A social history question, prompted by the book The Guns of the South (minor spoilers) - in it, a Union man comes to the Confederacy and gets a job in the railroad, but is fired for treating his Negroes ‘like men’.
Got me thinking about America’s troubled racial harmonics - how much trouble, legally and socially, could you get by being ‘too nice’ to a black man or woman, get too friendly, treating as equal to the white man?
The most obvious example I could think of is (depending on your definition of being ‘nice’, of course) is the laws against interracial sex or marriage.
I’ve always had the impression that they thought black man/white woman was worse than black woman/white man; the woman would be shunned and ostracised and if the Klan was about the man could lose his life. Feel free to enlighten me if I’m mistaken on that, though. How they’d view black man/white man and black woman/white woman in the days of segregation and earlier I’ve no idea, it would probably make their heads explode.
**Amateur Baseball **It shall be unlawful for any amateur white baseball team to play baseball on any vacant lot or baseball diamond within two blocks of a playground devoted to the Negro race, and it shall be unlawful for any amateur colored baseball team to play baseball in any vacant lot or baseball diamond within two blocks of any playground devoted to the white race. Georgia
Promotion of Equality Any person…who shall be guilty of printing, publishing or circulating printed, typewritten or written matter urging or presenting for public acceptance or general information, arguments or suggestions in favor of social equality or of intermarriage between whites and negroes, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and subject to fine or not exceeding five hundred (500.00) dollars or imprisonment not exceeding six (6) months or both. Mississippi
According to this site, it was illegal for whites and blacks to play checkers.
Needless to say, people’s behaviors weren’t driven simply by what was codified in the law books. Plenty of people were given a hard time for bucking convention just “cuz”. According to the link above, Jim Crow etiquette followed a number of restrictive rules, none of them laid out in formal regulation. If you served your maid a ham sandwich at the dinner table with the rest of the family, you might not be thrown in jail. But people sure would talk shit about you just as sure as if you’d been caught taking a dump in your next-door neighbor’s garden. You could get fired and harrassed. You might get pushed right out of town. For lots of people, it probably wasn’t worth facing this kind of stigma just to sing “Ebony and Ivory” with their friends.
It still amazes me that all this happened within my parents’ lifetimes. There would have been hell to pay if they, my parents as children, had been caught eating a ham sandwich at a friend’s house without a “proper” partition separating them. And this actually made sense to LOTS of people. It just blows my mind.
Consider the character of Dolphus Raymond from To Kill a Mockingbird. He’s married to a black woman, and he doesn’t seem to face any official legal trouble for that, but he has to fake being an alcoholic to be accepted by white society.
I can personally testify that in 1960’s small town USA, being labeled a “nigger-lover” would set you dangerously outside society. You had stirred up trouble among people who would otherwise have accepted their due hardships, actually were happy in their own neighborhoods and schools, etc. Troublemakers like you lost friends and job opportunities fast.
A relative of mine, a native Californian, got a job as a bar-maid in South Africa, back at the height of the apartheid era. She raised eyebrows by being willing to chat sociably with the black janitor. She never got in trouble for it, but it was a matter of some local comment, and got her a little ostracism. “Those weird Americans…”
You remember the story of Emmett Till, who was murdered for whistling at a white woman. It could go the other way, too. White women who seemed too friendly with black men were ostracized, and sometimes beaten up by their fathers/brothers/boyfriends.
In the 50’s, my old man was in the Army in the south, and was a DJ on his base’s radio station. He had a jazz show, and would play some Nat “King” Cole from time to time. That got him branded as a nigger-lover, and he was jeered and pelted with potatoes from passing trucks. I don’t think anyone would have the same problem nowadays, but at the time, it really got him sore. Damn Yankees!
Not sure about legal trouble, but if you’re any kind of public figure and a camera is rolling, it’s not a real good idea to compliment a Black person for being “articulate.”
One of the best bits in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles was to do with a Terminator that was thrown back in time to the 1930’s. He accidentally killed the guy who built the building where an assassination was supposed to take place in 2013. Thus, the Terminator had to build the building himself. He starts his own construction company and hires anyone, including black workers. He treats and pays them the same as anyone and works alongside them. His ultimate objective is to destroy all of humanity… but he’s not going to be a dick about it.
Or the black man would be accused of rape of a white woman and jailed. And then while trial in jail he could be dragged from his cell by a mob and hanged. My dad actually witnessed this as a young boy growing up in West Texas during the depression.
In John Steinbeck’s nonfiction Travels With Charlie he picks up a hitchkiker in the south who ends up calling Steinbeck a nigger lover. As Steinbeck drives away, the guy is still screaming it at him from the side of the road.
He lives with a black woman and has children by her. Marrying her would have been illegal.
Atticus Finch is called a “nigger lover” when he is appointed to defend Tom Robinson and takes the job seriously, rather than just letting the crowd lynch him.
One of my younger sister’s best friends in Boston was a girl whose parents had to come north to get married because they were a white woman and a “colored” man.
Yes, yes you could: in Tallulah, VA ( which I thought to be simply a girls’ name, like Florence… ) three Italian shopkeepers were lynched for treating blacks the same as whites. And as a bonne bouche they hung a couple of Italian bystanders as makeweights.
Was this in 1799 ? Nope, it was in 1899. A race crime, at that time, unimaginable anywhere else, even in the African Cape or China.
How timely - Just the other night I was watching a boxing match and during the round they (white announcers) commented on how ‘articulate’ the one (black) boxer had been in an interview before the fight. I sensed no derogatory nature to it. Frankly, compared to the other guys they interviewed that fighter did seem far more insightful and did a better job of expressing himself (i.e. articulate.)
This makes the mistake of thinking that racial prejudice started out really strong and gradually declined. But racial distinctions were much stronger in the mid 1800s than then were in the 1700s.
