6.4 The "New South"

Henry Grady, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, became famous in the 1880s for urging the South to industrialize and attract Northern investment. Some of that happened. Birmingham, Alabama, became a steel and iron center. Textile mills spread across the Carolina Piedmont, and James B. Duke's American Tobacco Company made North Carolina a tobacco powerhouse. Railroad mileage in the South grew quickly.

But Southern industry often depended on low wages, Northern owners and raw materials. Most Southerners, Black and white, still farmed, and per-person income stayed far below the national average. So the 'New South' was more slogan than reality for most people.

Sharecropping began during Reconstruction (5.10). A family farmed a landowner's land and paid with a share of the crop, often a third to half. Tenant farmers rented land and kept more of the crop.

Under the crop-lien system, local merchants sold seed, food and tools on credit, taking a claim (lien) on the coming harvest. High interest and falling cotton prices meant many families ended each year owing more than they earned. They could not leave until the debt was paid, so the system trapped poor white and Black farmers in a cycle close to debt bondage.

Jim Crow refers to the laws and customs that segregated Black and white Southerners in railroads, schools, parks and more. In the Civil Rights Cases (1883), the Supreme Court struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, ruling that the 14th Amendment limited only state action, not private businesses.

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) began when Homer Plessy deliberately sat in a whites-only rail car to test Louisiana's Separate Car Act. The Court ruled 7–1 that state-required segregation was constitutional as long as facilities were equal, the 'separate but equal' doctrine. In practice, facilities for Black Southerners were almost never equal. Justice John Marshall Harlan's lone dissent argued that the Constitution is color-blind. Plessy stood until Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

Disfranchisement means taking away the right to vote. The 15th Amendment banned denying the vote by race, so Southern states used tools that were race-neutral on paper:

• Poll taxes, a fee to vote that poor people could not afford.
• Literacy tests, judged by white registrars who passed white voters and failed Black ones.
• Grandfather clauses, which exempted men whose grandfathers could vote before 1867, protecting poor white voters.
• White primaries, plus intimidation, fraud and lynching.

Black Southerners faced more than unfair laws. White supremacists also leaned on so-called scientific theories of race, which falsely claimed that racial groups had fixed, unequal abilities, to justify segregation and disfranchisement. Black reformers answered in different ways.

Ida B. Wells, a Memphis journalist, investigated lynchings and showed that the common excuse (protecting white women) was usually false; lynching was a tool of terror and economic control. Her pamphlet Southern Horrors (1892) launched a national anti-lynching campaign.

Booker T. Washington, head of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, argued in his 1895 Atlanta Compromise speech that Black Southerners should focus on vocational education and economic progress for now, rather than openly challenging segregation. W.E.B. Du Bois later rejected this approach and demanded full civil and political rights immediately (7.4).