1900 - 1920s:  It couldn't get worse, could it?

• The South as a "Colonial," 3rd World, or Less Developed Country
1. Labor force unskilled
2. High birthrates
3. Infant mortality high, low life expectancy, little medical care
4. Little infrastructure (roads often just mud trails)
5. Education poor - few had access, funding limited
6. Inequality dramatic - large, desperately poor lower and working class (whether white or black), small middle class (merchants, doctors, lawyers, etc.), and a tiny, rich elite
7. Rigid gender roles, women excluded from opportunities
8. Low average income
9. Political systems undemocratic, openly corrupt
10. Agriculture dominates economy
11. Migrants flood out of region to more developed areas
12. Hyperexploitation of one ethnic group (African Americans)
• Sharecropping, cotton dominate
• 7 of 10 cotton farmers worked someone else's land
• Nearly 2 million Southerners grew only cotton for badly needed cash (and with what time and resources were left, grew food)
• Violence & Dehumanization against African Americans endemic
• Lynchings common, helped solidify white rule & terror, or perhaps palliate poor, desperate and alienated white males
• In 1900, 106 blacks (and 9 whites) were lynched -- that's 2 / week
• These were often public spectacles -- men, women and children would gather around the murder scene, roast marshmallows, and photos would be taken to make postcards
• Nationwide anti-lynching campaigns launched in response
• Legal system collaborates, puts blacks through court trials with no evidence or fair proceedings
• Novels, films, posters and popular art portray African Americans as inhuman, savage, amusing, or violent beasts
• Like the black & white KKK fantasy film, "Birth of a Nation" by D. W. Griffith
• Many African Americans pressed into slavery, more or less, by being arrested & sentenced (in trials described above) to chain gangs or even as rented labor
• Responding to Poverty & Violence:  Whites & Blacks both leave, Blacks organize
• Approximately 10 million people fled the South to Northern, Midwestern, Western cities
• Roughly equal numbers of whites & blacks left, but this was a much higher % of black pop.
• In 1910, 9 out of 10 African Americans lived in the South
• In 1960, 6 out of 10 African Americans lived in the South
• So, of course, new African-American communities created in North, Midwest, West
• Black leaders join or form organizations to promote African-American interests like the NAACP, National Negro Business League
• Industrialization:  the big craze, the 'gold rush'
• Cotton mills came because they could make their owners & investors wealthy, of course, but still local leaders promoted them and cut deals (like free land, resources, taxes) to lure them
• Rail extends into previously hard to access areas, like the Appalachians, leading to booms in coal, lumber, wood by-products
• Development rapacious, stripping mountains, denuding forests (old hardwood forests vanish, leaving pines), landscape erodes further
• Oil discovered, transforms Texas (later Oklahoma)
• Poor workers flood in, usually only whites allowed shop floor jobs though blacks worked in loading, transport sections.
• Child and family labor was the norm.
• Workers paid only enough, literally, to survive physically, and most took in fewer calories per day than needed to get through the day
• Paternalistic industry towns common -- you live on company land, in a company house, often get paid company 'credit' to use in company stores, which overcharge you, leaving you in debt to your low-paying employer
• Workers angry, hurt, betrayed, and popular culture reflects this -- many songs written about millwork and abuse by bosses
• Entire power structure of South cooperates to prevent, crush union or labor movements
• WWI mobilizes the nation and the South, followed by Red Scare
• The US entered WWI in 1917.  It was a war between the side of England, France, Italy (and then the US) against the side with Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire.  It was the largest, bloodiest war Europe had ever seen, and troops were not only drawn from Europe and the US but from the European colonies in Africa and Asia.
• Almost a million Southerners served in army or navy.
