It's 1925. Please give me a defense of segregation.

Great Debates
41

This is one of those questions you answer in one sentence or in 20,000 pages, so I’ll opt for one sentence. Racial segregation existed throughout the nation (throughout the world to some extent) for much the same reason that U.S. women couldn’t vote before 1920 or slavery was legal until 1865: it made sense at the time and had twisted logic to defend it, didn’t directly contradict the Bible, had economic benefits for some, and had tradition as its backing.

A related question that ties in greatly I think (and I’m not posing it, just pointing it out) is why, after centuries, did integration (and or women’s suffrage and other major social movements) begin to change? Thereagain a very long answer, and the role of World Wars (especially World War II) not to be diminished in any way, but a personal theory: if you examine every major social reformation or change and look just behind it you’ll see a major change in the way people spread and received information; neither Martin Luther nor Martin Luther King, Jr., said or did much of anything that was original with them or unique- there had been protestants [not smaller case p] long before Luther and men and women of all colors protesting segregation and systemic racism long before King, but the fact one came along just after the printing press had spread throughout Europe and the King just after the television had come to dominate living rooms was a major factor as well, and both knew how to use the media effectively. (Again, this is far from the only reason, but it is a reason.)

42

It’s also worth noting that there are still many strident advocates of segregation, many of them black. If you watch the movie “Boyz n the Hood” which, IIRC, was released in 1990, there are several rants by the black activist character decrying the evils of gentrification, and how it was essential that black people live in black-owned neighbourhoods, deal black businesses and so forth. Anything less was seen as an attempt of “the white man” to destroy “black people”.

And this was a view of last decade, not 100 years ago. I assume such views are still commonly held by blacks. You could certainly argue that such a position is inherently racist, but it is worth being aware that it exists, and that segregration is seen as a good thing by at least some educated black people.

So it’s hardly surprising that educated white people 100 years ago made the same argument.

43

An attempt to answer the OP with a non-racist but completely amoral view of history:

Segregation existed in some degree all over the country, but why and how was different to a degree. In the states that had been a part of the Confederacy much of Jim Crow was a backlash against Reconstruction, when white people were suddenly presented with black elected officials (their capability or qualifications for office were often unimpeachable but when you have always seen blacks as slaves or less-than-citizens it was jarring) and their economies are devastated.

Then no matter what the South did they couldn’t win for losing. In 1866 cotton prices were good- thirty-cents a pound for top quality- and that same year the boll weevil does record damage in Georgia and Alabama while Louisiana and Mississippi have record floods. After 1867 the cotton market stagnates and with the opening of the Suez Canal the cotton market declines far and fast, so the south is suffering. Some have gotten out of the agricultural endeavors and begun to make progress: just to use two famous examples Nathan Bedford Forrest (a self made multimillionaire before the war and broke when it ended) had slowly begun to regrow his fortune with railroads and public works contracting, Jefferson Davis (his plantations confiscated at the end of the war) had begun regrowing his through presidency and partial ownership of a successful life insurance company, and in 1873- BLAM. The other shoe drops and it’s a steel toed boot- Forrest and Davis go almost overnight back to being broke and so do millions of other people. Unlike the Civil War the Panic of 1873 wipes out millions and millions of non southerners as well, BUT for the south it’s becoming almost a dark comedy of “WTF is going to happen to us now? We go back to cotton farming- we lose our shirts. We get out of cotton farming go into business and industry- we lose our shirts. WTF?!”

But meanwhile blacks are generally doing better than ever before. This is not to say they’re eating bon-bons and singing and loafing and getting checks from the carpetbaggers, they’re working their asses off like everyone else for low pay and terrible cotton prices, BUT they are doing as well as most whites and they are enjoying freedoms they have never had before- will soon not have anymore- that allow them to vote, run for office, attend school, bank, and other things that white people all took for granted. Certainly most blacks, like most whites, are in poverty or spitting distance therefrom, but to the white southerners- many of whom had not been impoverished before the war- and nostalgia for that era growing daily*- it looks like the blacks are not in the same boat but dancing on the shore.

The KKK had been founded in 1866 (or 1867- an argument can be made for either) and other secret militia-groups (some not as terrorist in nature as the KKK and some of which made the KKK look like Boy Scouts) are formed and within a few years are defeated through legislation and sometimes military engagements; their power was pretty much broken by the mid 1870s. Again- this is an amoral judgment of history- but while many southerners even at the time denounced the KKK (including Forrest) many also saw its collapse as yet another reminder they were occupied and powerless as well as penniless.

