Delta Fragments: The Recollections of a Sharecropper's Son

The Color Line

The Color Line To live anywhere in the world of a.d. 1955 and be against equality because of race or color, is like living in Alaska and being against snow. William Faulkner, address to the Southern Historical Association The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk W. E. B. Du Bois wrote more than a century ago that in most American cities you’d find nine-tenths of blacks separated from nine-tenths of whites by a color line. Still evident to a large degree today, this line was a tangible partition between the races, which separated them in all aspects of social, political, and religious life. In one city it might be a creek, in another a street, and in still another a railroad track. But whatever it might be, it was a clear demarcation separating two worlds: those within and those outside the veil. Originally intended to regulate the relationship and conduct between blacks and whites after slavery, the color line has, in more recent times in the Delta, become the single greatest stumbling block to racial harmony and genuine progress. This doctrine was given official sanction in the Supreme Court case Plessy v. ferguson in 1896. On the short train ride from New Orleans to Covington , Louisiana, Homer Plessy, who was one-eighth black and seven-eighths The Color Line 146 white, sat in the car reserved for whites. In so doing, he violated the 1890 Louisiana Railways Accommodations Act, which stipulated that white and black passengers should sit in separate compartments.1 Only those blacks who were clearly serving white passengers, such as nurses and personal maids, were permitted to sit in the white section. Plessy’s attorneys argued, with no success, that this law violated rights granted to him under the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. The court held that it was indeed reasonable to separate black and white passengers and that such laws contravened neither of the two constitutional amendments.2 The court thus institutionalized the doctrine of “separate but equal” under which this nation operated for well over fifty years. Booker T. Washington, a year earlier in 1895, had assured whites in his famous Atlanta Exposition address that blacks would not clamor for social and political equality and that he would do what he could to persuade his people of the folly of such agitation. Wasn’t it better to have the opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory than to spend a dollar in an opera house? He thus concluded that blacks and whites could be “as separate as the fingers” in social and political matters, “yet one as the hand” in economic matters that would benefit both races. W. E. B. Du Bois, who had earlier penned a note to Washington commending him for the eloquence of his words in Atlanta, would by 1903 see this compromise as something of a Faustian bargain. Had Washington given away too much in his effort to assure blacks a fair share of the country’s economic pie? Furthermore , Du Bois and some others wondered whether whites had fastened their attention more on the separate fingers than on the single hand in Washington’s paradigm. It became painfully obvious that in the period preceding the Great Depression, southern blacks didn’t benefit nearly as much as their white neighbors did in the cotton economy.3 Throughout Mississippi and in the Delta in particular, enforced segregation not only embarrassed blacks and relegated them to an inferior status, it also embarrassed the entire state and prevented it from taking full advantage of its rich resources and talents. Reviewing a few well-known examples may help prove the point. The state spent untold millions creating a dual educational system for blacks and whites because of the perceived necessity to keep the races separate. This resulted not only in black grade schools and black high schools but black colleges as well.4 Thus, limited resources for education became even more strained, which may be partly responsible for Mississippi ranking near the bottom in terms of literacy and the overall educational level of its citizens. 147 The Color Line Education is but one example of how forced segregation proved costly, embarrassing, and absurd. In periods of national and regional crises, the state found its efforts to offer relief to all its citizens...