African American History in the Lowcountry: Jim Crow

[Music] at the end of the diffusion plan in 1877 when the federal troops were removed from the southern state then the South started finagling with the Constitution with the laws 13th 14th amendment and that the Constitution convention of 1895 they had the understanding clause which meant that in order to vote not only did you have to pay 350 dollars tax but you had to be your poll tax and you had to be able to read and interpret the Constitution and as a result the voting strength of the black went from 100,000 down to 20,000 the fusion plan was what somebody act me with this an integration plan I said well I guess you could fall I guess you could call it that for a while or whatever to live the time at last but it Longley lasted as long as the whites felt that they needed it she was too black being in the majority the booty list it was advantageous to the white to accept the fusion plan the share power which meant that that guaranteed that they would have whites in some of the controlling positions but when it got to round and 1900 when they had put in the understanding clause and everything to the Constitution and this principle of the black booty had been reduced to wear white because panel and then they no longer felt that they needed the fusion plan and so they did away with it and then became the Jim Crow when we said Jim Crow what do we mean he started off as a mute song that they did they sang in programs the word Jim Crow but then it changed prior to Jim Crow the white folk whites and blacks had a correlation they had establish a coalition where they had strength and combating the elite wife who were controlling the government and then they started playing the race card indicating that the whites were not protecting white womanhood and Cobley said that whenever the Constitution come between me and the verses of the white women itself I say the hell with the Constitution so they started making laws that were advantageous to them they watered down that part of the Constitution that can said that you could vote everybody could vote and that you couldn't discriminate and you couldn't pass law to discriminate but then that interpretation of that law and what destroyed it they said that the law said the Constitution saying the state could not discriminate but not that any organization in the state can there were we don't want you in our organization and the Supreme Court stood behind and say yes say that law didn't say that blacks had to be in all organizations that lonely the state wasn't sponsoring it it was Constitution and so stain cameo Jim Cole law the Deaf the dumb and the blind were separated by color white nurses were forbidden to treat black male white teachers were forbidden to teach black students South Carolina me that a crime for black and white cotton mill workers to look out the same window Florida require Negro textbook and white textbook Oklahoma required separate but equal telephone booth y'all in segregated black and white prostitute Atlanta provided Jim Crow Bibles for black and white witnesses now if you think that that is extreme and you haven't been able to look at the Jim Crow laws that they were passed in the south during this period [Music] I want to give you a copy of the Jim Crow laws that were passed in the various state some of them will blow your mind but they were on the book and they were being in full and they were involved some of them are still on the book in some state they haven't gone back and look although segregation has been outlawed all these years they hadn't looked back to remove certain laws from the book a lot of kids did on and forced them but they're still on a lousy book but here's the listing of the Jim Crow laws that they were passed during this period in the various states that passed them what did blacks accomplish during the Reconstruction did they gain property yep they were able to gain some property it wasn't that much but it was more than they had and all of this came about expressed between 1867 Asian feminism because of the strength of the black booty in in Georgetown who made it an end percent of the Republicans were black Georgetown had the strength more than Berkeley County of DuPage County and a lot of time individuals are surprised about the population of the area in 1790 there were eight thousand eight hundred seven eight white york-style South Carolina 13,000 240 full black and 1860 there were three thousand thirteen whites in South Carolina but eighteen thousand two hundred and ninety two flex so you see because of the rice and the farming rice and cotton three years of sleeve the population in South Carolina group steadily which lets out numbering plate and whites did not come up to met the population of Georgetown's of black until 1940 today the population in Georgetown City is about fifty two percent black forty percent white in the county is just the opposite for those worthy smooth with the glory days of reconstruction and Georgetown from 1867 to 1900 there's a fairly constant number terms of black community while the white population really starts to jump the a later years in the last 1940s when you show there's almost double yeah what court that what was that that changes yeah blacks were migrating but if the same number is here are you saying the population and thought will increase but the percentage of blacks the defendant effect impaired to the white went I mean went down to the stage in South Carolina because the number a lot of kid when they finished high school they left [Music] number of them left they left and grew in the early years and that's why the business on Front Street went down so drastically from black because at the beginning of Rican overcome depression in nineteen twenty five to thirty in doing that they closed the business and the families all and went off [Music] now it's reversing every week you just spoken fine ones back home building on the regrettable thing is that a lot of those who left and went off less properly back here in a lot of cases didn't pay the tax and loss of robbed a some of them sold their property and some of those who want to come back home can't because their property has a soul and they're not able to buy property to live where they want but they're in reversing they're coming back for him in the Gymkhana Lance or they went from 30 days to 90 days to whatever to jail and in a lot of cases they went to more than that sometime a lot of bright red kills [Music] for lynched not moving off the sidewalk white when they came by are being disrespectful the way not saying yes ma'am my notes are those things that recorders to have happen in yourself yeah you could cost planning your red shirts and everything doing the part between 1867 1900 I mean it in 77 right after walking the roads rule here at South Carolina in those days was dreadful because you found black bodies men and women scattered all about and a lot of times there was no explanation of what happened how it happened but a lot of time it was because somebody has been smart aleck a puppeteer whatever you call museum I understand in New York City now with photographs of that period of time and they actually made post cuts of lynchings and all the people would gather almost like a pair of something lynching was a grand affair it was something like a holiday where individual came up that they had the program that's called Sankofa african-american museum on wheels by an Angela W Jennings she had it here when they I'm a star with here she had in our gymnasium where she had the picture you talk about a lynching killing whatnot that were recorded there are a number of individuals fighting against lynching but very little was done about it people talked about it and said it was wrong what very few people did anything about it there was one point in this history that a lot of people talk about and that involved Booker T Washington who became the spokesman for black the United States because he didn't he didn't press for social equality he wanted blacks to learn a trade be able to work be able to grow their vegetable or whatever they had and there feels better than the whites could and felt that that would solve the problem that B BT booze and others felt that North they couldn't have it all and didn't think didn't have any what they had failed to understand Booker T Washington was in Alabama Alabama they were being lynched day and night and he knew if he preached social equality of whites and Alabama he had Tuskegee Institute there with all of those likes to what it would bring I'm assuming so he he just worked on the other aspect of it and said that his social part would come later but he didn't deputy BT boos and a lot of others never got along on that matter because they felt that he should have gone for the whole whole and he did and he got to repetition and being spoken for the black for a long time that's what the property didn't like any other question all right thank you there's a classic difference between Du Bois and Booker T Washington they did not agree Booker T Washington is credited with having established industrial education and he said let down your buckets where you are wherever you are that is where you begin and that is what you begin to work with w eb do boy or du Bois or Du Bois and you hear it pronounced all of those different ways wanted the education of the talented tenth and it was very unfortunate that these men differed to the extent that they did and each sponsored a different kind of education for the newly freed me grow each of which was very necessary and each of which made a very definite contribution it's unfortunate that the boy became so very very disappointed in what America had to offer and in the last years of his life he married a negro woman who was an author Shirley Graham I remember was her name and they moved to Ghana and in his confusion he became a communist he became disappointed and that is where he died I had the I started say good fortune on one occasion when I was a student at NYU to be in a class with her son and he loved his stepfather and had great appreciation for him for the compassionate kind concerned man that he was unfortunately unfortunately when he died he was not an American in good standing with America he had become communist he was living in Ghana he and his wife but he made a very definite contribution in this tradition of black education started in what 1860 unified I thought I'd given on a list of black colleges and when they were intent overnight yes and if you go back and look from the eighteen hundred's own and a lot of cases those schools were organized by blacks mostly black preachers black churches whatnot in the beginning organized school but you see that's one thing that slaves came out of slavery with that belief that education would be there ruled out and they believed in school even in the south after eight after of civil war the parents would walk for five six seven ten miles to take their kids to make sure that they got in school any school now there was a time in South Carolina when the schools were integrated in certain places what they were blacks who prefer taking their kids to all-black school they felt that something they were missing something when they did but uh for a while schools were integrated until finally they little by little with the Jim Crow thing they just cut out completely now there's one thing that we must mention that we have not mentioned and that is that in the early education of the southern Negro the churches not Negro churches white churches all churches made very positive contributions in establishing schools pain college I'm remembering was a Methodist school supported by the Methodists white Methodists women more so than men went to these schools to work and to help educate the Negro the schools in South Carolina Benedict College Mars College were Baptist schools Allen University and what other yes work Methodists Allen is our talons they only one but really in time the support became black and white in the particular denominations the very first school established by any religious group in South Carolina was the Penn school established by the Quakers we've mentioned the fact that it was in that section that the Union Army first had victories and the people came in and on st. Helena Island they established the Penn center to educate the Negro and we must give credit to the men and women who made outstanding contributions of money and of self in the establishment of schools I'm thinking particularly of colleges but then there were also other schools that they established and that they staffed I had a professor he was a co work I'm not a professor he was a PhD from Wisconsin and when he went through his program he was perhaps the only me