I’ve heard that Southerners would treat foreign visitors, even blacks, with great respect even though they kept slaves and discriminated against African-Americans. There’s also this quote from Invisible Man:
“I recalled a report of a shoe-shine boy who had encountered the best treatment in the South simply by wearing a white turban instead of his usual Dobbs or Stetson.”
Is there any truth to this?
Sure, why not? Even when slavery existed, it’s unlikely that every slave lived a life of abject misery. Some would have been considered as members of the extended family. I would imagine that many slaves would have considered themselves better off than the poor whites who lived nearby.
Free blacks who possessed needed skills would have been dealt with in a businesslike fashion.
So, I don’t think it’s beyond imagining that a foreign visitor or dignitary would have been treated as anything other than that.
As long as the slave, free black, or visitor was not seen as a “troublemaker”, I don’t think anyone would have bothered them.
Might need to politically correct that reply.
How so?
No actual data to offer; but I remember reading James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, in which he posited one reason why civil rights for negroes (as he called them) were finally coming to pass after decades of futile effort: that the power structure in Washington was faced with the prospect of having to diplomatically woo independent African nations, and that this was impossible when black ambassadors touring the South would be asked to use the “colored” facilities.
I’d need to see a cite for that. If it was really a reason, it had to be waaaaaay down on the list.
The shoe-shine boy stroy is certainly horse feathers, and prior to independence
there were few Black African travelers anywhere in the world.
before 1861 an appearance of a visitor from Subsaharan Africa per se in the South sounds like a dubious proposition. Phenomena like “British West Africa” and the geographically related “Nigerian 419 scam” were still in the far away future. However, as correctly pointed out by Invisible Man, some “Moor” or “Turk” visitors from North Africa could have dark skin and even somewhat black facial features, due to the history of light skinned Muslims there keeping black slaves.
On the other hand, there may have been mixed race people from the nearby West Indies visiting the South on business, but these would probably fit into the same social category as affluent free urban blacks.
Is this a whoosh? Can you possibly be serious? Blacks were discriminated against by law. They wouldn’t have been able to sleep where they chose, eat where they chose, say what they chose, or associate with who they chose.
So, sure, so long as they treated white people as their superiors, and didn’t go in to white establishments, no one would bother them. Or acknowledge their existence, for that matter.
This is not to say the treatment would be better in the north, however.
What’s the whoosh? Slavery existed. If anything, the institution probably suffered from the lack of laws governing it. A slave could be treated as well or as bad as his master desired.
Free blacks did live in the South. Some of them even owned slaves. Some had talents that required doing business with whites. Business was conducted.
I don’t know if an African dignitary ever visited the slave-holding South, but I don’t think it’s an automatic assumption that he would have been clapped in irons or hanged.
Didn’t South Africa run into a similiar problem when the various European colonies in Africa started becoming independent? Also I assume they had black diplomats from non African countries as well. Didn’t they “solve the problem” by just declaring them “honourary whites” and letting them use the white facilities? I know that Japanese people were considered white for diplomatic & economic reasons. Ditto for Chinese people (but only those from Nationalist China, not Red China).
Liberia and Haiti both became independent and had diplomatic relations with the US in the 19th century; presumably they were represented by black (or more likely mixed-race) diplomats in Washington, DC.
I think Boyo Jim and wedgehed are talking past one another as they’re referring to two different eras. I’m sure that for a free black person, the post-bellum Jim Crow South would have been more unpleasant in a lot of ways than the antebellum slavery era.
The story in the OP about a shoe-shine boy getting better treatment because he wore a turban sounds like a distorted version of the life of Lee Brown, also known as Ram Singh and Babs Gonzales, who got better treatment by pretending to be Indian or Hispanic rather than black:
Note that there is some dispute if Lee Brown’s account of his life is entirely accurate.
Definitely, and not just in the South, either.
For hypothetical black diplomats in the United States, it makes a difference if we’re talking about before the Civil War or after. I don’t know where one would find complete records of ambassadors or ministers to the United States, but the State Department has a record of all the chiefs of mission from the United States, and we didn’t actually send diplomats to Haiti or Liberia until 1862 and 1863, respectively. (Interesting coincidence of timing with certain domestic events ongoing in the U.S. at the time, but I don’t know if that was just a coincidence or not.) I presume the exchange of diplomats would be more or less reciprocal, so I wouldn’t expect to see Haitian or Liberian ambassadors or ministers in the U.S. before then. We didn’t have formal representation to Ethiopia until the 20th Century.
Don’t be so sure of that. Consider the case of Prince Whipple, his cousin and an elder brother. All were sent from subsaharan Africa to the American colonies for education. Unfortunately, it doesn’t say where in the colonies they were being sent.
Yes, IIRC, the Jim Crow laws were a reaction by southern whites after Reconstruction. Once they took their government back from northerners, they passed the laws to “keep the negroes in their place”. Other than laws about slavery, did pre-war southern states have any formal Jim Crow laws?
IIRC from my 'socially relevant studies" back in high school in the early 1970’s, Booker T Washington was criticized by other black activists for his compromising positions on civil rights. His attitude was “I am a success and I can socialize with whites without serious discrimination; you should try to do the same”. The Jim Crow (and polite northern racism) apparently did not apply to an important man like him, is how I understood it.
OTOH, a nattily dressed and Oxford educated Ghandi was forcefully ejected from a whites-only train car in South Africa, so some laws were not made to be broken…
I think things were based more on custom (which might vary from place to place) than law. The national laws that were enacted concerning fugitive slaves probably pissed off more northerners than than the institution of slavery itself.
“Slave codes” could also contain regulations of free blacks. For example, from the 1848 Slave Codes of the State of Georgia, there were provisions making it illegal to teach not only slaves but also free blacks how to read and write and free blacks could not “preach or exhort” without a license.
I believe there was not a statistically significant number of black foreign visitors to the American South prior to the 20th century to make any kind of statement about their reception..