The Reconstruction Era Part V The Legacy of Reconstruction

Political Alignments

Republican policies made the South virtually a one-party region.

The so-called “Solid South” voted almost exclusively Democratic for the next hundred years. (Until the Civil Rights Laws of the 1960’s turned it solidly Republican)

Economic Changes

Most blacks and many whites could not afford to buy land of their own, so a new form of farming became the basis for the Southern agricultural economy: sharecropping.

The plantation system was replaced by tenant farmers, who provided their own seeds, mules, and provisions.

Under sharecropping, the farmer farmed land owned by someone else, and the two shared the profits.

The landlord gave them a piece of land to farm, and in return he received a certain share of the tenant farmer’s crop.

The system kept blacks in economic bondage, though they were legally free.

In most cases, the sharecropper had to borrow money to make ends meet until the next crop was harvested.

This borrowing left him with so little when the crop was harvested that he had to borrow on the next crop.

Thus, many sharecroppers, both black and white, became virtual slaves to debt.

The sharecropping system was dominant in many parts of the South The sharecropping system was dominant in many parts of the South. In 1868, perhaps one-third of the area’s farms were tended by renters. By 1900, that percentage grew to about 70 percent.

The system, coupled with low cotton prices and the ravages of the boll weevil, virtually guaranteed that few farmers could become successful, no matter how hard they worked.

Jim Crow Laws and Disenfranchisement

By the 1890’s, the South passed Jim Crow laws, which established the segregation of public facilities.

"Come listen all you galls and boys, I'm going to sing a little song, My name is Jim Crow. Weel about and turn about and do jis so, Eb'ry time I weel about I jump Jim Crow."

These words are from the song, "Jim Crow," as it appeared in sheet music written by Thomas Dartmouth "Daddy" Rice. Rice, a struggling "actor" (he did short solo skits between play scenes) at the Park Theater in New York, happened upon a black person singing the above song -- some accounts say it was an old black slave who walked with difficulty, others say it was a ragged black stable boy. Whether modeled on an old man or a young boy we will never know, but we know that in 1828 Rice appeared on stage as "Jim Crow" -- an exaggerated, highly stereotypical black character.

Rice, a white man, was one of the first performers to wear blackface makeup -- his skin was darkened with burnt cork. His Jim Crow song-and-dance routine was an astounding success that took him from Louisville to Cincinnati to Pittsburgh to Philadelphia and finally to New York in 1832. He also performed to great acclaim in London and Dublin. By then "Jim Crow" was a stock character in minstrel shows, along with counterparts Jim Dandy and Zip Coon. Rice's subsequent blackface characters were Sambos, Coons, and Dandies. White audiences were receptive to the portrayals of blacks as singing, dancing, grinning fools.

By 1838, the term "Jim Crow" was being used as a collective racial epithet for blacks, not as offensive as nigger, but similar to coon or darkie. The popularity of minstrel shows clearly aided the spread of Jim Crow as a racial slur. This use of the term only lasted half a century. By the end of the 19th century, the words Jim Crow were less likely to be used to derisively describe blacks; instead, the phrase Jim Crow was being used to describe laws and customs which oppressed blacks.

Through the use of the literacy test, poll tax, and grandfather clause (which exempted whites from the literacy test), southern states also made it difficult or impossible for African Americans to vote.

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

Homer Plessy, a black citizen from Louisiana, sued a railroad company for not allowing him to sit in a section restricted to whites.

The Supreme Court ruled that the “separate but equal” facilities provided by the railroad were constitutional and did not violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

The Supreme Court’s decision legalized segregation for nearly sixty years.