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This introductory chapter begins with a description of Jim Crow reformers. Jim Crow reformers, along with others, played a significant role in shaping the political, economic, and social context in which both the civil rights movement and its counterpart, massive resistance, emerged. The policy successes and failures of Jim Crow reform examined in this book played a critical role in shaping the stage onto which history's actors would step. Southern reform and the shaping of American democracy, the Jim Crow order, and citizenship and the struggle for order and power are then discussed. An overview of the subsequent chapters is presented.

Southern liberalism has typically been identified with a small subset of white males. This identification has tended to ignore the southern black men and the southern women (black and white) who also played an important role during this period. One reason for this exclusion is rooted in the early tactics adopted by these white male reformers, many of whom believed that the white South would accept their findings only if those findings were from white male southerners. Although they were not happy with this logic, many black male reformers accepted this exclusion as the price to be paid for moving Jim Crow reform forward. Individual women played important roles in reform; however, their activities as a coherent, recognizable group were largely invisible or more likely simply ignored by white male southern reformers. Unfortunately later researchers have not recognized that the strategic exclusion or casual minimization of the participation of blacks and women from the record left by white male reformers does not mean that blacks and women were absent from the reform movement. This chapter explores how and why these racial and gender divisions in the Jim Crow reform movement emerged and points out how these divisions in turn shaped Jim Crow reform.

This chapter shows how the emergence of Jim Crow reform in the 1920s stimulated the emergence of what Jim Crow reformers would call the “golden age” of segregated education. In particular, the activities of northern foundations as well as the growing acceptance by many states of a minimal responsibility toward black public education led to this modernization of segregated education. This golden age rested on a mix of white paternalism, black pragmatism, and the institutionalization of state racial management structures.

This chapter shows how Jim Crow reformers used southern universities to create a new southern ideology of race relations and interracialism, which preached that reform inspired by social science coupled with mutual tolerance could create a harmoniously segregated order. Black colleges and universities would provide the middle-class leadership necessary to help govern a new vertical segregation, which would be more just for southern blacks but still secure for southern whites.

This chapter explores how southern African Americans' quest for social citizenship dovetailed with their renewed insistence on the restoration of their political citizenship. Education politics and the managed race relations of Jim Crow reform had created and sustained a dense network of organizations and institutions, including civic groups and voters' leagues, led by and for African Americans. The presence of these institutions and organizations did not presume unanimity; sharp disagreements remained within the African American community over tactics and goals.

This chapter traces the ending of Jim Crow reform during the late 1940s as the problem of regime maintenance became more transparent and the order become increasingly subjected not only to external challenges, but to internal challenges posed by the different layers of discordant and sometimes conflicting commitments, aims, and understandings that underlay the maintenance of the order's legitimacy and power. While Jim Crow reform was one of the results of this process of regime maintenance, it also contributed to its ending. The chapter provides an analytic conclusion to this work, discussing how political scientists and historians have analyzed this era in southern and American politics and how a rethinking of this era along the lines presented in this book can help scholars to understand the long and difficult road of democratic development.

This chapter traces some of the efforts of Jim Crow reformers to transform lynching from a heroic defense of white womanhood and white supremacy, into a manifestation of bad government and social disorder that threatened the stability of the Jim Crow order. It describes the founding and development of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC) to show how the anti-lynching campaign was central to the creation of Jim Crow reformers' identity and beliefs, and how they defined what order and stability meant in the Jim Crow South. Jim Crow reformers, including the journalists in their midst, used the power of the press as well as moral pressure targeted though organized networks of respectable white women in order to end mob violence and public disorder. They also attempted to change and strengthen stateways so as to shift power away from individuals and to the state, by encouraging growth in state police forces and by proposing new state anti-lynching laws.

This chapter explores how Jim Crow reformers, energized by the New Deal and with access to its resources, attempted to further centralize government power in a political order that was characterized by a pervasive localism and general hostility toward government power. Although southern New Dealers played an important role in pushing for state-level administrative reform, university-based reformers and northern foundations also played a critical and largely overlooked role in this attempt to reshape and modernize southern state government. Their awkward position as critics of the state as well as state functionaries reflected the contradictory position in which many reformers found themselves. In the end, reformers' attempts to reorient government power toward the needs of the South's have-nots faltered on the reformers' lack of political power and their inability as servants of the state to directly address issues of power and race.

This chapter explores the shaping of higher education for blacks by focusing on the role of Jim Crow reformers, foundations, individual whites, black educational leaders and administrators, and especially state government. At the heart of the struggle was the question of whether and how southern states could be encouraged or forced into supporting a system of genuinely separate and equal higher education for blacks in the South. Just as reformers sought to rationalize primary education in the South, they sought to create a similar pattern of rationalization and centralization of higher education. The goal of the General Education Board (GEB), for example, was the creation of an “orderly and comprehensive system” that was “territorially comprehensive, harmoniously related [and] individually complete.” This new system would “discourage unnecessary duplication and waste and encourage economy and efficiency.” In keeping with the emerging race relations model, black colleges and universities were an inevitable part of this new rationalization.

This chapter shows how the struggle to reshape the southern state would lead to a new struggle for political citizenship for whites. Guided by their belief that the root of the South's problems was economic inequality, southern New Dealers began a drive to re-enfranchise the South's whites through an attack on the poll tax. Though not the most fundamental problem of the South's variety of discriminatory voting practices, the poll tax was the one that was most widespread, and strategically it was the one that seemed to harm whites the most. Some reformers embraced poll tax reform as a reflection of white privilege that was wrongfully withheld; others saw it as the means to other ends. For many New Deal southern liberals the goal of poll tax reform was the enfranchisement of a huge pool of have-not whites, who in turn would “naturally” support New Deal-friendly politicians in their struggle against the South's conservative elites.

