Brown

“I am just as much opposed to Booker Washington as a voter, with all
his Anglo-Saxon reinforcements, . . . as I am to the coconut-headed,
chocolate-covered, typical little coon, Andy Dotson, who blacks my
shoes every morning. Neither is fit to perform the supreme function of
citizenship.”

—Senator James Vardaman of Mississippi, 19031

D U R I N G R E C O N S T R U C T I O N , B L A C K S had been promised the equal-
ity guaranteed in the Constitution.2 Yet, by 1896, on the eve of the Plessy
decision, that promise seemed to have been completely destroyed. Black
political participation had been dismantled in southern states, where 90%
of blacks resided.3 Post-Reconstruction governments had blocked politi-
cal participation by blacks, and educational opportunities for blacks had
been greatly reduced.4 In order to solidify and maintain false notions of
white superiority/black inferiority, blacks would have to be separated from
whites, unless they were obviously subservient. Laws were formulated
that reflected the notion that blacks were inferior, and demonstrations of
black excellence were suppressed because they stood to shatter the racial
hierarchy.5

Black opportunities to compete with whites were eliminated.6 Racial
segregation, through physical separation, became the method by which
black excellence was denied.7 During Reconstruction, having held absolute
power in America since the time of its colonization, whites felt threatened
by new laws and opportunities for blacks. They responded by crushing
those prospects even before they materialized.

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86 Creating the Paradigm

Who Is Jim Crow?

“Jim Crow,” the term identifying discriminatory laws and policies that
separated blacks after Reconstruction, was, allegedly, named after a real
person—an elderly, physically handicapped black slave on a horse farm in
Louisville, Kentucky, owned by a Mr. Crow.8 In 1828, a white entertainer,
Thomas Dartmouth Rice, observed the elderly Jim Crow as he sang and
danced with an unusual hopping and shuffling maneuver.9 As Jim Crow
danced, he sang in slave vernacular, “Wheel about, an’ turn about, an’ do
jis so; eb’ry time I wheel about, I jump Jim Crow.”10

Rice immediately memorized the song, added a few verses, copied the
dance steps, and, apparently without any compensation or attribution
to Jim Crow, tried out this new act on stage in Louisville. He dressed in
blackface and called the routine “Jump Jim Crow.”11 It was an immediate
hit. Soon, Rice was performing to sell-out audiences of whites in New York
City’s theater district.12

Rice’s Jim Crow character propelled him to international fame and im-
mense wealth, and inspired other white performers to create similar ma-
terial. In 1842, four entertainers named the Virginia Minstrels13 staged a
full-length show focused exclusively on Jim Crow–type characters. For the
next hundred years, minstrel shows were one of the most popular forms of
entertainment in America.14 The Jim Crow song was played so often that
one foreign ambassador thought it was the national anthem.15

The Jim Crow minstrel shows demeaned and degraded blacks, while up-
lifting whites, through song, dance, and acting.16 The shows created several
stereotyped characters, including the happy plantation slave and the inept,
corrupt, and foolish northern urban free black.17 Every skit, song, joke,
or dance reinforced these images.18 Black minstrel characters in southern
slave plantation settings were given endearing names like Uncle Remus
and were portrayed as happy, healthy, obedient, and excessively loyal to
their white owners, while the white masters were portrayed as compassion-
ate, benevolent, and fair-minded.19 In contrast, black minstrel characters
in northern urban settings were given pompous names like Count Julius
Caesar Mars Napoleon Sinclair Brown.20 These characters were portrayed
as ignorant fools or frivolous spectacles, often saved from disaster or self-
destruction by whites who felt pity for them.21 Such portraits of blacks and
whites conveyed an unequivocal message that the proper place for blacks
was a southern slave plantation, thereby asserting that freed blacks could
not and would not be productive free citizens.22 Minstrel shows were not

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Preventing Black Excellence 87

only hugely profitable; they systematically promoted a message of white
superiority.23 These portrayals had an insidious effect: condoning pub-
lic mockery and denying the humanity of blacks by relegating them to a
“harmless” form of entertainment. Consistent with the creation and main-
tenance of black separation through de jure rules, minstrel shows were the
first, and in some cases the only, exposure many whites would get to the
black experience in America. Most did not know the actual conditions that
blacks had to endure. The demeaning images created and reinforced supe-
rior attitudes toward blacks.

As minstrel shows saturated the country with notions of black inferi-
ority, and as large audiences of whites embraced them, it is not surpris-
ing that racial segregation laws came to be named after the first and most
famous minstrel character of all: Jim Crow.24 The name of a handicapped
slave was now recognized nationwide; it was a label, an entertainment
sensation, and a mindset.25 W hile there are no historical references iden-
tifying who first applied the term “Jim Crow ” to segregation laws, the
term caught on fast. By 1900, Jim Crow was widely used as the informal
term to describe any law, custom, or practice that intentionally separated
racial minorities from whites.26 Physical separation allowed negative ra-
cial stereotypes to flourish, and Jim Crow laws mandated such separa-
tion.27 For the next fifty years, Jim Crow laws proliferated in America.28
The “harmless” humor on the minstrel stage created an atmosphere that
accepted and justified segregationist laws. Those laws maintained and
exacerbated physical and psychological distance between the races. Seg-
regation spread and got ever stronger during the latter half of the 19th
century, fueled by the notions of black inferiority celebrated in Jim Crow
minstrel shows.

Jim Crow laws provided a combination of government hindrance of
economic opportunities for blacks and empowerment for whites. The
notion of white superiority/black inferiority was strengthened in many
forms—eliminating blacks from sporting competition with whites; pre-
venting educational opportunities for blacks; generating housing segrega-
tion such as all-white towns or designated black areas; excluding blacks
from certain jobs; creating government programs, like farm assistance, of
which poor and middle-class whites were the primary beneficiaries; and
refusing to acknowledge or recognize black inventions and technological
advancements.29

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88 Creating the Paradigm

The Supreme Court Embraces Jim Crow: Plessy v. Ferguson

While black separation practices existed prior to Reconstruction, consti-
tutional sanction of race separation, allowing for widespread and compre-
hensive coverage, would not occur until the end of the 19th century.30 In
1896, the Supreme Court, in Plessy v. Ferguson,31 upheld a Louisiana statute
that prohibited black passengers from riding alongside whites in railway
cars. In doing so, the Court placed its imprimatur on discrimination—
even the justice who disavowed race separation embraced notions of white
superiority.32

Complainant Homer Adolph Plessy was born in Louisiana in 1862.33 His
parents were free, French-speaking, and of mixed Spanish, French, Native
American, and African ancestry.34 Plessy had only one-eighth African an-
cestry and appeared to be entirely white.35 By 1896, Plessy was a success-
ful businessman, earning a substantial living by selling shoes.36 He often
traveled in the first-class car on trains; the Jim Crow car was usually dirty
and in disrepair.37 Plessy belonged to a citizens’ group composed of lead-
ing blacks from New Orleans who opposed all forms of racial segregation,
including the 1890 Louisiana statute that segregated passengers on local
railway cars.38 The group decided to challenge the statute under the Four-
teenth Amendment.39 They chose Plessy as their plaintiff, hoping that his
white ancestry and appearance would reveal the arbitrariness of segrega-
tion laws in Louisiana.40 By preapproval with the railroad company, which
opposed the segregation law because it increased transportation costs,
Plessy boarded a white train car and was arrested by the conductor and a
railroad security guard.41

Plessy’s lawyers argued that segregation violated the Fourteenth
Amendment’s equal protection guarantee.42 The Court not only rejected
this claim under a “separate but equal” theory of equality but scolded
Plessy for attributing an invidious motive to Louisiana lawmakers.43 Seg-
regation, the Court said, was enacted “in good faith for the promotion of
the public good, and not for the annoyance or oppression of a particular
class.”44

In the justices’ view, the separation law did not discriminate; blacks
who opposed the law were merely being too sensitive.45 As Justice Henry
Brown explained, “We consider the underlying fallacy of [Plessy’s] argu-
ment to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two
races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is
not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored

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Preventing Black Excellence 89

race chooses to put that construction upon it.”46 Segregation, of course,
was designed precisely for the purpose of demeaning blacks, and everyone,
including the justices, knew it. Justice John Harlan referenced this reality
in his dissent, where he alluded to the fact that such discriminatory intent
was apparent to everyone.47 Justice Harlan explained,

