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

Introduction: The Color Line and the Public Sphere

introduction the Color line and the Public Sphere W.E.B. Du Bois in the Souls of Black Folk concluded that “[t]he problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.” This quote would frame our understanding of the black experience in America for most of the twentieth century. It is curious that both he and Frederick Douglass, who first coined the term in 1881, imagined the race problem in geographic terms as a line both concrete and abstract that separated whites and blacks in the South after the Civil War. For Douglass this line served a specific function in pushing African Americans into a racially subordinate position as a subaltern caste. Douglass too pointed to the political implications of these actions when he concluded that “wild apprehensions are expressed lest six millions of this inferior race will somehow or other manage to rule over thirty-five millions of the superior race.” Decades later Du Bois asked the same question, “what are we going to tell the black voter in the South? Are we going to induce the best class of Negroes to take less and less interest in government, and to give up their right to take such an interest, without a protest?”1 2 \ To Render Invisible What both Du Bois and Douglass were keenly aware of was the relationship the color line had to civic participation and public life. In the same way the color line is a story of geography, it is also a story of blacks and the public sphere. The color line and the history of blacks in the public sphere in the post–Civil War South share a parallel story. This too was not lost on C. Vann Woodward who first assumed that racial segregation was born out of social patterns or customs from slavery, but realized that its origins were actually long removed from slavery. Instead Woodward and later Edward Ayers would echo the fact that racial segregation was a modern artifact of the New South landscape. Howard N. Rabinowitz, however, was the first historian to really connect the emergence of the color line to black agency and black action in the South. Rabinowitz concluded that Southern whites imposed Jim Crow due to blacks being politically assertive and contentious in public life.2 Du Bois was one of the first scholars to embrace this sentiment. Reconstruction was a lost opportunity for blacks and white Southerners. Government agencies, such as the Freedmen’s Bureau, and the resourcefulness of blacks in preparing for freedom through the building of schools, churches, and businesses fell victim to conservative white desires to push blacks out of the public sphere and into a state of second-class citizenship in the 1870s. To Du Bois the color line was not only a geographic construction of white supremacy, but also lived as a mental demarcation in the minds of African Americans—a phenomenon he referred to as the veil. The function of the color line for conservative whites in the South was not to remove blacks from public life in absolute terms, but to remove blacks from white public view that challenged Southern white perceptions of blacks as a race inherently inferior and socially unequal. Blacks who occupied subservient positions or who were outwardly deferential had a place within the white side of the color line. Blacks who were autonomous from white authority or who openly challenged white supremacy were considered a threat and thus were “out of place” within the white side of the color line.3 The physical and mental worlds of the color line existed as a cognitive dissonance to conservative white Southerners so that blacks who were “out of place” could be beyond view or invisible. The struggle for blacks to become visible to a majority population became a salient theme mined throughout the twentieth century by African American authors. Introduction: The Color Line and the Public Sphere \ 3 Celebrated writers such as Jean Toomer, Richard Wright, Nella Larsen, and Ralph Ellison fixated on the struggle for black men and women to be seen and heard as they truly were and not as whites perceived them through the filter of the color line. In some sense the racial tensions engendered during this period on both sides of the color line were precipitated by blacks making themselves “visible” to whites in public life.4 What we can conclude is that the...