• Many African Americans were mobilized, fought in segregated units
• The US gov't called the war a fight "for Democracy"--and serving African Americans received respect from the Europeans they met
• But racism in military life, and on return from home, was not as easy to accept after a taste of greater equality and respect
• Russian Revolution (in 1917, this is what brought about the Soviet Union and its Communist government) made ruling governments and wealthy people around the world very nervous
• In US, a "Red Scare" led by US Attorney General Palmer targets organizations which supposedly were "Bolshevik" (this was the name of the group led by the people who came to power in the Russian Revolution)
• So now, any organization pressing for great change for poor or for workers could be labeled "Bolshevik" or "Red":
• "Aunt" Molly Jackson, a union organizer for coal workers in Kentucky, wrote this song stanza:
I was born in old Kentucky
I'm Kentucky born and bred
But when I joined the Union
They called me a Russian Red
• Cotton prices fall, and crops fall to boll weevil
• Only so much cotton was needed by mills
• But farmers were desperate for cash -- remember how many farmers were sharecroppers and had to grow cotton
• So farmers produced more and more, but price sinks lower & lower
• Boll weevil migrates from Mexico, slowly spreads across entire cotton belt
• To prevent returning infestation, larger growers would quit cotton for a year -- so their tenants had to flee
• Others used the threat as a way to promote diversifcation -- after all, nothing else seemed to make farmers interested in abandoning cotton, even when some of them could have
• New workforces might have unionized, but pressure & violence block
• Workers in certain kinds of industries came together early in the century to form unions -- like mining, iron / steel, lumber (and even formed somewhat biracial unions)
• Owners could use violence (local sheriffs, hired armed thugs), strikebreakers, or a general appeal to racism if the situation so allowed it
• Textile organizing not too successful except for 2 waves of strikes
• Conditions of work desperate
• Women led efforts to call attention, organize
• Gastonia strike of 1929 left 6 dead in Marion, NC, shot by police
• the Great Textile Strike of 1934 was the largest in US history, squads would fly from mill to mill, faster than owners and authorities could prevent
• 20 ended up dead
• 5 shot by deputies in Honea Path SC
• Those involved would stay silent for generations.
• But strikes happened at the worst time -- mills were overstocked, and purchases were decreasing, so what did mill-owners care about a strike?
• Women gain vote, Womens' Organizations lead fights for reform
• Led fights for child welfare, educational, labor, even highway reforms
• Women lead the anti-lynching campaign
• Jesse Daniel Ames specifically targetted the argument that lynchings were done to save the 'purity' of white women
• Thanks but no thanks, she said, in Revolt Against Chivalry
• In this respect women could more strongly challenge the immorality of lynchings while not facing the degree of violent threat males in the South might have
• Technology begins to transform not only industry but daily social life
• Radio begins to spread furiously throughout South, though at first few households owned a radio
• Automobile begins to break down many social barriers, including that of dating and sexuality among younger people -- and this prompts great condemnations of the auto by social conservatives.

• In 1929 the New York Stock Exchange 'collapses,' meaning an enormous % of stocks lose their value
• In 1929 the worst drought in known history strikes South and West (the famous "Dust Bowl")
• People who were already on the edge lost it all -- money, jobs, even food, and in the South, this was most everyone.  If you weren't starving, hunger wasn't far behind you.
• Government officials, academics, even the richest people in the country urged President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) to create strong government intervention to fix the economy.  The programs created, following on campaign promises, were called The New Deal.  They came in the context of strikes across the country, of marches by the poor and jobless, of massive unrest.  There's a lot of debate on who created the idea for these programs, and how they came to be chosen.  Certain business organizations which opposed the programs' protections for labor and wages, like the National Association of Manufacturers, promoted the idea that the idea was a dangerous flirtation with socialism and communism.  Other wealthy corporate leaders thought that if serious aid and reform programs were not enacted from above, there could be chaos from below.
• Thousands of ordinary Americans wrote letters to FDR begging for his personal intervention and support, and they really expected help.
• Because some programs needed to be passed by the Congress, FDR compromised many programs to meet Southern Democrats -- like, agricultural workers wouldn't get the protections of other workers to organize and have workplace safety
• Too many programs to list
• And some programs lasted while others were blocked or halted
• With agricultural reforms, educational assistance, direct jobs programs, relief for the destitute, this was the first time that millions in the South would encounter government agents and agencies offering help, not just taking taxes
• