Question

Explain how changes in the politics, economics, social factors

, and spread of violence affected the situation of blacks in the New South.

Answer 1

The need for a New South after Reconstruction was obvious. Southern states had lost prestige, property, and wealth during their failed insurrection. Before the war, the South had held the presidency for all but thirteen years and had consistently held a majority in Congress and on the Supreme Court. The cotton South was home to the twelve wealthiest counties in the country before the war. But defeat left the region in a state of despair. Thousands had died and the scars of loss were everywhere. Moreover, four million enslaved Americans had thrown off their chains. Slaves had represented the wealth and power of the South, and now they were free. Emancipation unsettled the southern social order. When Reconstruction governments attempted to grant freedpeople full citizenship rights, anxious whites struck back. From their fear, anger, and resentment they lashed out, not only in organized terrorist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan, but in political corruption, economic control, and violent intimidation.

Lynching was only the violent worst of the South’s racial world. Discrimination in employment and housing and the legal segregation of public and private life reflected the rise of a new Jim Crow South. So-called Jim Crow laws legalized what custom had long dictated. Southern states and municipalities began proscribing racial segregation in public places and private lives. Separate coach laws were some of the first such laws to appear, beginning in Tennessee in the 1880s. Soon, schools, stores, theaters, restaurants, bathrooms, and nearly every other part of public life were segregated. So too were social lives. The sin of racial mixing, critics said, had to be heavily guarded against. Marriage laws regulated against interracial couples and white men, ever anxious of relationships between black men and white women, passed miscegenation laws and justified lynching as an appropriate extra-legal tool to police the racial divide.

In politics, de facto limitations of black voting had suppressed black voters since Reconstruction. Whites stuffed ballot boxes, intimidated black voters with physical and economic threats, or bribed them with money and alcohol. And then, from roughly 1890-1908, southern states implemented de jure disfranchisement. States began passing laws that required voters to pass literacy tests (which were often judged arbitrarily) and pay poll taxes (which hit poor whites as well as poor blacks), effectively denying black men the franchise that was supposed to have been guaranteed by the fifteenth amendment. Those responsible for such laws posed as reformers and justified voting restrictions as for the public good, a way to clean up politics by purging corrupt African Americans from the voting rolls.