A Defense of Jim Crow and the South

“And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.”

Acts 17:26, KJV

The foremost artificial sin Dixie remains guilty of committing stands as the Jim Crow era. While Antebellum slavery receives unremitting condemnation, Southern segregation holds the crown jewel of Dixian sins, often painted as the nadir of race relations in North America. Very little apologetics were written in defense of Jim Crow, unlike the Antebellum South and the Confederate cause, and even the most ardent of pro-Southern and neo-Confederate sympathizers often refuse to address the era, going so far as to even adopt the current neo-abolitionist historiography. Aside from American historians, and the media, waxing poetically about the struggles of the Civil Rights movement and its leaders’ fight against systemic racism in Dixie during the 1950s and 1960s, many Southerners simply lack the intestinal fortitude to address the fallacies within the leftist narrative or to seek vindication of the Southern segregationists of old, despite those segregationists often comprising the brunt of the utmost superlative statesmen Dixie produced following the War Between the States. However, upon further research, it is quite possible, though difficult in many respects, to find a number of buried sources in which segregation is defended and justified. This essay will seek to provide a legal, social, and Christian justification for and explanation of how Jim Crow laws produced a superior society for both Caucasian and Negro Southerners, as well as, discussing the means through which they may be used to reform contemporary Southern society.

To give pretext to this extensive topic, a bit of history is required. The origin of Jim Crow Laws are murkier and less clear than commonly purported. Whereas a handful of instances which occurred allow for the pinpointing of the Jim Crow era’s official, or de jure, beginning, confusion mires the questions of “why” and “how” it began, a far more convoluted origin than the simplistic neo-abolitionist view of history.

Segregation began de facto in some areas during Reconstruction. On a case-by-case basis, Radicals sought to forcibly integrate numerous areas, and Lowland Southerners’ intimate, paternalistic pre-War lifestyles allowed for a greater degree of social interaction between the races. However, that paternalism did not prevent Southerners from holding the same social beliefs as they had prior to 1865; additionally, poor Whites assiduously disliked interactions with Negroes. All classes of Whites loathed living under Radical and Negro rule, with the former oppressing Southerners and engaging in superfluous corruption and the latter committing wonton crime, as well as, flocking to abrasive militia organizations.²⁰

With the Compromise of 1877 came the end of Reconstruction and the ousting of the Republican regime. The Redeemer Democrats often ran on pro-White platforms and promises of restoring social order. While these promises won them control of Dixie at this time, only a few, including Governors Wade Hampton III of South Carolina and Francis Nicholls of Louisiana, actually upheld their promises and led generally unobjectionable gubernatorial tenures, concentrated primarily in the first few years after Reconstruction’s end.²⁰ Order was quickly restored, but the Democrats were no longer constituted of the same preeminent folk which constituted the Jacksonian, and few remaining Jeffersonian, Democrats of before the War Between the States. The Southern aristocracy had been rendered all but extinct by the War’s end due to exile, destruction of their plantations and property, death from starvation and illness, without children because of their sons’ service in the Confederate military or their daughters falling victim to collateral damage, and the ravages of military invasion and occupation. The replacements to these men were often second sons, businessmen, lawyers, middle managers, and other second-rate individuals, failing to bear the torch of leadership their predecessors had done. This dominant faction of the Southern Democrats came to be known as the “conservatives” and “Bourbons.”⁴

This new generation of Southern politicians were more business oriented than the Planters, focusing on industry, railroads, urban expansion, and financial gains to the detriment of the still mostly rural Southern population. Taking this into account, it was quite beneficial for them politically to make claims of supporting Negroes, who flocked to urban areas following their emancipation. All but excommunicating working-class Whites from the base of the Democratic Party, conservatives cast aside the demographic they utilized to Redeem Dixie and began to cater to Freedmen. This created an interesting social dichotomy with three primary philosophies which competed against each other in the 1880s and 1890s.²⁰