grow in know there was another he was in the same class with quarrels Benjamin quarrels that you read of as a historian but in this particular class he was the only Negro and the professor who was an authority on the south in lecturing said but in the early that in the days of slavery the whites found that they could control the negro by denying him education after the Civil War when the Negro was granted freedom they found that they could still control him if they permitted him to educate himself he said his head just burst open he said he had to jump up and run outside in the square because it was so true if you are ignorant and perpetuating the pattern of ignorance we don't have to worry about you so if you see what that professor said you begin to see the importance of the men and women who gave money and self to come into the South and help and begin with the education it was not unusual in some instances for children and parents to be in the same class they placed a great deal of importance on learning that all of the teachers that came to the South were not white some were Negro and one of them who came to the pen school and later married one of the Grimke brothers made a very outstanding contribution Charlotte fortune at the pen school but along this line of educating themselves in some instances they promoted after they established the church's Negro ministers to preach and in some places they did not where they permitted them to preach and this is during the period of slavery they didn't know enough to be a threat they couldn't even read the Bible and many and so you would see again this would be the perpetuation of ignorance but all this is in the matter of group control controlling this large Negro population and being able to neutralize it's possible leadership and then taking from them the vote I guess one of the things that we have not emphasized one of the other things that we have not emphasized is the many constitutions that were written in South Carolina after the war the first constitution that was written in order for South Carolina to be reconstructed into the Union established the same black codes that they had used in slavery the Radical Republicans in Congress refused to accept that no no these people must be freed and they must be given the vote and then they established that they could not come back into the Union except that they accepted the amendments that provided for that and then in the struggle to control as David his path has pointed out over a period of time not all at once but progressively they enacted the Jim Crow laws that put the newly freed Negro back in his quote place end of quote second-class citizen and to hold him there and then with the establishment of the Klu Klux Klan to intimidate them to scare the pants off him they are ignorant superstitious people that was a belief so then we'll play upon this superstition will dress up in white sheets and look like HAMP's they are scared of him people who are dead and come back in spirit and so they played upon that and intimidated them and incapacitated them but that was not true of all southerners and neither wasn't rule all Americans [Music] because if it had been the civil civil rights movement would not have succeeded to the extent that it did there are other people that we need to mention who perhaps are not South Carolinians but I'm thinking after the establishment of the Association for the Advancement of Negroes the early organizers of that group were not all Negroes they're people that we need to remember like Spingarn and like Mary Ovington who gave of themselves and who gave of their time and who worked with Dubois in the organization and in the spread of that particular organization are there any questions or any observations that you want to make oh I know what I was speaking of the Constitution's the one of the main provisions of those constitutions was that they provided for public education that was not true in the south prior to the Civil War the elite was educated but the poor whites in the south they really suffered and the scholars are beginning to address their attention to that and this was the group that began to come into prominence under the restrictions of the Constitution when the vote and participation in the newly established governments was taken away from the elite then the poor whites began to come in and to take office that would change the tone and it would change in some ways the philosophy but they lead was smart enough to come back and pit the poor whites who themselves in a way were newly freed against the newly freed Negros so that they did not come together and join forces and they are the people who have been pitted against each other in the south if you have been reared to think that you are superior and that's the only education you've had and there's a group over here that you have been taught is inferior and that you must disassociate yourself from that group they were just expressing the fruits of their education there were some people who felt differently but there were other people who themselves had been Mis educated and if you had been told that your great superiority was based on your whiteness you would go to all lengths to attempt to maintain that they believed I remember my husband told me once he was a student and had gone to a student conference and in our generation there were a number of conferences attempting to bring black and white together and at this conference he had been very friendly with a southern white girl who they were interested in the same things they wanted that we should all come together but when the conference was over and they were going home and the parents were coming to meet them she told him while I'm very sorry I cannot act as though I knew no you are I'm associated with you because my parents believe in racial superiority and I'm not strong enough to resist their belief I do not know you know we all get tested and we must recognize that we all get tested very deeply and you don't know what you are going to do until you are faced with a particular situation and neither do you know what other people are going to do now you can read in the books what people have done but to say oh I would never do that you would hope you would never do that [Music] you you

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Length: 37min 10sec (2230 seconds)

Published: Wed May 06 2020