Then came the fustercluck election of 1876. Makes Gore/Bush 2000 look like a friendly debate over a checkers game- results in the Compromise of 1877 whereby the Southern Democrats agree to hand the election to Republican Hayes in exchange for which Reconstruction ends, the troops go home, the war is over, the South doesn’t need the North to oversee its elections, we’ll handle it from here, thank you very much. Suddenly the south is again completely under the rule of its own elected officials again and there are no troops to enforce anything.

To many southerners- again this is an amoral judgment- it was payback time. The blacks become the scapegoats: every single thing that is bad and has gone wrong in the past 20 years is because of them and they’re going to get back to where they once belonged. They may have voted in 1876, but they’re not voting in 1878 if it takes enforcing every poll tax, literacy test, and obscure ruling from 1787 to the present and a few we just reinterpreted. About those schools and the black judges and all that- hope you enjoyed them, because it’s over. And while it’s impossible to legally or even practically re-institute slavery, the southern politicians did everything they could to turn back the clock to 1861 and they ran on the tickets of undoing all the damage done our pride and our land by the presence of the Yankees and the elevation of the blacks to your equals and neighbors. By 1880 most blacks were disenfranchised and it would get worse for several more years.

1896- Plessy v. Ferguson- separate but equal is allowed. Let’s see- you got a school with a door and some windows, we got a school with a door and some windows- never mind that ours has got a roof and yours has a piece of canvas and the windows have no glass in them, it looks equal to me. And so it goes.

So by 1925- the date you chose for the OP- this is how it’s been for as long as most people have been cognizant. Only those over 60 can really remember a different time all that well and those over 60 are mostly out of the work force. It’s become ‘how we do things’. (Again, this is in the south; in many non southern states there is also segregation and it has nothing to do with Reconstruction.}

*Oscar Wilde 1882: "The nostalgia for the antebellum era is so extreme that to compliment the beauty of a full moon will cue the response ‘yes, the moon is lovely… but you should have seen it before the war’.

44

I forgot to mention one important point of the OP.

A few years ago I was watching a movie about ancient Rome with a psychologist friend who’s not particularly well read or interested in ancient history. She asked “Do you ever wonder if all those carved columns on their temples and houses have anything to do subconsciously with the phallic symbolism?” I told her “No, they were primarily there to hold up the lintel and add beauty. For phallic symbolism they’d go to one of the great big carved marble dicks in the Forum.” That’s pretty much how racism was in 1925.

When Jack Johnson married his second white wife in 1912 Seaborn Roddenberry of Georgia pulled a Glenn Beck on the House floor in D.C. by breaking down in tears and weeping over the state of America. Then he proposed his interracial marriage ban with such jewels as this*:

Lest you think it was only southerners who did such things, he got a huge round of applause from elected officials from all over the nation (and in fact Johnson’s worst legal problems came from Illinois itself [which as with gay marriage had a lot people who felt ‘it might be legal but I don’t have to like it’] and Wisconsin for having transported his wife across state lines [IL extradited him when he skipped bail after being arrested in Wisconsin]).

The point is that it’s impossible to defend without open racism and they didn’t try to; the racism was as open as those giant dicks in the forum. If you had called Seaborn Roddenberry- or Strom Thurmond a generation later- a white supremacist and racist it would have been like me saying “jtgain is an oxygen breathing automobile driver!” and they’d have responded about the same: yep, sure am, what about it?

And it was a self sustaining system of 'if you can’t beat 'em join 'em". George Wallace famously started out as a liberal for his time and place, an acolyte of liberal democrat James “Big Jim” Folsom, but when Big Jim fell from grace (alcoholism and corruption) and tried to run as a moderate against war hero/movie hero** John Patterson who openly screamed about “niggers going to school with our children and dating our daughters and mongrelizing our race!”, Wallace was annihilated and didn’t even make the party runoff. He famously said “That’s the last time I’ll be outniggered”, and he turned radical in his rhetoric.

*Seaborn Roddenbery, Congressional Record, 62d. Congr., 3d. Sess., December 11, 1912, pp. 502–503.
During a later spiel of similar bile he got so worked up that he continued yelling when his voice was hoarse and his throat sore and didn’t stop until he began vomiting blood. It turned out he had throat cancer and he died following a few weeks of divinely imposed muteness.