It was said in argument that the statute of Louisiana does not discrimi-
nate against either race, but prescribes a rule applicable alike to white and
colored citizens. But this argument does not meet the difficulty. Everyone
knows that the statute in question had its origin in the purpose, not so
much to exclude white persons from railroad cars occupied by blacks, as
to exclude colored people from coaches occupied by or assigned to white
persons. Railroad corporations of Louisiana did not make discrimination
among whites in the matter of [ac]commodation for travelers. The thing
to accomplish was, under the guise of giving equal accommodation for
whites and blacks, to compel the latter to keep to themselves while travel-
ing in railroad passenger coaches. No one would be so wanting in candor
as to assert the contrary.48

Despite the transparency of the motives behind the effort to separate
blacks, the Court declared that the Constitution sanctioned the racial di-
vide in all social activities.49

According to the majority reasoning in Plessy, separate but equal facili-
ties on the train did not imply legal inferiority but merely recognition of a
social distinction.50 According to the political/social rights distinction in
the Equal Protection Clause first identified by the Supreme Court in the
Civil Rights Cases, the clause guaranteed only political equality, not social
equality.51 Unlike racial distinctions in voting or serving on a jury, separa-
tion on a train did not constitute an infringement on any political right.52

Plessy’s distinction between “social rights” and political rights also con-
firmed the true intent behind segregation.53 This distinction, like the statu-
tory exception for subservient blacks, provided whites with an opportu-
nity to reaffirm superiority to blacks.54 The argument that social segrega-
tion did not emanate from notions of white superiority but instead grew
out of benign concern for the “natural affinities” of both whites and blacks
to socialize separately enabled the Court to endorse discriminatory laws
without having to acknowledge the racist presumptions behind them.55
Even Justice John Harlan, who alone dissented from the majority decision,
insisted that whites historically had been, and forever would be, socially

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90 Creating the Paradigm

superior to blacks:56 “The white race deems itself to be the dominant race
in this country. And so it is, in prestige, in achievements, in education, in
wealth, and in power. So, I doubt not, it will continue to be for all time, if it
remains true to its great heritage. . . .”57 In truth, however, segregation laws
were created by whites for the sole purpose of reaffirming such superior-
ity by demeaning and degrading blacks and, thus, benefiting and uplifting
whites.

The Plessy mentality of racial separation was also embraced by the high-
est elected government officials, including presidents, governors, and
members of Congress.58 For example, when the moderate black leader
Booker T. Washington informally, and for the first time in history, had
lunch with President Theodore Roosevelt, in 1901,59 the public reaction
revealed the extent of the nation’s separatist mentality, as in the following
indictment by the Memphis Scimitar: “The most damnable outrage which
has ever been perpetrated by any citizen of the United States was commit-
ted yesterday by the President, when he invited a nigger to dine with him
at the White House.”60 Similarly, Senator Benjamin Tillman of South Caro-
lina said, “Now that Roosevelt has eaten with that nigger Washington, we
shall have to kill a thousand niggers to get them back to their places.”61

Jim Crow on Steroids

Perhaps no event better demonstrates the extent of violence by white su-
premacists in order to secure complete political domination, after Recon-
struction ended, than the 1898 Wilmington race riot.62 During the riot,
white men in Wilmington, North Carolina, gunned down black men,
seized the armory building, and burned down a local newspaper owned by
blacks.63 Two thousand white men assembled at the armory of the Wilm-
ington Light Infantry and, led by former Confederate officer and United
States congressman Alfred Waddell, proceeded to march through the city.64
Blacks on the street were killed or wounded by the mob, with estimates of
the death toll as high as one hundred.65

After a sweeping Democratic victory in the elections that followed the
1898 riot—victory that was achieved primarily by fraud and intimidation,
including stuffing the ballot boxes and scaring black voters away from
the polls—supporters of white privilege met at the Wilmington court-
house and presented a “White Declaration of Independence.”66 This dec-
laration made demands of the black community, including the immediate

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Preventing Black Excellence 91

resignation of Wilmington’s black mayor, even though he had several
months remaining in his term, as well as that of the police chief and the
editor of the local newspaper.67 Whites threatened violence if the demands
were not met.68 As a result, many blacks left the city,69 which of course en-
trenched physical separation of the races even deeper.

For the blacks who remained in Wilmington, the intimidation contin-
ued in the elections two years later. After public threats of violence and
bloodshed, black voters stayed away from the polls, resulting in resound-
ing victories in support of the racist Democratic Party ticket.70 The winner
of the North Carolina gubernatorial election that year, Charles Aycock,
vowed to prevent blacks from voting, making this the state’s primary obli-
gation to its white residents.71

By 1899, all southern state governments were comfortably in the hands
of white Democrats committed to separation of blacks. Many members
of Congress openly sought to exclude black politicians. By 1903, Congress
had not one black member in its House or Senate. This disparity directly
reflected the success of the schemes introduced decades earlier. At the 1901
Virginia Constitutional Convention, delegate Carter Glass accurately char-
acterized the disparity: “Discrimination! Why, that is precisely what we
propose. . . . That, exactly, is what this Convention was elected for—to dis-
criminate to the very extremity of permissible action under the limitations
of the Federal Constitution, with a view to the elimination of every negro
voter. . . .”72

Over a dozen black members of Congress served during Reconstruc-
tion, but by 1903, that double-digit number had dwindled to zero.73 In a
democracy, how was that possible when in some states 40% of the popula-
tion was black? The short answer, as we saw in chapter 2, is that the dem-
ocratic process was perverted through the use of such devices as grand-
father clauses, in which voting eligibility was limited to those who voted
or whose grandfathers voted in 1867;74 poll taxes, in which eligibility was
based on a fee;75 and literacy tests, in which blacks, who in the not-too-
distant past had been executed for learning to read, were required to meet
insurmountable reading comprehension standards.76 When these devices
failed, many who resisted voting by blacks preferred to kill them rather
than allow them to vote.77

Presidents and members of Congress, like governors and state legis-
latures, were often either patently hostile or coldly unsympathetic to the
muted and cautious requests by blacks for some slight improvement of
their lot.78 Even the false rumor that a black had been present at an official

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92 Creating the Paradigm

White House function was sufficient to drive President Grover Cleveland
into a frenzy.79 He stated, “It so happens that I have never in my official
position, either when sleeping or waking, alive or dead, on my head or on
my heels, dined, lunched, or supped, or invited to a wedding reception any
colored man, woman, or child.”80

In keeping with his predecessors, Woodrow Wilson had no qualms
about the plight of blacks. A black newspaper, The New York Age, warned
that Wilson, “both by inheritance and absorption . . . has most of the prej-
udices of the narrowest type of southern white people against the Negro.”81
As president of Princeton University from 1902 to 1910, Wilson headed
the only major northern school that excluded black students.82 Moreover,
when he was governor of New Jersey from 1911 to 1912, Wilson’s “progres-
sivism” did not embrace blacks. His “New Freedom” had been “all for the
white man and little for blacks.”83 According to Professor Rayford Logan,
President Wilson had not visited “any colored school, church, or gathering
of colored people of any nature whatever.”84 During Wilson’s administra-
tion there was a steady “expansion of segregation in the federal department
buildings in Washington, a policy which President Taft had begun.”85

Color was the mark of inferiority, and neither wealth, fame, education,
nor skill altered that notion. As Thomas Dartmouth Rice so accurately
portrayed in his minstrel shows, wherever blacks came in contact with
whites, whether in public accommodations, schools, or job training pro-
grams, they were made to “weel about, turn about, and do jis so,”86 result-
ing in segregation laws well into the next century. From the Plessy decision,
in 1896, to the Brown decision, in 1954, most governments and private en-
tities would separate blacks and whites except when black presence ben-
efited whites, as when blacks performed services like cleaning or cooking
on behalf of white employers.

