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1. Stranger Than We Thought: Shifting Perspectives on Jim Crow's Career
- University of Georgia Press
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1 Stranger Than We Thought Shifting Perspectives on Jim Crow’s Career Writing in 1958, with the outcome of the Little Rock school integration crisis still hanging in the balance and the reenergized post–World War II crusade to recruit new industry to the South going great guns, Oberlin College sociologists George E. Simpson and Milton E. Yinger suggested that segregation could never “survive ” in an “industrial society.” The current unpleasantness down in Arkansas notwithstanding, “once a society has taken the road of industrialization,” they advised, “a whole series of changes begin to take place that undermine the foundation of the segregation system.” Two years later economist William H. Nicholls agreed that segregation and industrialization were mutually exclusive, but where Simpson and Yinger believed that the latter would win out, Nicholls argued that the South’s entrenched culture of racial discrimination could actually retard industrial expansion in the region . Therefore, Nicholls believed, white southerners must choose between “progress” and “tradition,” because “the South can persist in its socially irresponsible doctrine of racism only at the ultimate cost of tearing its whole economy down.”1 The contention that industrialization and urbanization are incompatible with rigid socioeconomic and political inequality has been disproved over several centuries and across several continents, but the American South presents a textbook example of how the forces of what we might call economic modernization may not only adapt to antidemocratic social and political institutions, such as segregation and disfranchisement, but actually help to perpetuate them. As we shall see, in the southern context of the late nineteenth century, 7 the appropriate question seemed to be not whether segregation could survive industrialization but whether industrialization could even proceed without segregation. Six years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, however, Nicholls explained that the white South’s still-resolute refusal to abandon segregation was typical of a “primitive rural folk society” where “laws . . . follow customs.” Here Nicholls reflected a prevailing historical and sociological vision in which the struggle against Jim Crow pitted the progressive statutes and institutions, or “stateways,” of a modern, urban-industrial society against the deeply rooted “folkways” of a backward, rural, and agricultural one.2 If old Mr. Webster is to be believed, “folkways” are “the ways of living and acting in a human group, built up without conscious design but serving as compelling guides of conduct.” Defined in this fashion, the term implies a broad and largely internalized consensus among the “folk” of a society on the appropriateness or necessity of certain forms of behavior that have been legitimized by a common group experience. The language employed here is actually attributed to turn-of-the-century sociologist William Graham Sumner, whose insistence that laws were no match for “ancient custom ” had evolved into a widely held popular and scholarly belief that “stateways cannot change folkways.” Expressed in what Sumner’s fellow sociologist Henry Franklin Giddings called a transcendent “consciousness of kind,” this belief in the immutability of folkways was reflected in the words of Justice Henry Billings Brown, whose 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson opinion upholding separate facilities for blacks and whites had noted that “legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts, or to abolish distinctions based on physical differences.”3 Nearly sixty years later, hailing the Brown decision’s invalidation of Plessy as good news for “all God’s chillun,” a New York Times editorial nonetheless cautioned that “[t]he folkways in Southern communities will have to be adapted to new conditions if white and 8 Chapter 1 [52.55.55.239] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 10:18 GMT) negro children, together with white and negro teachers, are to enjoy not only equal facilities but the same facilities in the same schools.” Although he did not share the Times’s enthusiasm for the Court’s ruling, the editor of the Cavalier Daily at the University of Virginia agreed that the decision was in conflict with long-standing southern custom: “To many people the decision is contrary to a way of life and violates the way they have thought since 1619.”4 Just a few months later students, faculty, and members of the Charlottesville community would hear a decidedly different message from C. Vann Woodward, a Johns Hopkins University historian who had prepared a research brief for the NAACP legal team that had argued the Brown case. In the James Richards Lectures delivered at the University of Virginia in the fall of 1954 and rushed into print the following spring...