Race Man: The Rise and Fall of the "Fighting Editor," John Mitchell Jr

10. Jim Crow and Race Pride

CHAPTER TEN Jim Crow and Race Pride The early years of the twentieth century would have been a difficult period for Mitchell even had he not been contending with church fights and assertive women. Setbacks had come in such quick succession. The loss of his council seat in 1896 was followed by the fiasco of the Spanish-American War in 1898, the closing of the armory and the disbanding of the militia in 1899, his defeat in the council elections of 1900, disfranchisement and the four-months school provision in 1902, and the redrawing of the political map and the disappearance of Jackson Ward in 1904. Amid the turmoil he tried to keep his footing and maintain some perspective on what was happening. “Some of these white folks down here may be our best friends,” he noted, “but they have a very poor way of showing their friendship.”1 The early 1900s also brought new laws dedicated to the separation of the races in public transportation. Railway cars were segregated in Virginia in 1900, passenger steamboats in 1901, and Richmond streetcars in 1904. No matter how fervently Mitchell defended the right of black Baptists to separate themselves voluntarily, he never acquiesced in proscriptive segregation laws. Under the most difficult of circumstances, he tried to find some way to counter the spread of Jim Crow without provoking more repression. He was also eager to restore his standing in the community as an effective and resourceful leader and to repair the damage done to his reputation by the church conflict. The first Jim Crow law arrived in Virginia with surprising suddenness. On Christmas Eve, 1899, a “dirty, intoxicated negro” allegedly took a seat beside a white woman on a train traveling between Richmond and Petersburg and then refused to move. The Richmond Times publicized the incident and drew far-reaching conclusions that seemed strangely at variance with its earlier more moderate stance on the race issue. “God Almighty drew the color line,” said the Times, “and it cannot be obliterated.” The newspaper argued that segregation had to be applied in “every relation of Southern life.” John E. Epps, a white lawyer from Richmond, introduced a bill in the General Assembly requiring separate railroad cars for whites and blacks. As a concession to the railroad companies, he stipulated that in those cases where the traffic failed to warrant a separate car, a partition could be built within the car to divide the races.2 In the weeks that followed, tensions rose as whites debated the merits of the bill and reported case after case of black rowdiness on the trains. Mitchell’s editorials took on new urgency: “Let us make friends with as many white people as we can, colored men. The time is now at hand that we need their friendship. Yes, we need it badly.” He pleaded with male readers to keep their wounded feelings in their pockets and be polite to white passengers, no matter how much they were provoked. He ended his editorials with the refrain, “Let us have no ‘Jim Crow car’ law in Virginia!” Other than write editorials, however, there was little he could do. Giles B. Jackson led a delegation to the law office of John E. Epps, but even he seemed dispirited. “The colored people are generally submissive and are easily controlled by the white people,” he told Epps. “Why be scared of a Negro?” On January 25, 1900, a month after the incident on the Petersburg train, the Virginia Senate unanimously passed the separate-car bill, scheduled to take effect on July 1.3 Throughout Virginia blacks responded to the act with anguish and bitterness . One group living in a small settlement in eastern Virginia even began making plans to leave the state. “Some are disposing of their personal effects and real estate,” said the Times, and others are “visiting the members of their family to bid them a last farewell.” Closer to Richmond, in neighboring Chesterfield County, a white reporter discovered that in the small community of Dry Bridge, blacks were “a good deal excited over the passage of the separate -car bill.” They were “incensed” that they would have to ride in separate cars: “They declare that they will organize and band themselves together against the whites of their neighborhood. The men say they have their own stores and shops. They will not hire themselves out to the white people anymore , but will live of and...