Jim Crow Housing

In 1911, at a time when many blacks were trying to break away from ru-
ral poverty by moving into urban areas, Richmond, Virginia, passed an
ordinance that legally sanctioned the segregation of all white and black
residents.87 Richmond was one of several Virginia cities to establish such
requirements.88 These laws gave municipalities the right to divide the
land within their boundaries into segregated districts.89 The city coun-
cils were authorized to prepare maps “showing the boundaries of all such

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Preventing Black Excellence 93

segregation districts, and showing the number of white persons and col-
ored persons residing within such segregation district[s]. . . .”90 Thereafter,
those newly defined Jim Crow districts were designated “white” or “black”
depending on the race of the majority of the residents. Twelve months af-
ter the passage of such ordinances, it became a crime for any black person
to move into and occupy a residence in an area known as a white district.
Similarly, it was a crime for any white person to move into a black district.
Many other states and cities across the country also instituted Jim Crow
housing segregation in the early 20th century.91

For example, Baltimore passed the first racial housing segregation or-
dinance directed exclusively at blacks, in 1910.92 Similar ordinances were
passed in thirteen other cities, including Louisville, Winston-Salem, and
Atlanta. The Baltimore ordinance’s93 passage was a direct response to at-
tempts by blacks to move into neighborhoods that, by 1910, had become
all white.94 The plight of George McMechen and his family is a typical
example.95

In 1910, George McMechen purchased a house in the previously all-
white section of Baltimore known as Eutaw Place.96 The family was sub-
jected to harassment and required police protection.97 Shortly after the
McMechens moved into their new neighborhood, over ten thousand
members of the community petitioned the city council in the hope of pre-
venting any such future intrusions.98 In response to this petition, the city
council implemented the “Baltimore idea.”99

The ordinance provided for residential segregation by street block. It
prohibited blacks from moving into or assembling in residences located on
blocks that were completely occupied by whites, prohibited whites from
moving into or assembling in residences located in blocks that were com-
pletely occupied by blacks, and applied those same restrictions to schools
and churches.100 The ordinance was inapplicable to mixed blocks where
both black and white persons lived.101 Domestic servants, however, were
exempted from this housing ordinance’s coverage, just as they had been by
segregation laws on trains.102

Residential segregation was not relegated to the South. Historically,
Irish, Jews, and other white immigrant groups had been separated in hous-
ing in the North.103 Ethnic colonies, or “ghettos,”104 were created whenever
new European immigrants arrived in large numbers. Typically, immigrants
were impoverished, were poorly educated, and tended to crowd into low-
rent areas with others of similar background or language.105 As these immi-
grants accumulated money or became educated and informed about other

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94 Creating the Paradigm

opportunities, they left these ethnic areas and, no longer handicapped by
their background, moved into more diverse communities.106 However, the
experience of the massive wave of blacks who entered the metropolitan
North from the rural South in search of opportunity between 1905 and
1930 was altogether different. City and state laws relegated blacks to the
least desirable areas and prevented them from meaningful opportunities to
get out of those areas, while whites, even impoverished ones, were not sep-
arated.107 Moreover, whites who improved their economic circumstances
could move into wealthier white areas, thus moving up the ladder of suc-
cess.108 Blacks, however, were denied that opportunity under housing sepa-
ration laws and practices.109

After the invalidation of residential segregation ordinances, many urban
whites, in favor of black separation, turned to the Klan for help.110 The Klan
became extremely popular in northern cities like Detroit, Michigan, where
a Klan member was elected mayor.111 Violent Klan tactics were utilized in
these cities, just as they had been earlier in southern rural areas, to main-
tain black separation.112

Other methods included steering, wherein real estate sales agents only
show blacks houses for sale in black areas, and intimidation, wherein blacks
who bought houses in white neighborhoods were threatened and harassed
by white residents. One of the most popular methods was the racially re-
strictive covenant.113 Of the myriad of devices implemented by whites to
prevent blacks from buying property, the racially restrictive covenant re-
ceived the first legal challenge.114 As blacks tried to move from the less de-
sirable areas of cities relegated to them through private and governmental
practices, racial covenants were placed on houses in the more desirable
areas.115 Because of these covenants, the few blacks economically capable of
owning such property were prevented or discouraged from doing so.

When housing segregation laws were prohibited by the Supreme Court,
similar mandates were instituted by white vigilantism practices.116 For ex-
ample, certain cities excluded blacks from living within the city limits. Af-
ter 1948, by practice, over three thousand “sundown towns” existed in the
country. The term “sundown town” was derived from requirements that all
blacks having business in the town had to leave by nightfall or risk bodily
harm.117 Blacks were not permitted to live or own property within the city or
county limits. Some “sundown towns” prohibited only blacks, while others
prohibited all minorities.118 In a few towns and counties such as Pierce City,
Missouri, and Anna-Jonesboro, Illinois, blacks were completely banished

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Preventing Black Excellence 95

from the areas.119 Confiscation of black-owned property was rampant, and
such banishment was enforced by violence and intimidation.

Jim Crow Education

In response to demands by poor and middle-income whites in the begin-
ning of the 20th century, most southern states began providing universal
public education, albeit on a segregated basis.120 The education provided
to blacks was, keeping in line with Plessy, both separate and unequal. Afflu-
ent southern whites considered blacks cheap labor, good for one thing: the
proper growing of cotton and tobacco.121 These whites believed that educa-
tion spoiled a good domestic or field hand,122 preferring their laborers to be
illiterate or semiliterate at best.123 Southern white legislators claimed that
blacks were not capable of higher learning and, therefore, were relegated to
studying subjects dealing with manual labor. Money for educating blacks
was often contingent on limiting their education to expansion of the man-
ual labor force.124 In 1900, the federal commissioner of education estimated
that in sixteen former slave states, the average black child received half as
much educational funding as the average white child.125 Many states were
worse.126 South Carolina reports indicate that blacks, who represented 61%
of the school population, received 20% of school funds (barely one-fifth as
much as the average white child).127

Black children suffered other educational disadvantages as well. School
terms in black institutions were significantly shorter.128 Black schools were
also fewer in number, and, therefore, were spread out, making travel to
and from school more difficult, particularly in rural regions with poor
roads and bridges.129 Making it more challenging for blacks to acquire an
education impeded the performances of those who tried. This reinforced
inferiority notions, and provided false justification for expending fewer re-
sources on black education.

The educational divide between black and white schools drastically in-
creased as the 20th century moved forward.130 By 1915, the funding disparity
had grown so large that blacks received only one-twelfth as much money
for education.131 Moreover, most southern school boards, unlike those in
the North, did not offer public secondary education to black youths.132
Black school children, at best, received an elementary school education
only. On the rare occasions when secondary schools were provided, those

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96 Creating the Paradigm

schools were drastically underfunded.133 Typically, black southerners were
not provided with public secondary schools until after World War II.134 In
1909, Mississippi governor James Vardaman spelled out the white view of
educating blacks:135

Money spent today for the maintenance of public schools for negroes is
robbery of the white man, and a waste upon the negro. You take it from
the toiling white men and women, you rob the white child of the advan-
tages it would afford him, and you spend it upon the negro in an effort to
make of the negro what God Almighty never intended should be made,
and which men cannot accomplish.136

Under the Supreme Court’s “separate but equal” doctrine articulated
in Plessy, states that adopted Jim Crow were obligated to provide separate
educational facilities for blacks.137 Many states in the North left the deci-
sion on whether to segregate public primary and secondary schools to lo-
cal school boards.138 While some local jurisdictions rejected Jim Crow, a
majority, particularly the large urban school districts, chose to require ra-
cial separation.139 Yet no state or local jurisdiction came close to satisfying
the equality component of the doctrine, especially with regard to college,
graduate, and professional school training.140

The Land-Grant Act, enacted in 1890, required that states using federal
land-grant funds open their schools to both blacks and whites or allocate
funds for black schools as an alternative to white ones.141 The act gave states
a choice, and the Plessy decision sanctioned that choice.

After 1896, most states provided an undergraduate institution for blacks
to attend, but no states provided any graduate or professional schools for
blacks.142 Blacks who wanted to attend graduate or professional school had
only two options: they could attend the limited number of private institu-
tions throughout the country, like Howard University in Washington, DC,
created by the federal government in 1867 to educate blacks, or they could
hope to secure one of the token spots reserved for blacks at state, private,
or federal institutions located in northern and western states.143

Many states attempted to satisfy the Plessy doctrine by choosing not to
provide black students with an educational institution, and instead identi-
fied existing institutions in neighboring states as legitimate alternatives.144
One of the most popular methods was providing scholarships for black
students to attend Howard University, or another historically black insti-
tution located in another state.145 These states reasoned that providing a

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Preventing Black Excellence 97

scholarship to attend an out-of-state school was the same as providing a
school within the state. Many black professionals, including a large num-
ber of black lawyers and doctors, were educated in this fashion.

