To Render Invisible: Jim Crow and Public Life in New South Jacksonville

5. Representations of Private Spaces

5 representations of Private Spaces The move to push African Americans out of the public sphere had a direct impact on the ways in which private and public spaces were produced. Henri Lefebvre identified spaces that transmit the meaning of social relations and are tied to the “order” that imposes those social relations as “representations of space.” Racial segregation was an example of “representations of space.” Racially segregated spaces—whether public or private or through de facto or de jure means—was a way to embed white supremacy and the everyday practice of racial difference throughout Southern society. Not only did these spaces encode racial difference, but as David Harvey notes, these spaces were produced as a means to keep the subaltern or populations on the margins “in their place.” As such, these spaces were also loci for not only contestation but also a publically engaged discourse on the segmentation of Southern society. Although white Southern politicians and policymakers conceived of Jim Crow segregation as a way to encode and enforce racial difference, it also brought 70 \ To Render Invisible a formal end to democratized space introduced by both Northern whites and blacks during Reconstruction.1 The attempt to segregate spaces can be divided into two categories: private and public spaces. Private spaces such as schools and churches began to racially segregate as a voluntary effort at the end of Reconstruction. As Howard N. Rabinowitz observed, while not an absolute, blacks in the South preferred churches of their own that would demonstrate autonomy from white control.2 However, schools were different. As the state took interest in the private spaces of the classrooms, it pitted Northern missionaries against state lawmakers and brought an end to democratized private spaces throughout the city. It also pushed Northern whites and their descendants across the color line, eventually leaving black leaders and activists alone to address the political implications of Jim Crow on the limits of black citizenship. The social construction of separate racial spaces that evolved into Jim Crow segregation would happen slowly over time. The first statewide attempt to legally reconstruct space after Reconstruction occurred with the passage of two pieces of legislation in the spring of 1881, which targeted the private spaces by making it illegal for blacks and whites to marry. In fact, it went so far as to legally define blackness as one-eighth black blood and carried much stiffer penalties to white men marrying black women to prohibit “black” children from inheriting historically white land and property. Additionally it punished white men who violated their mythic role as the paternal figures of blacks. The debate over interracial marriage would even be reinforced in the 1885 Florida Constitution. The ways in which this legislation was a means to cast blacks in racial and gender terms, as both less than whites and less than men, was not lost on blacks themselves. Thomas V. Gibbs decried that lawmakers gave license to white women to engage in sexual liaisons with black men outside of marriage, but only enforced these racial marital prohibitions exclusively toward black men.3 Locally, integrated schools and churches would not last long. Their evolution as racially segregated spaces was initially voluntary and not state mandated. In 1876, one Northern visitor wrote a letter to the Florida Times-Union describing several white tourists attending a fundraiser in the black suburb of La Villa for the opening of the local AME Church.4 As integrated as this space was, it represented more an aberration in church attendance than a rule by this point in time. Additionally, since these Representations of Private Spaces \ 71 white visitors were guests and not members of the church, their presence in a black church did not raise concern with local whites. In December 1875, Margaret E. Winslow a New York temperance activist and visitor to the city, noticed racially segregated churches by voluntary association. In a letter to Zion’s Herald and Wesleyan Journal, she explained: There can be no mixing of the two races. The whites do not desire the presence of their colored brethren, and the negroes do not desire it. They prefer to take care of themselves, spiritually, socially and politically.5 However, according to Winslow, the color line in spiritual gatherings was sometimes fluid. In a subsequent letter she noticed that blacks and whites stood in the rain together for an hour in front of Metropolitan Hall to hear...