De facto segregation ebbed and flowed following Reconstruction. Multiple philosophies formed to address the race issue. Conservatives were moderates and often promoted social policies of paternalism, often via ostentatious means and consisted of a few of the remaining Planters as well as new upper classes of Whites. There was a faction of liberal Whites who believed in the absolute idea of Negro suffrage and equity among the races and spread across all socio-economic classes. Lastly were the hardline racialists, or segregationists, and were typically constituted of the aforementioned rural, working-class Whites.²⁰

The belligerent feelings between these factions catalyzed during the 1880s, as the original Redeemer governors began leaving office. At approximately the same point, the indigent rural population grew weary of the corruption brewing within the conservative Democratic ruling faction, and they opted to form various populist Farmer’s Alliances, ultimately creating the Populist Party. Drawing in poor Whites and Negroes, the Populists worked diligently to unify the two races and quell animosity between the two demographics which historically loathed each other and directly competed with each other in correlation with a series of devastating depressions which hit throughout the 1880s and 1890s. However, this was all for naught. The Populist Party in the South collapsed earlier than its counterparts in the West due to infighting and the conservatives’ strategic use of Negro votes to crush upstarting White populists.²⁰

Yet, the conservatives failed to firmly grasp the reins of power indefinitely. These depressions, rising corruption, circumvention of White votes, and neglect of rural interests would be their undoing and weaken them severely, especially as the Negroes became more apathetic towards voting. Segregationist populists and left-wing populists continued to strengthen, encroach upon the conservatives’ power, and successfully takeover swathes of the Southern Democratic Party; consequently, conservatives were left standing at a fork in the road. ^19,20

Whether capitulating so as to preserve what power they still held or being voted out of office entirely, the conservatives gave in, state-by-state, to the tidal wave of Jim Crowism spreading across Dixie. In 1890, Governor John Marshall Stone, a former Confederate officer serving his second non-consecutive term whose first term was that of Mississippi’s Redeemer governor, presided over the ratification of the new Mississippi Jim Crow constitution. Beginning the movement known as the Mississippi Plan, segregationist constitutions and laws began slowly manifesting in the South until 1896.^19,20

Also in 1890, Benjamin Tillman seized the reins of power in South Carolina and became the Palmetto State’s governor. The former Confederate soldier was a firebrand mouthpiece of White agrarian populism, and Tillman spearheaded a vicious campaign against the South Carolina conservatives, loathing them for casting him aside after he led the Red Shirts to win Wade Hampton’s III governorship in the 1876 gubernatorial election. Tillman pushed for and successfully presided over a new Jim Crow South Carolina constitution in 1895. The uproar caused by its ratification brought a case to the Supreme Court, the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson, in 1896 after which a slew of Jim Crow constitutions were drafted and ratified between then and 1910. The era of de jure segregation had truly begun, with the additional factor that White populism became a mainstay of Southern politics. According to Mississippi Governor James Vardaman, in 1890 a member of the Mississippi Constitutional Convention, “There is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter…. Mississippi’s constitutional convention of 1890 was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the nigger from politics. Not the ‘ignorant and vicious’, as some of the apologists would have you believe, but the nigger…. Let the world know it just as it is…. In Mississippi we have in our constitution legislated against the racial peculiarities of the Negro…. When that device fails, we will resort to something else.” This statement, along with his catering to the White working class in Mississippi throughout his political career in the Mississippi House of Representative, governorship, and U.S. Senate, and the later governorships of Theodore Bilbo in Mississippi and Ben Tillman in South Carolina, only serve to solidify the patent fact that segregation formed as a product of the woes of the White working class and not a means of rich White Southerners to suppress Negro votes, as is often commonly claimed.²⁰