Widespread use of this approach greatly limited the number of place-
ments available for blacks at state schools. This explains why there were so
few black professionals prior to the civil rights movement.146 Graduate and
professional placements nationally were limited to a couple of hundred per
year.

This practice served to reinforce notions of black inferiority by limiting
opportunities for blacks to become professionals. Those few blacks admit-
ted, under a quota of one or two per year, to college or graduate and pro-
fessional schools for whites, in northern or western states, were subjected
to racist and discriminatory treatment.147

White students at military academies also pressed for black separa-
tion. In 1932, a young black male, Benjamin O. Davis Jr., entered West
Point Military Academy in New York.148 Like Henry Flipper before him,
he was the only black cadet enrolled at West Point during that term, and
just the fourth since the school had been established in 1802.149 Shortly af-
ter his arrival, Davis accidentally witnessed a meeting of the other cadets
in his class.150 The subject of the meeting was, “What are we going to do
about the nigger?” “From that meeting on,” Davis recalled, “the cadets who
roomed across the hall, who had been friendly earlier, no longer spoke to
me. In fact, no one spoke to me except in the line of duty.”151

The cadets at West Point “silenced” Davis for the duration of his four-
year education.152 This method of social exclusion meant that no cadet was
permitted to speak or interact with Davis under threat of similar treatment
by the rest of the academy.153 Although the administrators at West Point,
like most northern white leaders in the early 20th century, denied order-
ing, sanctioning, or even condoning this practice, the treatment Davis
suffered was not prevented, nor were the culprits punished by academy
officials.154 Despite the “silent treatment,” Davis became a skilled combat
pilot during World War II and the commander of an all-black air corps unit
called the “Red Tails” that achieved numerous combat records in spite of
Jim Crow practices.155

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98 Creating the Paradigm

Jim Crow Military

From the Spanish-American War in 1908 through the ending of World War
II in 1945, blacks served in racially segregated units commanded by white
officers.156 Most often, black soldiers were excluded from skilled leadership
positions and served overwhelmingly in labor and service capacities.157 To
discourage black participation, the military placed a strict cap on the num-
ber of black enlistments.158

When World War II began in Europe in 1939, only 3,640 black soldiers
were in uniform.159 By the time Pearl Harbor was bombed, that number had
increased to 97,725.160 By the end of 1942, the number of black soldiers had
swelled to 467,833 men.161 Despite this increase, the army pledged to main-
tain the practice of segregation and to keep the proportion of blacks in
uniform the same as the proportion of blacks in the general population.162
Thus, the military continued deliberately to relegate the vast majority of
black soldiers to manual labor positions in support and supply units.163 The
primary task of the service troops included road building, stevedoring,
laundering, and fumigating.164

The military’s policies of parity in population percentage and racial seg-
regation were difficult to maintain. Despite the cap on enlisted soldiers,
the army did not have enough segregated facilities to house and train the
unprecedented number of black recruits.165 In addition to these logistical
problems, most of the war was waged while black soldiers, a valuable and
powerful resource, remained on the sidelines.166 As in earlier wars, black
soldiers were denied the right to fight until their manpower became a ne-
cessity.167 Black infantry units were assigned to combat duty late in the war,
but only when necessary to replace white units who had lost large num-
bers of soldiers.168

Eugene Bullard, a black American, fought with the French Foreign Le-
gion in the early 20th century.169 Bullard left the United States for France
at the age of seventeen, after witnessing an attempted lynching of his fa-
ther in Georgia in 1906.170 A stellar soldier, Bullard was awarded the Croix
de Guerre, the highest combat award, for heroics at the Battle of Verdun
during World War I.171 Opportunity presented itself when he was asked
by French officers to volunteer for the Eagle Squadron, a group of Ameri-
can volunteers in the French Air Force.172 Known as the “black swallow of
death”173 for his daring and courage, he was the first black aviator to fly suc-
cessful missions for the French Air Force during the early stages of World
War I.174 In 1917, the United States entered World War I, and the United

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Preventing Black Excellence 99

States Army took over the squadron; Bullard applied to transfer to the
newly formed American squadron.175 Of the twenty-nine applicants, he was
the only one denied transfer.176 Instead, Bullard was ordered to report to
a maintenance troop, a decision based solely on his race.177 In spite of his
decade of flying expertise, Bullard was excluded from serving his country
in the way he was best qualified; instead, he was relegated to a low-level,
menial position.178

Not one black was awarded the Medal of Honor, America’s highest
award for bravery during combat, in either World War I or World War II,
even though several clearly qualified on the basis of meritorious and heroic
deeds.

Jim Crow Employment

In the late 1800s, 75% of blacks lived in the South.179 Most were underedu-
cated and without capital. As a result, agricultural jobs served as the pri-
mary means for earning a living. Without money to buy land, blacks were
limited to labor arrangements with low wages and no equity or equitable
profit sharing. Such circumstances led to perpetual poverty.

Blacks who could not be coerced to work for unduly low wages were
forced, through the legal system, to work without pay. Thousands of
blacks, in the early 1900s, were arrested and convicted on false charges and
leased out to corporations by southern state governments, as convict la-
bor.180 Unjustly forced to labor in coal mines, lumber mills, or road main-
tenance, these blacks were always exploited by being underfed and poorly
housed, often injured or afflicted by illness, and sometimes overworked to
the point of exhaustion and death.181

For those few blacks who could access capital, productive farm land was
still not accessible. Few whites were willing to sell land to blacks. Where
white purchasers existed, a sale of fertile land to blacks was less likely to
transpire.182

Black employment in southern urban areas was not much better. Even
as economic opportunities improved in the last decade of the 19th century,
blacks were not permitted to benefit economically. Even in service positions
such as maids, cooks, and barbers, blacks were refused employment due to
the sentiment of many whites that these jobs were too good for blacks.183

For those blacks who remained in rural areas, the 1920s brought tre-
mendous economic hardship. Agricultural cycles of overproduction and

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100 Creating the Paradigm

dwindling prices, coupled with frequent crop destruction from insects,
caused widespread losses and infrequent payment to workers.

After the Civil War, most blacks lived in southern states.184 By the turn
of the 20th century, however, due to political and economic developments,
including the denial of civil rights and high rates of unemployment, many
blacks decided to leave the South for better opportunities in the North.185
This process came to be known as the Great Migration.186 Lasting twenty-
five years, beginning in the late 1800s, it became the largest migratory shift
in American history.187 Blacks who participated encountered racist prac-
tices similar to those they had escaped in the South.

Intense conflicts occurred between white and black job seekers. Com-
petition from skilled black laborers was particularly resented. Most blacks
seeking employment as blacksmiths, furniture makers, or painters met
hostility from whites who possessed similar skills.188 This was exacerbated,
within the union movement, when white workers attempted to organize
to strengthen negotiating power with management over wages and hours,
and black workers, denied union membership due to their race, were
brought in as strike breakers. Companies exploited this dynamic to their
own advantage. As far back as 1867, in Boston, Massachusetts, black ship-
builders were brought from Virginia to undermine white laborers’ efforts
to obtain shorter working days,189 demonstrating once again how those in
positions of influence used race divisively. Black desires for employment
and economic independence were used to reduce the economic clout of
white workers, perpetuating racial division.

