Reckoning with Race. Gene Dattel
had been responsible for sustaining “a prejudice against negroes . . . which without it would have gradually died out.” The newspaper proposed “self-help and reliance.” It suggested that blacks follow the leadership of “eminent leaders of the white race in the South.”
Other racial landmark cases continued to flow from appointments to the Supreme Court by the anti-slavery Republican Party. In 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson formally enshrined racial segregation in public accommodations, provided that the facilities were separate but equal. The decision was quickly interpreted as applying to all aspects of American life, including schools.
A man defined as black, Homer Plessy, had been arrested for violating a state law by sitting in the “white section” of a New Orleans train. According to Louisiana’s definition of “black,” Plessy qualified. He was an octoroon—a person whose parentage was one-eighth black. (The court agreed that a state could determine who was black.) Plessy died in obscurity in 1925, but his name resonates in American history.
The Plessy opinion was written by Judge Henry B. Brown, an appointee of Republican president Benjamin Harrison. Brown wrote that “separation of the two races,” in and of itself, did not convey a “badge of inferiority” upon blacks.
If the two races are to meet upon terms of social equality, it must be the result of . . . a mutual appreciation of each other’s merits and voluntary consent. . . . If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution . . . cannot put them on the same plane.
Therefore the states were free to legislate separation. In the seven-to-one decision, Justice John Marshall Harlan, a former slaveholder from Kentucky, is given credit for his dissent, in which he said the “Constitution is color-blind.” No attention is given to Justice Harlan’s authorship of the opinion in Cumming v. School Board of Richmond, County, Georgia (1899), which allowed unequal funding for black schools. Plessy was finally overturned by Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which held that segregation is inherently unequal. (By 2016, however, de facto and self-segregation were present in every aspect of American life.)
The final nail in the coffin of black suffrage, it could be argued, was the 1898 Supreme Court decision in Williams v. Mississippi, which upheld Mississippi’s 1890 constitution that had effectively disfranchised blacks. The consequences of that constitution were striking. In 1880, 110,113 whites and 130,606 blacks were registered to vote in Mississippi. In 1896, 108,998 whites and 16,234 blacks could vote in the state. In its consideration of the constitutionality of Mississippi’s law, the court’s opinion was written by Justice Joseph McKenna, an appointee of Republican President William McKinley.
Was political or economic power more important for the freedmen? The question resonates in the twenty-first century, when blacks have political power but still lack broad representation in the private sector of the economy. Could a separate black economy prosper in American society where racial separation, both North and South, was deeply embedded? The controversy between two major black leaders, Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) and W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), centers on the correct approach to black success in America and remains enormously relevant. Both Washington and Du Bois recognized that blacks were confined to the South; neither forecast the Great Migration north that began during World War I.
Booker T. Washington, born into slavery and educated at the vocational Hampton Institute in Virginia, had experienced physical labor. He was an apostle of self-help, racial pride, racial self-sufficiency, vocational training, and the prioritizing of economic over political goals. In 1881 Washington founded the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, a vocational institution that derived its plan from the Hampton Institute. He was the most visible and important black leader of his time, a recognition crowned by the famous invitation from President Theodore Roosevelt to dine at the White House.
Washington rose to national prominence when he spoke at the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta on September 18, 1895. There he paraphrased Rutherford Hayes, who had dismissed social equality with whites as a goal for blacks. “In all things that are purely social,” Washington declared, “we can be separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”
“[N]o race can prosper,” said Washington, “until it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.” He recommended preparation in agriculture, mechanics, commerce, domestic service, and in the professions—a recognition of the obvious geographic and vocational restrictions placed on blacks. Respect, Washington believed, would come only with economic success: “No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized.”
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