Having established the caliginous background of the laws, the Jim Crow era violated nothing within the constitutional framework and easily held the status of legal justification. Multitudinous works, book and essay, presented and expounded upon this argument throughout the 20th century, only being suppressed and swept away by modern historians. Simply stated, the Jim Crow laws complied with America’s constitutional framework. Generally speaking, Jim Crow required a poll tax and literacy in order to vote, effectively disqualifying a majority of Negroes and many poor Whites. However, this did not restrict voting based on racial status, adhering to the regulations established in the 15th Amendment; Congress simply passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 anyway. Social segregation was further dismantled via malicious misinterpretation of the 14th Amendment in the Brown v Board of Education decision, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, none of which actually held any constitutional validity upon inspection of the amendments in question. The last of the landmark Civil Rights bills came about in 1968, with the Fair Housing Act, preventing Whites from setting up their own communities and towns in direct violation of the 1st Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of association.^2,15,18

The segregationists vehemently asserted the claim that communist factions, or sympathizers, fomented, catalyzed, and financed integration. In this they were not wrong, often utilizing the argument as a primary means of context and giving further validity to the arguments utilized in this essay.^{1,11,14,17,18} According to Herman Talmadge, the NAACP, Southern Regional Council, Southern Negro Youth Conference, and other such organizations teamed with communists. In his book You and Segregation, Talmadge listed Dr. George S. Mitchell, Paul Robeson, James E. Jackson Jr., Howard Fast, Dr. Max Yergen, and Louis Burnham as a few notable examples. Dr. Mitchell was affiliated with the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, a notorious communist front group prosecuted by the House unAmerican Activities Committee, and which worked extensively with the NAACP prior to the former’s disbandment in 1948. Also, Louis Burnham was at one point the organizational secretary of SNYC while also the vice president of American Youth for Democracy, also known as the Young Communist League.¹⁸ Furthermore, the Left has even admitted to and praised communists’ involvement in the Civil Rights movement, in some cases even giving them credit for starting it.^5,12,13

Being fully within the legal bounds of the United States Constitution, the social benefits of the era are easily quantifiable. The social implications, and subsequent consequences, of integration were dire and overturned a multi-generational establishment of customs. The fallout from these tyrannical, communist, anti-Christian, anti-Southern pieces of legislation carried with it the permanent degradation and destruction of American, and especially Southern, society in both the short term and long term. The Civil Rights legislation of 1964,1965, and 1968 as well as the Brown v. Board ruling and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society welfare program utterly decimated Negro communities. Now in direct competition with all Whites, Negroes found themselves and their businesses collapsing when confronted with the new White markets, and welfare expansion crushed any incentive they once held for work ethic and familial stability. Furthermore, the Fair Housing Act of 1968 caused the mass phenomenon known as “White Flight” to drain cities and townships of financial stability in order to recreate all White communities they no longer could legally have. Southern cities quickly collapsed thereafter and became consumed with crime.^6,8,9,10 Lastly, the Immigration Act of 1965 created the scenario of Negroes having to directly compete with the unremitting flow of Hispanic immigrants into America, forcing the former into a position of competition on all fronts in the trades and agricultural fields they once thrived in. Even Herman Talmadge lamented the collapse in employment of Negro school teachers following the Brown v. Board ruling.¹⁸

The effect these political moves imposed on White Southerners carried an even greater reprehensible nature. No longer legally allowed to maintain their own clubs, schools, communities, or even politics, Southern Whites’ relationship with the Negroes soured immensely. Since the politics Whites controlled became tainted with the votes of lesser qualified, malicious groups brainwashed with communistic delusions of grandeur, Southern politicians turned on their own kinfolk after a generation, engaging in a modern Reconstruction which has not ceased since the 1990s. With no positive political representation, difficulty in residing within Southern cities, and a relentless assault on Southern culture and history within the education system and media, as well as, increasing rates of miscegenation, Southerners’ future appears quite bleak.