Many blacks headed for northern industrial areas, motivated by the
same aspirations as white immigrants who came before them—to obtain
better educations for their children and higher wages for themselves and
to avoid brutal treatment from oppressive governments.190 Black culture
embraced a strong work ethic, and the Great Migration reflected blacks’
strong desire for better employment opportunities.191 Unlike white immi-
grants, however, black migrants were already Americans—they knew the
language, understood America’s social customs and class structure, and in
a sense were at home in the North before they ever set foot in New York,
Detroit, or Chicago.192 Yet, blacks faced stronger opposition than white for-
eigners in many areas of life.193

Once white immigrants became “Americanized”—knowledgeable in
the ways of America—they were allowed to become American citizens
not subject to separation laws.194 Despite the fact that European im-
migrants had much in common with black workers, as they were both

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Preventing Black Excellence 101

exploited by employers with low wages, long hours, and poor work en-
vironments, white immigrants united along racial lines with their white
employers to support discriminatory laws.195 The lure of white privilege,
it seems, was more unifying than common social or economic class
characteristics.196 Whites born in the United States, and those emigrat-
ing from Europe, united to withhold economic and other opportunities
from black Americans.197 From the start of the trade union movement in
the late 19th century, blacks were excluded from membership. In 1915,
immigration from Europe stopped suddenly with the outbreak of World
War I.198 As a result of white immigration being halted, many blacks were
hired in war-related industries that had been heavily dependent on im-
migrant labor.199 Blacks worked in industries from shipbuilding to iron
and steel to automobile and trucks to electrical supplies to coal mines
and to railroads.200 Hundreds of thousands of blacks found employment
during the war.201 In 1917, as World War I came to a close, the Ameri-
can Federation of Labor (AFL), one of the largest labor organizations
in the country, considered opening its membership to blacks in order
to prevent them from being used as strikebreakers as they had been
prior to the war.202 Nevertheless, most AFL-affiliated unions denied black
membership.203

The number of blacks and whites seeking employment in the urban
North outnumbered available employment opportunities. Employers
tended to favor white workers over blacks, so the latter had difficulty secur-
ing all but the most onerous and lowest-paying jobs.204

The racial divide in employment reflected the paradigm’s racial hier-
archy. Service and menial jobs were reserved for blacks, if they could get
jobs at all. Most of the blacks who came to the North during the Great
Migration were unskilled industrial laborers or farmers.205 With only the
most menial jobs available to blacks, these migrants formed the bulk of
the working poor in cities throughout the North.206 Black political lead-
ers, like W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, encouraged business
enterprise so that blacks could become their own employers and secure
wealth and economic independence.207 Blacks established a wide range of
businesses located in northern cities, from restaurants to grocery stores to
funeral homes and banks. The hair and beauty care industry was one of the
most successful areas of black enterprise, producing the wealthiest black
woman of the early 20th century, C. J. Walker, whose business employed
thousands of black women as salespersons in the beginning decades of the
20th century.208

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102 Creating the Paradigm

The lack of employment opportunities for blacks in white-owned busi-
nesses necessitated creative approaches on the part of blacks in order to
further economic opportunities. One of the most successful approaches
was to involve black churches in business enterprises in black neighbor-
hoods. Because of limited access to capital from white-owned banks,
black churches, the most prosperous entities of the time, exercised a more
diverse responsibility than simply providing religious support. Black
churches got involved in various economic enterprises to benefit the larger
black community, such as building and loan organizations, newspapers,
and restaurants.209 Many of these church-affiliated businesses made steady
progress and performed valuable economic services for blacks during the
first three decades of the 20th century.

The economic depression of 1929, however, devastated most of these
businesses; because they had little or no capital reserves, failure rates were
high and only a few businesses survived. Black laborers were the first to
lose their jobs or to have their wages lowered to poverty levels.210 New
Deal legislation in the late 1930s and early 1940s lowered unemployment
numbers for blacks.211 By 1940, over a million black laborers in the North
owed their employment to New Deal work programs.212 Nevertheless, in a
majority of localities, blacks received less financial assistance than similarly
situated whites, or no assistance at all.213 In the early 1940s, industrial hir-
ing began to pick up, particularly in war-related industries. Yet, first prefer-
ence was given to white workers unemployed since the Depression.214 Few
black workers were hired until federal legislation required it in 1941.215 As a
result of this unequal treatment, whether skilled or unskilled, black work-
ers in the North were subjected to discriminatory treatment if they were
fortunate enough to be hired at all. In 1934, Paul Robeson, a black scholar
and athlete, graduated from Columbia Law School.216 As a member of Phi
Beta Kappa at Rutgers University and as the College Football Player of the
Year, he was a uniquely gifted individual.217 Offered legal employment at a
white law firm in New York City, a first for a black lawyer, he quit after sev-
eral months, frustrated because a white secretary refused to take dictation
from him.218 Robeson would later become an internationally celebrated
singer, opera performer, and movie star.219 While “white-collar” blacks like
Robeson were demeaned and degraded, most blacks, even those few who
were highly trained or skilled, received no opportunities at white-owned
or -controlled institutions, including federal and state governments.220

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Preventing Black Excellence 103

Jim Crow and Economic Growth

In the decades after World War I, business opportunities for blacks had
worsened, with widespread disparities existing in government assistance
programs. The Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) sent mil-
lions of dollars to all-white county committees to pay for farm land retired
from cultivation, thus reversing a drastic fall in prices caused by overpro-
duction.221 AAA subsidy checks never reached a sizeable percentage of
black farm owners, and because white administrators and landlords kept
the checks for themselves, when they did disperse funds appropriately, dis-
criminatory discrepancies existed.222 Comparable workers received widely
disparate subsidies. A black sharecropper received an average of $295 from
the AAA, while a white farmer received $417.223 A black field hand received
$175, while a white one received $232.224

While blacks were being forcibly displaced and denied housing oppor-
tunities, many whites were able to purchase their first homes with mort-
gages secured through the G.I. Bill, which was passed after World War II to
allow veterans to secure government loan assistance. Many of the homes
purchased in 1945 for ten thousand dollars were subsequently valued at
more than one hundred thousand dollars, a tenfold increase in value.225
The few blacks who qualified for assistance faced discrimination, with
state government officials failing to deliver their earned benefits.226 Even
the G.I. Bill, which provided college tuition assistance for those who had
served in the military, failed to provide benefits to most black veterans,227
because racist southern state officials administered and controlled the
distribution of the funds.228 A substantial number of white males attend-
ing college after World War II did so with government assistance under
the G.I. Bill.229 That same opportunity was denied to many black veterans
who had fought under the very same conditions.230 Other government as-
sistance programs, like Social Security and farmer assistance, had equally
racist administration.

The Social Security program—designed to provide monetary assistance
to retirees—excluded farm laborers and domestics from its coverage, due
to concerns by white southern legislators that blacks would benefit from
the program.231 These legislators knew that 60% of all employed blacks na-
tionwide fell within those two job categories.232

Jim Crow government programs and practices created a staggering dis-
crepancy in wealth and resources among blacks and whites. Large numbers
of whites, for example, were able to purchase homes or farm land while

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104 Creating the Paradigm

a majority of blacks remained renters in the North and sharecroppers in
the South.233 Approximately 75% of the black farmers in the South, in 1900,
were sharecroppers or tenant farmers.234 But in the Mississippi Delta, for
example, Professor Leon Litwack explained that “black owners comprised
only slightly more than 2% of the farm operators. . . .”235 By 1940, 75% of
white farmers owned their land while few blacks did so.236 In the North,
disproportionate white home ownership was maintained and perpetuated
by racial covenants that prevented many whites from selling their homes
to blacks.237 By 1940, fewer than 5% of blacks owned homes in the North.238
The lack of home ownership for blacks kept them in a weak economic
state, especially during periods of inflation, when housing became easier to
afford for those who owned real property and held a fixed-rate mortgage.239
Renters, in contrast, usually saw their housing expenses increase. As a re-
sult, large numbers of whites would inherit valuable assets from deceased
relatives. On average, one in four white families received an inheritance
after a parent’s death averaging close to $150,000.240 In contrast, only one
in twenty black families inherited valuable assets with an average worth of
around $40,000.241

Jim Crow Sports

Separation in sports was necessary to prevent blacks from defeating whites,
even if only in a game. Contrary to what most Americans have been led
to believe today, there were integrated sports competitions as far back
as the mid-1800s.242 In fact, at that time, blacks participated in, and often
excelled in, the major sports of the day—cycling, horse racing, and boat
racing.243 For example, in the first Kentucky Derby in 1875,244 fourteen of
the first fifteen jockeys were black, and ten of the Derby’s first seventeen
winners were black.245 Soon after, in 1894, the Jockey Club was formed to
license jockeys, and it denied licenses to blacks.246 The main reason for this
discrimination was that many horse owners believed that most whites did
not want to see black jockeys winning races, making money, and getting
newspaper coverage.247 These owners felt that it would be more profitable
to have white jockeys winning the races.248 Similar separation practices
were implemented in increasingly popular professional sports such as foot-
ball, baseball, basketball, and in boxing after Jack Johnson249 became the
first black heavyweight champion of the world in 1910. After his defeat of
Jim “The Great White Hope” Jeffries250 inspired race riots, no black was

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Preventing Black Excellence 105

allowed to fight for the heavyweight title from 1915 to 1937.251 Some states
even had statutes that prohibited whites and blacks from boxing one an-
other in amateur bouts or social settings.252

The plight of Jack Johnson is particularly instructive as to the lengths
that some white government officials would go to prevent black excel-
lence.253 As the first black heavyweight boxing champion, Jack Johnson
was placed in one of the most high-profile positions symbolizing physical
excellence. While he was heavyweight champion, members of the federal
government targeted Johnson and attempted to have him incarcerated so
he could not hold the title or fight anymore. Due to Johnson’s extrava-
gant lifestyle of traveling extensively and dating many women, including
women who worked as prostitutes, government officials felt that he could
be convicted under a recently enacted law, the Mann Act, which made it il-
legal to transport women across state lines for immoral purposes.254 After a
two-year investigation of Johnson culminating in his arrest in 1912, the case
collapsed when it became clear that the woman in question, Lucille Cam-
eron, had been a prostitute long before she met Johnson.255 The govern-
ment, however, refused to abandon their obsession with targeting Johnson
for criminal investigation.256 The government went to great lengths to se-
cure a criminal conviction against Johnson.

