Consolidating Support for a Law “Incapable of Enforcement”: Segregation on Tennessee Streetcars, 1900–1930

On September 19, 1905, a Shelby County Criminal Court grand jury in Memphis, Tennessee, indicted Mary Morrison for violating the state’s recently enacted streetcar segregation statute. The indictment charged that ten days earlier, Morrison, an African American, had boarded a car of the Memphis Street Railway Company and refused to take a seat designated for “colored passengers.” Her trial, four months later, attracted attention throughout the state, with Tennessee’s white press—which described Morrison as “belonging to the society element of her race”—reporting that she had violated the law to test its constitutionality. After the court decided against Morrison and fined her the $25 penalty provided by the statute, she appealed. Though a number of whites feared her challenge would become streetcar segregation’s undoing, her suit was unsuccessful. The Tennessee Supreme Court upheld the new law in August 1906.¹

Morrison’s suit capped a seven-year period of legislative and judicial deliberation over streetcar segregation in Tennessee. After the court’s decision, racial separation on public conveyances outlasted streetcars as a fixture of life in the state. Taken as a means to explore Jim Crow more generally, Morrison v. State (1906) suggests an orderly expansion of segregation in Tennessee. As they had for schools, hospitals, and railroads, the state’s white legislators came to see racial separation aboard streetcars as necessary for “the comfort of the public”—an explanation the state supreme court accepted in its review of the law. Like those who participated in Morrison’s action as parties, jurists, and witnesses, Tennesseans supported or opposed the statute depending on their side of the color line. And streetcar conductors, given the authority under the law to enforce the statute, both could and dutifully did exercise that power.²

While the court’s opinion in Morrison might be taken as evidence of de jure segregation’s linear spread, it obscures a counternarrative of suppressed knowledge, political and legal calculations, and feigned enforcement that marked this turn-of-the-twentieth-century segregation fight. The legislators who passed, the jurists who upheld, and the white public who came to insist on streetcar segregation did so despite acknowledging problems they foresaw—or experienced—with racial separation on street railways. White Tennesseans approved of streetcar segregation over the objections of both street railway companies and African Americans, even as they admitted the impossibility of complying with its strictures. They devised strategies to avoid its requirements and made political compromises to lessen the consequences of noncompliance. They also recognized the poor fit between mainstream conceptions of bifurcated racial difference, on the one hand, and the range of faces they encountered daily, on the other. The counternarrative lurking behind Morrison reveals a white public acting not in ignorance of Jim Crow’s impracticality but in full knowledge of it, bringing into relief the chasm between cultural knowledge and political consensus during the period.

The fissures in Tennesseans’ embrace of racial separation aboard streetcars offer a window to consider what W. Fitzhugh Brundage has called the “exceptions, contradictions, and unintended consequences” that underlay segregation.³ Historiographical attention to such matters is largely a development of the last several decades. For nearly half a century, two questions drove the study of the post-Reconstruction South: when did the region turn to Jim Crow, and did that pivot owe more to legal codification or to a culture of racial separation that predated legal change?⁴ While that debate demonstrated Jim Crow’s contingency and continues to be productive, social and cultural historians in the 1990s turned their attention elsewhere.⁵ They uncovered, among other things, the relationship between sexual anxieties and Jim Crow’s enforcement, the contributions of black women in contesting segregation, and the efforts of white elites to use segregation to shore up the meaning of “whiteness.” These scholars also demonstrated that African Americans resisted racial separation in hitherto unacknowledged ways.⁶ What emerges from these studies is a complex, messy account in which competing motivations, timelines, and degrees...