Part two of our Jim Crow Virginia 1900-1945 begins with “Blue Laws and Black Codes” that focuses on Virginia law as a link between social and racial conflict and change. “Making Whiteness” discusses the culture of segregation imposed after racial progress in Reconstruction. “Separate and Unequal” discusses the connection between public school campaigns and racism 1901-1915.
The biographies of two very different black men of this period are brought to light in “Race Man” about the “Fighting Editor” John Mitchell Jr., and “Mr. Bojangles” describing Bill Robinson the renowned tap dance innovator.
Additional titles of interest may be found in this Black History Month at the blog series “African Americans in Antebellum Virginia”. Part One looks at the slaves themselves and the slave regime, Part Two considers both domestic slavery and the largest free black community, Part Three addresses resistance to slavery in both rebellion and escape, and Part Four represents family life and three biographies.
Blue Laws and Black Codes
Peter Wallenstein wrote Blue Laws and Black Codes: Conflict, Courts, and Change in Twentieth-Century Virginia in 2004. It is available on Kindle and online in paperback. It examines the law as a link between social and racial conflict and change from 1890 to 1970. The first three essays relate the social changes upheld by the Virginia State Courts involving the unpaid labor for road construction, Sunday closing laws and women choosing legal careers.
The next three essays focus on legal challenges to Virginia’s system of white supremacy. For these, Virginia courts upheld segregation into the 1960s, requiring plaintiffs to turn to the federal courts for relief. NAACP lawyers Oliver Hill and Samuel W. Tucker committed decades to challenging every aspect of Jim Crow discrimination. The Richmond sit-in movement contributed to integrating public places. Richard and Mildred Loving successfully challenged Virginia’s anti-miscegenation statute.
The last chapter looks at the ways political power is wielded and public policy effected. These related to the one-man-one-vote apportionment in state and local elections and abolition of the poll tax.
Learn more to buy “Blue Laws and Black Codes” at Amazon.com for your bookshelf.
Making Whiteness
Grace Elizabeth Hale wrote Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940. It is now available on Kindle and online new and used. Hale makes a cultural study of how white supremacy took hold in the South and then the United States between 1890 and 1940. The South was defined as “a white man’s country” and “whiteness came to stand for America. Earlier subordination of blacks in slavery was broken by economic and political advances during Reconstruction. The subsequent regime of segregation was not only a legal construct, it was a complete cultural system to subjugate blacks, especially among the rising black middle class and their potential for upward mobility in the South.
Blacks had to be made into a cultural “other” to answer white fears of black success. Modernization and mass consumer society only enabled black progress. The response of southern white leadership was to choose values of “whitenesss” over profit or efficiency. A ubiquitous narrative of the past that demonized black participation in the political and economic spheres was conjoined with dismissive marketing stereotypes of Aunt Jemima, black women domestics and misrepresentation extended to black disorderliness to justify lynching as a further definition of race and place.
Learn more to buy “Making Whiteness” at Amazon.com for your bookshelf.
Separate and Unequal
Louis R. Harlan wrote Separate and Unequal: Public School Campaigns and Racism in the Southern Seaboard States, 1901-1915 in 1958; it was reprinted in 2011. It is available on Kindle and in paperback new and used. Harlan studies a public educational movement in Virginia and Georgia with annual school terms of four months, and the Carolinas that had much shorter terms. Virginia’s great “May Campaign” is featured that produced marked improvements for white elementary and high schools, along with critiques of Virginia’s Governor Andrew Jackson Montague and other state leaders.
Harlan studies the relationship between the state racism and white supremacy of the period effecting policy that left black schools behind, never adding to their development anywhere near their proportionate due. Northern reformers underwriting the educational campaign aligned with local leaders to short-change blacks educationally. Supposedly a better educated white population would be more racially tolerant, but Harlan found no evidence of that hope being realized.
Learn more to buy “Separate and Unequal” at Amazon.com for your bookshelf.
*William A. Link wrote A Hard Country and a Lonely Place: Schooling, Society, and Reform in Rural Virginia, 1870-1920 in 1986. It is out of print but available online new and used. Learn more to buy “A Hard Country” at Amazon.com for your bookshelf.
Race Man
Ann Field Alexander wrote Race Man: the Rise and Fall of the “Fighting Editor,” John Mitchell Jr. in 2002. It is available on Kindle and online new and used. Even as Reconstruction began to fade with Virginia “Redeemed” by white Conservatives in 1883, the former school teacher John Mitchell Jr. was named editor of the newly established black newspaper Richmond Planet in 1884, a post he would retain until his death in 1929. From 1888 to 1896 he was elected to the Richmond City Council from the gerrymandered Jackson Ward.
Mitchel became know as the “Fighting Editor” for his resolute opposition to lynching and unfair court practices, being credited with Governor Fitzhugh Lee’s commuting the death sentence of a fifteen year old black accused of raping a white woman. Nevertheless, he did not cross the line that led crusader Ida B. Wells to be exiled to Chicago.
With black disenfranchisement from the 1902 Virginia Constitution, Mitchell turned to promote black economic independence, founding the Mechanic’s Savings Bank in 1902. Although he advocated for an unsuccessful Richmond trolley boycott for equal rights in 1904, Mitchell ran for governor in 1921 on the “Lily Black” Republican ticket.
Learn more to buy “Race Man” at Amazon.com for your bookshelf.
*Gertrude Woodruff Marlow wrote A Right Worthy Grand Mission: Maggie Lena Walker and the Quest for Black Economic Empowerment in 2003. It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “A Right Worthy Grand Mission” at Amazon.com for your bookshelf.
Mr. Bojangles
Jim Haskins and N.R. Mitgang wrote Mr. Bojangles: the Biography of Bill Robinson in 1988, and reprinted in 2013. It is available on Kindle and online new and used. Haskins and Mitgang place Bill Robinson as exemplar of the African American tap dance. From the 1920s to the 1940s at the height of his popularity, he was the most powerful and highly paid black performer. His life held many contradictions.
While he was able to make an impression in both white and black worlds, he was a resentful, angry man. A gambler who was known to flash the gun he always carried, he was also by turns generous, optimistic and charming. He famously directly confronted racial insults and pushed for actor’s rights against racial prejudice, but he also repeatedly took roles of a stereotyped self-demeaning black man.
Learn more to buy “Mr. Bojangles” at Amazon.com for your bookshelf.
For more book reviews at TheVirginiaHistorian.com in this historical era addressing other topics, see the webpage for Gilded Age, New South, Civil Rights, New Dominion (1889-present). General surveys of Virginia History can be found at Virginia History Surveys. Other Virginia history divided by topics and time periods can be found at the webpage Books and Reviews.