Disappointed that Johnson had avoided conviction in 1912, Assistant
United States Attorney Harry Parkin was determined to indict Johnson for
his involvement with white prostitutes.257 Parkin requested that the Justice
Department investigate whether Johnson had ever transported any other
women across state lines for allegedly immoral purposes.258 Although the
Mann Act was designed to apply to pimps and brothels or other busi-
ness establishments promoting money for sex, Parkin insisted that the law
could be used to convict Johnson.259 One of Johnson’s former companions,
Belle Schreiber, whom he dumped for another woman, became a primary
witness in the government’s new case against Johnson.260 Soon after Sch-
reiber came forward, indictments were issued against Johnson for Mann
Act violations relating to involvement in prostitution by transporting
women out of state for sexual purposes in exchange for money.261 Johnson
was convicted and sentenced to a year in prison.262

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106 Creating the Paradigm

Black Entrepreneurship under Jim Crow

Due to severe discrimination in education, housing, employment, and gov-
ernment benefits, the black entrepreneurial spirit was encouraged by black
leaders as a way to combat discriminatory treatment. Many blacks estab-
lished self-sustaining black towns in an attempt to minimize contact with
and reliance on hostile and unresponsive state governments. Allensworth,
California—along with Mound Bayou, Mississippi, and Nicodemus, Kan-
sas—was one such place.263 Started by Colonel Allen Allensworth in 1906,
after he retired as an army chaplain, the thriving community grew to over
four hundred residents and included a bakery, lumber yard, restaurant, liv-
ery stable, and blacksmith shop.264 After being denied participation in a wa-
ter cooperative agreement by neighboring white towns, Allensworth was
abandoned in 1918.265

The National Patent Office was one of the few federal institutions that
did not discriminate; it accepted patents irrespective of the race of the ap-
plicant.266 As a result, thousands of blacks, including Elijah McCoy, who
held fifty patents connected to automatic machine lubricators, and Gran-
ville Woods, who held several patents later assigned to the General Elec-
tric Company and American Bell Telephone Company,267 successfully ob-
tained patents between 1900 and 1954. Garrett Morgan was also one of the
many black patent applicants.268

Morgan was born in 1877, the seventh of eleven children in his family.269
As was typical of rural blacks, his formal education ended at grade five, and
he subsequently sought work to help his family financially.270 Eventually,
Morgan found a job as a sewing machine adjuster for Roots and McBride,
a clothing manufacturer.271 Morgan became so good at repairing and fine
tuning sewing machines that he found steady work fixing and adjusting
them.272

Recognizing the high demand for his services, Morgan opened his
own sewing retail and repair business in 1907.273 This began a long and
prosperous career of inventions, beginning with several patents that im-
proved the sewing machine.274 Morgan conceived his greatest idea in 1911,
when he read newspaper reports of the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Com-
pany fire in New York City.275 The thick, deadly smoke prevented firefight-
ers’ efforts to save victims, which led to the death of 146 workers in the
factory.276 Shortly thereafter, Morgan designed and patented a helmet that
could help firefighters survive in such dangerous environments.277 Mor-
gan named his invention the “gas inhalator,” and it consisted of a durable

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Preventing Black Excellence 107

hood that fit over the head and two long tubes that ran from the hood to
the floor.278

Marketing his invention as “the Morgan Helmet,” Morgan recognized
that the best way to sell his invention was to demonstrate it.279 Yet, when
he traveled around the country displaying his invention in a dramatic tent
demonstration equivalent to a magic show, where Morgan would use his
device to amazingly survive a smoke-filled chamber, Morgan ran into hos-
tility from white audiences due to his race.280 Morgan realized that sales
dropped off dramatically when he presented himself as the inventor.281 As
a result, Morgan staged a show where he had a white friend pose as the
inventor, and Morgan posed as his assistant.282 Sales improved dramatically
when the invention was no longer associated with a black inventor.283

Garrett Morgan’s experience is a prime example of how notions of white
superiority/black inferiority hinder black excellence. It was difficult for
Morgan to sell his invention to whites when Morgan identified himself as
the inventor. The fact that Morgan was black caused many whites to ques-
tion the quality of the device or the authenticity of the claims as to what the
device could accomplish. Moreover, the lack of sales to whites may also re-
flect the sentiment that even if the device was effective and the claims were
authentic, support of black businesses would undermine white competi-
tors. In contrast, when Morgan posed as the assistant to the white inventor,
sales to whites soared.284 These whites could accept and embrace purchas-
ing a technologically advanced product created by a white person but dem-
onstrated by a black servant serving as the “guinea pig” for the experiment.

In the white mind, blacks were thought of as servants, cooks, maids,
butlers, and field hands. Blacks could be successfully associated with prod-
ucts that reflected their rightful place in American society, such as “Aunt
Jemima” selling pancakes or “Uncle Ben” selling rice—in those types of
positions, blacks were serving whites in areas of labor where whites chose
not to perform. But designing technology to be used in sophisticated min-
ing operations or firefighting rescues moved into a realm deemed unsuit-
able for black control or supervision. Rejecting these inventions was the
ultimate exhibition of racial insanity, for those whites would prefer to ig-
nore or dispute the success of a device that could save thousands of lives,
most of them white lives, rather than acknowledge that a black inventor
may have accomplished a feat that whites had not been able to accomplish.
Morgan had to acknowledge and make use of false notions of white supe-
riority by having a white person pose as the inventor in order to get whites
to even consider using Morgan’s creation.

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108 Creating the Paradigm

Unfortunately, this was not a rare occurrence. Notions of racial hierar-
chy were frequently reinforced through black/white interpersonal relations
throughout the Jim Crow period. Many blacks had to falsely play roles in-
ferior to whites in order to fit into the racial paradigm. Blacks whose activi-
ties or roles fell outside of the paradigm, by demonstrating excellence or
beating white competitors, made many whites uncomfortable and under-
mined the notion of black inferiority.

Paul Williams, one of the first black architects in California, took a dif-
ferent approach from Morgan in overcoming white racism against black
entrepreneurs.285 Instead of camouflaging the fact that he was the building
designer, Williams developed methods that would allow whites to utilize
his services while maintaining a degree of black separation.286 For instance,
sensitive to white clients who might feel uncomfortable sitting next to him,
Williams developed the ability to draw upside down.287 This allowed cli-
ents to examine his designs right-side-up as he drew them from the op-
posite side of the table.288 This tactic worked as Williams completed over
three thousand projects, most of them for white clients.289 Nevertheless,
Williams was forbidden from visiting the Beverly Hills Hotel—a hotel he
had designed—due to the hotel’s policy excluding black customers.290

