Lexington’s segregation sits on a historical scaffold of white supremacy | Opinion
Almost sixty years ago, the United States of America became a representative democracy. Until 1965, if you count African Americans, this nation was a democracy for some, but not others. The Voting Rights Act was signed by Lyndon B. Johnson that year, after ten years of Black American activists and their allies placing their bodies where they were not allowed to be, and the resulting violent backlash. One hundred years after the end of hereditary chattel slavery, meaningful enforcement of voting rights was in place, and the era of Jim Crow was over.
Lexington has begun an important discussion on the intentional segregation caused by government practices such as racially restricted deeds and redlining. But it’s important to understand the history of white supremacy that supported it all.
It’s often called segregation but that term doesn’t begin to cover it. I prefer the term “Jim Crow” for the web of laws and customs that upheld a system of Black subordination for about seventy years. The term itself comes from a blackface character in nineteenth-century theatre that caricatured a dopey, stupid, and happy-go-lucky version of Black people. Eventually the term came to refer to the American version of racial apartheid that arose after a brief post- Civil War period of multiracial democracy known as (Black) Reconstruction. The Thirteenth (1865), Fourteenth (1868), and Fifteenth (1870) Amendments to the United States Constitution guaranteed the abolition of slavery, citizenship rights, and universal suffrage for men. But the impact of those Reconstruction amendments was blunted by a concerted pushback by the former Confederate states and indifference from most others.
The new normal for white supremacy took about 20 years to solidify into law and culture. The new system consisted of three connected pillars—segregation, disenfranchisement, and poverty—under a roof—violence—to consolidate power for white people at Black people’s expense. Racial solidarity among white Americans upheld the system and rested upon the need for cheap labor, the need to divide working people, and the fictions of Black inferiority that appeared in those early blackface performances, as well as advertising, film, and fiction.
Segregation is the most familiar of Jim Crow’s pillars in our historical memory. Images of “Whites Only” signs at water fountains are part of our national iconography. Those signs were merely directional, since everybody already knew that there were spaces that Black people could not occupy as the equals of white folks. Schools, hospitals, restaurants, restrooms, public parks, and workplaces were among the countless public accommodations that enforced separateness. However, when Black people entered any of those spaces as subordinates — to clean facilities or care for white people—such entry was permissible. Segregation was legalized by ordinance and state law and upheld by federal courts. Where it was not legally enforced, it was customary or privately enforced: for example, racially restrictive covenants or redlining in residential neighborhoods. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 declared segregation laws illegal in public accommodations.
Disenfranchisement, or what we would call voter suppression today, denied political power to Black Americans through electoral politics. While the Fifteenth Amendment remained in place, loopholes such as ostensibly colorblind grandfather clauses (eligibility to vote if one’s grandfather had been eligible, i.e. not enslaved), poll taxes, and literacy tests (arcane exams administered to Black would-be voters), effectively barred the vast majority of Black people from voter registration. The private Democratic Party (the overwhelming party of choice for segregationists until the late 1960s) refused Black voters at its primaries. Holding public office and serving on juries were similarly out of reach, because those functions depended on voter registration. These practices were addressed by the 1965 Voting Rights Act (although Shelby County v. Holder in 2013 removed its most powerful provisions).
Poverty among Black people resulted from everyday job discrimination, dramatic theft of wealth and property, and everything in between. The national wealth of the United States was in large part extracted from the labor of ill-paid Black workers, but not shared with them. Avenues to the middle-class were few, but this did not mean Black people did not try to follow them. But even among Black people with more assets, access to neighborhoods with quality schools was denied. And instances of outright theft of assets through sabotage or financial deception are woven through Black family histories across the country.
Protecting and binding all three of these pillars—segregation, disenfranchisement, and poverty—together was violence. Southern Democrats staged all-out coups in several instances across the former Confederacy. Lynchings—mob violence with some public aspect—attracted spectators to spectacles that reminded Black people what might happen if they defied Jim Crow etiquette. Race riots (more accurately referred to as racism riots) subjected Black neighborhoods and households to terroristic destruction. But much violence was out of public view: sexual assaults in white households, nighttime “visits” by the KKK or informal groups of vigilantes, casual and unprosecuted murders and beatings, and police brutality. White impunity of visiting violence on Black people was the signature of Jim Crow and the force that gave it teeth.
Black resilience in the era of Jim Crow was truly remarkable, and we continue to tell those stories. We must hold both truths in mind at once: both Black humanity and the devastation wreaked by racism. One result of Jim Crow for Black Americans was the physical risk of untimely death. Whether from a single act of violence or years of poverty with poor healthcare, Black Americans were at risk for death and illness. Now, in the twenty-first century, the record of Jim Crow’s defeat is uneven, and Black people are still at disproportionate risk of premature death. Certainly we have lost those segregation signs, and many of the unwritten segregation customs, too—though residential and educational segregation persist. We have far more access to voting for Black Americans—though voter suppression remains. We have tremendous Black economic success—but poor people are disproportionately Black. And we have collectively witnessed horrific acts of violence against Black people through social media.
I often tell my students that we are no better and no worse than people in the past. The Jim Crow era is over, but racism is not. A commitment to a truly just and equitable society requires that we monitor segregation, disenfranchisement, poverty, and violence—and work to end all of them for good.
Anastasia Curwood is the Hallam Professor and Department Chair of History and Director of the UK Commonwealth Institute for Black Studies.
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