**Patterson had a lot of fame and momentum from having been the main character of a a successful movie in which Richard Kiley played him. While Attorney General of Alabama Patterson really had gained international fame for cleaning up Phenix City, Alabama, the most mafia controlled city in the nation, following the mob’s murder of his father (who was the nominee for Atty. General when he was killed; his son took his place). The movie was actually based in fact- Patterson really did run the mafia out of “the wickedest little city in America”, but the movie was- to put it mildly- a bit selective in its portrayal of Patterson, not that it would likely have hurt the success of the movie if he’d been portrayed as a racist. As a reminder of how relatively recent those times are, Patterson is still alive and last I heard doing fairly well for a man of his years (88) and still works as a freelance judge.

45

That’s all true. It is also worth noting that Thurmond himself was seen mid-century as an economic liberal and somewhat progressive (in Carolina terms) on the subject of race. He wasn’t out to actively punish black people - he just didn’t want to upset the status quo.

As such, he pressed for funding to improve those separate institutions - though he did want to keep them separate.

46

As a side note, how does one become a freelance judge? Does he just drive around asking people, “Excuse me, do you folks have anything you need judging?”

47

Private arbitration companies and filling in for other judges who have recused themselves.

48

Great stuff, Sampiro. Many thanks.

Was Roddenbery proposing a constitutional amendment or some other thing?

49

Yikes! Somebody is not familiar with Asians :slight_smile: Koreans, and their descendants are easily picked out on sight by Japanese.

Not all Asians look alike you know!

50

Do you have any objective evidence for this claim?

51

I lived in Japan for 7 years. A Korean from Korea can be picked out, but that’s largely due to differences in makeup and style. Most Koreans in Japan were brought over by Japanese pirates, centuries ago and have been bred fully into the populace. First generation Koreans are a terribly small percentage of anyone and aren’t likely to become citizens.

52

Yes- he wanted a constitutional amendment to ban interracial marriage. It was illegal in all but a few states, but he wanted a Federal ban that would make it illegal in all. His name came up a lot again during Dubya’s proposed amendment.

53

This:,

[QUOTE=even sven;11783094

One is the “social harmony” theory- the idea that mixed race facilities would cause social tensions. The idea here is that people naturally might be uncomfortable. Tempers might flare. The racists who do exist on both sides might not be able to handle it. For everyone’s sake it is better to keep people apart where they can enjoy themselves without racial tensions (this is one of the theories for why gays shouldn’t serve in the military.)[/QUOTE]

inmo, is racist and ridiculous. I admittedly have deep questions, reservations and doubts over certain remedies that were applied as a means of achieving school de-segregation, and there were many hotheads on both sides, (although most of them were white), but that doesn’t excuse people being kept apart and constantly pitted against each other due to race, color, or ethnicity. I do think, however, that, ideally, on the long run, it’s best to start kids off in integrated settings at a young, early age, because once kids reach high school, or even middle school, it’s often much, much more difficult, because the hatreds and resentments are already quite ingrained by the time kids reach that age, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be or shouldn’t be done.

Having said all of the above, there’s absolutely no excuse or defense of segregation. It’s wrong…plain and simple.

54

I agree with Sampiro that the actual justifications offered for segregation in 1925, by intellectuals and the booboisie alike, were openly racist with no effort at concealment.

That said, even a non-racist could have reasonably argued in 1925 that, with African Americans in their thousands still being strung up and subjected to horrible tortures by white people for often wholly imaginary crimes or “disrespect,” it was best for African Americans’ safety to keep them separate from said white people.

In the long run, I think such an argument is wrong, because the separation of the races at best reduced, but certainly did not eliminate, such violence, while also reinforcing and perpetuating the bigotry that led to lynchings and other racial violence in the first place. In the short run, though, to have simply integrated the races outright in 1925 could have been a very, very bloody affair for African Americans, and for whites also to a lesser degree. Integration wasn’t any cakewalk even after World War II, when white Americans’ attitudes had changed somewhat due to the struggle against Nazism discrediting racism, plus the larger and more visible service of African American soldiers. To have integrated the races in 1925, with the Ku Klux Klan at the very height of its influence (6 million members in 1924) could have been a whole lot bloodier.

Still, freedom must often be won at the cost of blood, and it would have been silly to argue in 1925, “Let’s keep segregation for now, because maybe in a decade or two a major war against a racist regime will make integration easier.” So while I think the “segregation keeps Afircan Americans safer” argument is wrong, and furthermore was not actually offered at the time, it’s the least bad argument I can think of.