Often, denial of black excellence involved taking credit away from blacks
and giving it exclusively to whites. In housing, schools, business, politics,
and sports, the presence of and performances by blacks were devalued.
Such devaluation occurred even in medicine, where lives were at risk. For
example, Vivien Thomas, a black man with a high school diploma, created
and perfected a complicated heart surgery procedure that saved thousands
of lives.291 In 1944, headlines across the world announced that Johns Hop-
kins University chief of surgery Dr. Alfred Blalock had repaired the heart of a
nine-pound baby.292 However, although Blalock actually performed the heart
procedure, it was Thomas, his surgical assistant, who instructed him.293 As
Blalock scrubbed in for the procedure, he looked around the operating room
and realized his guide, Thomas, was not present.294 Despite the confusion of
the other medical personnel in the room, Blalock insisted that Thomas be
permitted into the operating room to advise him.295 At the time of the sur-
gery, Blalock had little experience with the procedure, while Thomas had
successfully completed the procedure dozens of times on animals.296 As the
white doctor maneuvered the baby’s heart, the black laboratory technician
sat behind him, whispering instructions.297 Because he was black, Thomas
would not ordinarily have been permitted in the operating room, and was

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Preventing Black Excellence 109

forced to use a separate door to enter the university hospital.298 Furthermore,
Thomas’s official job title was initially “janitor.”299 But, Blalock’s successful
research and pioneering medical innovations were the result of Thomas’s
work.300 Not only did Thomas perfect the procedure; he designed new sur-
gical tools for Blalock.301 Unfortunately, while Blalock was able to negotiate
reasonable compensation for Thomas, he did little to acknowledge Thom-
as’s contributions in the operating room—Blalock unfairly took credit for
Thomas’s work and innovations.302 It was not until the 1970s, almost thirty
years after the initial groundbreaking surgery, and several years after Blalock’s
death, that Thomas was finally recognized for his accomplishments—a por-
trait of Thomas was presented and hung at the hospital, and he was awarded
an honorary doctorate by Johns Hopkins, as well as being appointed to a po-
sition on the Hopkins medical school faculty.303

When laws proved ineffective in suppressing black entrepreneurial ex-
cellence, economic incentives were offered for blacks to deny their excel-
lence. During the early 20th century, A. Philip Randolph gained recogni-
tion as the head of the first black union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car
Porters (BSCP).304 Consistent with Jim Crow employment practices, na-
tional labor organizations, such as the American Federation of Labor, ex-
cluded black members. In 1925, Randolph agreed to help start and head a
union for the black employees of the Pullman Train Car Company (Pull-
man Company), which provided the most expensive and luxurious ac-
commodations for overnight train travel.305 A majority of employees at the
Pullman Company were blacks employed as service attendants.306 Despite
strong opposition by the Pullman Company’s management, the employ-
ees voted to support the BSCP.307 In 1929, the Pullman Company sent Ran-
dolph a check for ten thousand dollars as a thinly veiled bribe to discon-
tinue his work as head of the BSCP.308 Disgusted by the proposition, Ran-
dolph returned the check. In a later speech to the BSCP, Randolph said, “I
will not take Pullman gold.”309 According to one BSCP member, in refusing
the company’s bribe, Randolph sent the message that “negro pride [was]
not for sale.”310

Preventing Black Excellence with Incarceration and Violence

Many blacks who challenged separation practices were either incarcerated
or killed. During the first half of the 20th century, threats and intimidation

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110 Creating the Paradigm

against blacks were widespread.311 Torture, used to coerce confessions, was
prevalent in detentions of blacks,312 and arrests for violating Jim Crow laws
sharply increased incarceration rates. Under Jim Crow laws, in the early
1900s, blacks were arrested, imprisoned, and forced into labor.313 Moreover,
longer sentences for blacks were encouraged in order to extend their labor
commitment. For example, 1913 court records from Arkansas indicate ex-
cessive sentences for convicted blacks—180 days for disturbing the peace;
three years for stealing clothing from a clothesline; and thirty-six years
for forging documents to buy whiskey.314 If a local industry needed work-
ers, vagrancy arrests increased proportional to the need for labor, in some
cases rising by 800%.315 Trials of blacks took place without legal representa-
tion, or with an all-white jury,316 or without any jury at all. An offense such
as hitching a ride on a train often quickly turned into years of forced labor
on a prison-run plantation.

This is exactly what happened to John Davis, a black man from Goodwa-
ter, Alabama.317 In 1901, Davis was arrested and convicted on a false charge
of failure to pay a forty dollar debt.318 The sheriff, Robert Franklin, claimed,
as he did with numerous other blacks, that Davis owed him money.319 A
wealthy white landowner, John Pace, paid the fictitious debt plus a fine
and, pursuant to Alabama law, Davis, under duress, signed an agreement to
work for Pace for ten months in order to avoid a prison sentence.320

While vagrancy arrests could in theory affect both blacks and whites,
officials generally targeted blacks. Many states had curfew laws that were
applied to blacks only. The resulting disparity in incarceration was well
documented. For example, in Texas in the early 1900s, blacks represented
20% of the state population but 60% of the prison population.321 In 1917, in
Mississippi, 90% of the prison population was black.322

Once convicted of a crime, blacks were frequently forced to work on
chain gangs or prison-run plantations or factories. The largest and most no-
torious was Parchman Farm, a 20,000-acre prison camp plantation in Mis-
sissippi.323 Life at Parchman Farm was particularly brutal.324 Black prisoners
would rise before dawn and march, at gunpoint, all the way to the fields,
sometimes a mile or more, with prison guards trailing on horseback.325
Once workers arrived at the fields, they were divided into squads and led
by the fastest worker, who would “set the pace” for the entire group.326 Any
prisoner who did not keep up with the pace received severe punishment,
and prisoners who tried to run or escape were shot on sight no matter what
the reason.327 Prisoners at Parchman Farm generally worked until they

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Preventing Black Excellence 111

dropped dead or experienced sunstroke.328 On several occasions, prisoners
attempted to avoid work by “knockin’ a joe,” which referred to self-muti-
lation by cutting off a limb.329 It was common to see a one-legged or one-
armed man who had chopped off his own foot or hand with an ax or hoe
to avoid the prison labor of the South.330 Prisoners at Parchman realized
that pardons were nonexistent, so self-injury became the only alternative
available for them to get out of the laborious and torturous tasks.331 Other
prisoners drank poison, slit their wrists, or severed Achilles tendons to free
themselves from the agony of working in the fields.332 However, those who
were unable to work due to severed limbs soon became guinea pigs for the
state in medical experiments instead.333

Worse than incarceration and forced labor, the fate of death by white
vigilantism befell some who challenged Jim Crow laws. One example was
Lloyd Gaines, a black man who graduated from Lincoln University, in
Missouri, in 1935 and wanted to go to law school.334 Gaines sought to at-
tend law school in Missouri, so he applied to the only law school within
the state—the University of Missouri.335 The university conceded that
Gaines was qualified but would not permit him to enroll because he was
black.336

The NAACP represented Gaines and sued the University of Missouri,
alleging that Gaines had been denied admission in violation of equality
provisions in the Constitution.337 During the trial, the university claimed to
have satisfied its obligation under the Equal Protection Clause of the Con-
stitution by providing Gaines with a scholarship to attend a law school in
an adjacent state that accepted blacks.338 It was odd indeed to hear the law-
yers for the University of Missouri advocating for the greatness of one of
its competitors, the University of Illinois Law School.339 The University of
Missouri also contended that Gaines should have applied to Lincoln Col-
lege, the Jim Crow school in Missouri, and asked Lincoln officials to create
a law school for him and other blacks.340

The United States Supreme Court heard the case in 1938.341 As Charles
Hamilton Houston stood in front of the Court to argue the case, Justice
James McReynolds, a declared supporter of white superiority, reversed his
chair and turned his back to Houston.342 Houston subsequently made his
arguments and, not surprisingly, Justice McReynolds did not agree with
Houston’s position.343 Yet, McReynolds’s vote was inconsequential be-
cause seven justices agreed with Houston.344 Led by Chief Justice Charles
Hughes, the Court held that the University of Missouri had violated

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112 Creating the Paradigm

Gaines’s equal protection rights and affirmed that, unless an equal school
in the state was available immediately, he had to be admitted to the Univer-
sity of Missouri.345 On March 19, 1939, several months after the decision, but
prior to his enrollment in law school, Gaines suddenly disappeared346—
one afternoon, Gaines left the fraternity house where he resided to buy
some stamps, and he was never seen again. Many believe that Gaines made
the ultimate sacrifice, giving his life to bridge the racial divide.

While black separation was rigidly maintained under Jim Crow laws,
those laws were frequently challenged within the judicial system and,
sometimes, said challenges were successful. But even when those chal-
lenges succeeded, vigilantism by whites often prevented the racial divide
from being bridged and black excellence from being fulfilled.