This chapter talks about the complex patterns of racial alliances that emerged during the Jim Crow era. It shows that, shaped by the interactions of a wide range of groups, the patterns and practices of white supremacy during the Jim Crow years varied from state to state, town to town, even neighborhood to neighborhood, and shifted over time in differing ways in all these locales. Within this new era of American racial politics, diminished but determined racially egalitarian actors, groups, and institutions remained important players in American politics, and over time new ones emerged. From their own efforts, aided by changes in a range of domestic and international circumstances, they would gradually grow more powerful through the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, especially during and after World War II.

This chapter brings together sites of assimilation and elimination, beginning with the imaginative bedrock of Jim Crow: the restroom doors and drinking fountains whose parallel alignment, derived from and reinforced by the sexual division, affords the illusion of a stable binary. The side-by-side arrangement also indulges the photographic fantasy of a neutral position. This chapter explores how that fantasy was betrayed by the association of specific racial labels and bodies. It tracks the evolution of perspectives along a historical axis from the 1930s through the 1960s and across the spectrum of subject positions occupied by the photographers. At stake in the depiction of Jim Crow signs for women were the boundaries of gender, destabilized through the juncture of race and waste, and renegotiated by the camera's extension of the visual frame to embrace contradictions and contiguities. The juxtaposition of front and rear with the lateral structure of gender was an especially disturbing feature of racial segregation's geography in the eyes of another observer.

This book examines the pervasive and tenacious and variously mediated web of racial signage that stretched across much of the United States for three-quarters of a century and which lagged several decades behind the actual practices of racial segregation. First appearing in the closing decades of the nineteenth century inside train cars and outside station doors, hundreds of thousands of Jim Crow signs spread, through the early decades of the twentieth century, sporadically up and down both coasts and across much of the Midwest. “Jim Crow” names a defining crux of American racial politics and culture. This book looks at how race has always been intertwined with space in the United States. It also discusses how Jim Crow signs were produced, reproduced, and made visible and invisible to distinctive viewing publics, focusing on questions of mediation and memory. Moreover, it addresses the material history of Jim Crow signs, their tangible forms, and circuits of transmission; the circulation of Jim Crow photographs; and issues of race and gender in Jim Crow signs.

This chapter examines the material history of Jim Crow signs, their tangible forms, and circuits of transmission. Tracing the signs' “biography” across the twentieth century, it discusses how, through whose agency, and in what material manifestations they appeared on, disappeared from, and reappeared in the United States. It places Jim Crow signs in conversation not with the intellectual history of the racial sign, but with other forms of public signage that bring into focus racial segregation's distinctive modes and spectrum of expression. In contrast to the standardization of commercial signage, Jim Crow's perversely populist production encouraged idiosyncratic and self-revealing forms of utterance that were especially apparent to the signs' primary addressees—and to their eventual preservers, collectors, and consumers. By juxtaposing two stages in the signs' life history—their production at the turn of the twentieth century and their reproduction at the turn of the twenty-first century, when an industry emerged to meet the growing demand for ownership, primarily among African Americans—this chapter explores how race has been configured through the signs' production and recirculation as commodities.

This chapter turns to photographic modes of reproduction and from historical to theoretical accounts of photography's role in the construction of racial meaning. It examines the verbal strategies through which Jim Crow signs recruited the authority of the logos to add race to the divisions of the social universe. It highlights the work of African American photographers and invokes Charles Sanders Peirce's differentiation among iconic, indexical, and symbolic signs to question photography's role as the iconic complement to logos. Despite the photograph's (iconic) resemblance to the things it represents, the camera registers traces (indices) of things that disrupt our mental image of the world. The reading of photography's symbolic signs draws by contrast from Roland Barthes, tweaked against his inclination to associate what he calls the rhetoric of the image with the dominant ideology. The chapter concludes by turning to the 2000 exhibition “Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present,” a massive retrospective of black photography.

Four men representing a pacifist human rights organization called the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and a civil rights organization that advocated the restoration of black rights through nonviolent protests were arrested on April 13, 1947, for breaking the laws imposed by Jim Crow transportation regarding passenger segregation. These men participated actively in the “Journey of Reconciliation”. Their aim was to examine the Supreme Court's decision and to see how this proved that the Jim Crow seating for interstate passengers was illicit. The Freedom Ride consisted of eight black men and eight white men, and the Journey made several developments for civil rights.

This chapter examines the complex inquiries posed by visual culture studies against the uses of the visual in the construction of cultural memory. It analyzes the pressures that have made Jim Crow signs available for scrutiny. Too offensive to enlist the aesthetic interest of northern photographers such as Walker Evans and too routine to capture the attention of Southern documentarians, the signs were surprisingly underdocumented and their representations underdisplayed. Several questions thus emerge: How and by whom has Jim Crow's visual record been produced? Where has it been lodged? And why has it registered so lightly in the public domain? How did the racial signs both elicit and evade the attention of photographers from diverse racial, ideological, and historical locations? This chapter also considers the conditions of production and publication that have made it possible to avoid encountering or conceptualizing these photographs as a coherent cultural archive, and how a few iconic images have come to fill the cultural void.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the segregation of the music business until the mid-1960s. It then looks at the development of a pro-integration discourse in the jazz world that mobilized the ideas of democracy, equality, and protest on its behalf; policies of the American Federation of Musicians (AFM); and desegregating the AFM. It presents the case of Nat King Cole, which illustrates the way that new standards of professional behavior for African American entertainers were articulated against the backdrop of the Brown decision and the Montgomery bus boycott.