As a brief note, industrialization of Dixie arose concurrently and correlated with integrationist movements of the 1950s and 1960s. Urban life never truly benefitted the Negroes. As with integration of the labor force, urbanity placed Negroes in direct competition with Whites, and the latter generally responded with hostility. Blacks usually thrived more comfortably in rural areas, in agricultural work, and in trade skills. Urban industrial work brought with it associations with communist groups, modernized promises of “40 acres and a mule,” and the false hope of Civil Rights activism, none of which brought positive change to the Negro life. Robert Penn Warren discussed the negatives of industrial living for blacks, emphasizing the positives of rural living and their thriving within agricultural and trade work.³ This phenomenon remains an overlooked aspect of Negro history and neglected discussion of the negative consequences of their movement from rural to urban environments.

A cursory assessment of Jim Crow illuminates the fact numerous, if not most, segregationists utilized the Holy Bible to support their claims, a prime example being Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett’s status as a Baptist Sunday School teacher.^1,7,16 Further inquiry proves their beliefs true. Utilizing multiple verses and passages, Jim Crowism patently fails to fit within the modern accusations of Southern sins. The Old Testament remains filled to the brim with verses and laws discussing the separation of the Hebrews from other peoples, and the New Testament discusses in Acts 17:26 how the Lord separated human groups into different homelands and Revelation 7:9 describing John’s vision of countless unique nations and languages standing before God’s throne. Revelation also details the antichrist’s goal to establish a one world government with a one world language, flying in the face of modern, open border, miscegenation pursuing globalism. However, the most damning piece of evidence opposed to integration and amalgamation of the races exists in Genesis, in the first book of the Holy Bible. This passage gravely chronicles the story of the Tower of Babel. In this bit of Biblical history, God deliberately separated the humans living within that ancient metropolitan city so as to prevent them from creating a singular language, culture, and nation, disobeying His command to spread throughout Earth and multiply within their own lands. At no point in Christ’s ministry or in the Great Commission does the Bible purport the idea of endless mixing and destruction of cultures but to spread the Gospel to all peoples, two very different ideas. The segregationists were more than biblically justified.

With Jim Crowism extinguished and its true history shrouded in lies compounded on some of its flaws, it may appear jarring to a contemporary reader to endorse the idea that current developments necessitate its partial return. Blending the elements of Jim Crowism and paternalism contains the potential for wholly positive social reformations. Though this section is largely based on predictions, idealism, and conjecture, it is not unreasonable to introduce some ideas of old segregationism into contemporary circumstances. Firstly, it is paramount to acknowledge racial differences and race relations today. Lower than they have ever been since the Civil Rights movement, it would possibly be a worthwhile idea to allow more freedom of association, allowing for differing demographics to purposefully choose which schools they enroll in, which businesses they frequent, which employees they hire, which customers they sell to, which individuals allowed into private clubs and fraternities, and which neighborhoods they live in based on racial and religious factors. This, of course, would come with the caveat of fair economic opportunities and political participation. Regarding political representation, removing the poll tax was an asininely bad move. While a poll tax per se is not necessary, providing proof of paying taxes would solve numerous issues with rooting out reprehensible characters from office and is an increasingly popular idea not uncommonly heard in public political discussions among the Southern populace. This would allow for more “voting for the person” as opposed to belligerently “voting for the party.” Lastly, focusing more so on populist policies in favor of the working and middle classes, particularly the available pipelines between the two, and social morality as opposed to focusing on political parties and racial issues would further mend relations between competing factions. These policies would not be difficult to implement and only require a modicum of common sense.

A long, arduous, and tumultuous nature often characterizes the Jim Crow era, yet in depth research of its policies and history contradict these descriptors. Upon inspection of the legal, social, and Biblical arguments, as well as the circumstances of each, of Jim Crowism only vindicates its previous implementation. The impenitent loathing contemporary society holds for such an era stems from the lies sold to it and the opposition it holds to delving deeply into its history, often prevented from encountering said history due to the suppression of sources. Understanding of segregationism and adopting a handful of its ideas opens the possibility for adopting solutions to the present irrational, preposterous social qualms which, if previously handled correctly, may not even have catalyzed.

Bibliography