Crossing the Jim Crow Line

Throughout the first half of the 20th century, blacks who attempted to
cross the racial divide of Jim Crow segregation or who demonstrated ex-
cellence while interacting with whites faced systematic atrocities. The prac-
tice of lynching—a form of public murder without trial—was frequently
utilized against blacks who attempted to vote during Reconstruction and
continued and expanded from the late 19th century well into the 20th cen-
tury, especially in the South.347 Perpetrators were rarely tried or convicted.
Thousands of blacks were tortured and murdered through public specta-
cles held in town centers and attended by hundreds of spectators.348

Historians estimate that between 1880 and 1951, more than three thou-
sand lynchings took place in America.349 Lynching was supported by all
levels of society, including law enforcement agents, who were sometimes
active participants.350 In nearly all historical records, the victim was falsely
accused of a crime and assaulted by a violent mob, while police and the
justice system made no efforts to restore order.351 The key, however, in al-
most all lynchings, was the belief by some whites that a black perpetrator
had wrongly crossed the racial divide, such as drinking from the white-
designated water fountain, or committed an offense challenging notions
of white superiority, such as engaging in sexual relations with a white
female.352

It is important to note that lynchings were not unique to the South.
In the summer of 1930, James Cameron, a sixteen-year-old from Marion,

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Preventing Black Excellence 113

Indiana, and two of his teenage friends were arrested and held in the Grant
County Courthouse Jail, accused of murdering a white man and raping
a white woman.353 Over the course of several days a mob surrounded the
jail, led by the Ku Klux Klan and urged on by local newspapers and radio
broadcasts.354 The sheriff and law authorities made no effort to control the
crowd, which grew to several thousand and used sledgehammers to pulver-
ize the brick frames around the iron doors of the jail.355 For hours the unre-
lenting pounding of their hammers tore away at the brick frames, sending
shock waves of terror into the souls of the prisoners within the holding
cells.356 The mob tore the iron doors from their frames, surged in, and be-
gan pounding down the inner doors.357

Reaching the cell of Thomas Shipp, the mob dragged him out, beat him
into unconsciousness, and cheered as they hung him from a tree on the
courthouse lawn.358 As his lifeless body swung from the tree branch, they
desecrated and mutilated it.359 The mob reentered the jail to repeat the
process on their second victim, Abe Smith.360 In his cell, Cameron heard
a second crescendo in the crowd outside, and he knew that Abe had been
murdered. Smith was hung next to Shipp.361

The mob surged again into the jail, taking Cameron from his cell.362
In his book, A Time of Terror, Cameron describes how he was punched,
spit on, bitten, clubbed, and stabbed as his body was dragged through
the crowd.363 He recognized the faces of many of his attackers: some had
been his friends during his lifetime in that town.364 He noted how people
urged each other on, teaching each other the expressions of hatred.365 An
adult told a child to bite Cameron’s leg as he passed by.366 The violent
crowd dragged him toward the tree where the dead bodies of Tom and
Abe hung.367 As the rope was already placed around Cameron’s neck to
hang him, he heard a woman’s voice above the din of the crowd, saying
“Take this boy back. He had nothing to do with any raping or killing.”368
The booming voice knocked back the crowd, stopping them cold in their
tracks.369 They fell back stunned, suddenly motionless; time stood still for a
moment.370

Though the crowd stopped momentarily, Cameron was not yet safe. A
deputy and two assistants rushed him back into the jail and from there into
a car that snuck him out of town.371 For the next fifty hours Cameron had
no food or rest, fleeing to safety in another prison.372

From the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century more than three
thousand individuals were brutally murdered through lynching.373

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114 Creating the Paradigm

Cameron is the only known survivor of such an attempt.374 Although he
was innocent, Cameron served four years in prison before gradually re-
building his life.375 Many years later, Mary Ball, the woman who had ac-
cused the boys of rape, testified that, in fact, she had not been raped.376
More than sixty years later, in 1993, Indiana governor Evan Bayh granted
Cameron an official pardon.377

In other cases, where the violence was planned well in advance, specific
exemplars of black excellence were targeted, such as veterans, clergy, and
especially civil rights leaders, whose actions were designed to change state
and national laws and policies on discrimination and, thus, threatened
Jim Crow segregation in all its forms. On Christmas night, 1951, Harry
T. Moore, the head of the NAACP in Florida, and his wife were killed
in a bombing that destroyed their home in Mims, Florida.378 At the time,
Moore was leading an investigation stemming from an incident in which a
group of black men were accused of raping a white woman in Groveland,
Florida.379 At trial, the three defendants were found guilty.380 However, in
April of 1951, in a rare demonstration of judicial intervention, the Supreme
Court overturned two of the convictions and death sentences on grounds
that “Lake County’s method of jury selection had ‘discriminated against
the Negro race.’”381 The exonerated defendants’ claim to innocence, how-
ever, was ignored when they were shot by the local sheriff.382 He claimed
they were trying to escape—behavior that would be rather illogical for
a group whose conviction had just been overturned.383 Witness accounts
of the event affirmed that the sheriff shot without cause; evidence illus-
trated that it was highly unlikely that the two men were, in fact, trying to
escape.384 Moore spearheaded the investigation and, just months later, was
killed.385 The sheriff was never prosecuted.386

Conclusion

Woven through this rampant victimization, lynching, and exclusion, Jim
Crow laws provided the systematic framework that expanded the sepa-
ration of blacks and sustained the racial hierarchy. Black separation was
maintained through government policies in education and housing, which
perpetuated the physical separation of blacks and whites. The racial hierar-
chy was reinforced by preventing black advancements in virtually all walks
of life: employment, housing, education, military service, sports, and
business. The pervasive practice of separating blacks in these areas of life

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Preventing Black Excellence 115

directly increased the proliferation of notions of black inferiority. By the
early 1950s, the racial divide was rigidly maintained throughout the coun-
try by government enforcement and private acts. In this way, the second
pillar of the paradigm—separation of blacks—became firmly entrenched
in American society. The resulting long-term racial isolation made blacks
extremely susceptible to economic and political victimization.

As we have seen throughout this chapter, blacks were kept separate in
order to eliminate their competition with whites and to control the per-
ceived threat of their integration into society. Central to this method of
controlling blacks was the ruling in the Plessy case, introducing the harm-
ful “separate but equal” doctrine.387 This infamous case, in which the Su-
preme Court sanctioned segregation in public accommodations, resulted
in decades of blatant segregation of blacks in public settings. In this way,
the racial hierarchy was intensified and expanded, and segregation was
given a false patina of judicial legitimacy.

Separation intensified throughout this grim period of history. Govern-
ments segregated education to separate blacks and to continue subjugating
black labor to menial jobs. Segregated educational facilities were grossly
unequal, and on the average, black schools received half the funding of
white schools. Flagrant discrimination in housing saturated the United
States, both in the South and in the North, sustaining the paradigm of
black separation and white isolation. Such discrimination was legally sanc-
tioned in most states, by laws, such as the Virginia statute on racial compo-
sition, or by policy, such as the “Baltimore idea.”388 By 1910, Jim Crow laws
maintained black housing separation, even as blacks migrated out of south-
ern rural areas. The paradigm persisted despite efforts to reduce it: courts
invalidated housing segregation laws in 1917, but private racial covenants
maintained black separation; as courts invalidated racial covenants, white
flight maintained black separation. As a result, white isolation in housing
persisted even as Jim Crow laws were invalidated. Black separation and vic-
timization became more insidious, strengthening the paradigm. Gradual
improvements in court rulings had no impact because the paradigm was so
entrenched in the minds of individuals and the practices of society.

Throughout this period, government programs and societal practices
openly excluded blacks from economic and educational opportunities.
Whites refused to accept black inventions, unless they were attributed to
whites, as we saw in the case of Garrett Morgan.389 Whites took credit for
the work done by blacks, as we saw in the case of Alfred Blalock taking
credit for the discoveries made by Vivien Thomas.390 Blacks were excluded

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116 Creating the Paradigm

from educational opportunities, by law and by violence, as we saw in the
case of Lloyd Gaines.391 During a period when positive growth could have
been possible, victimization intensified. As victimization became ubiqui-
tous, the paradigm took its most evil incarnation: lynching was the ulti-
mate form of exclusion and violent victimization.

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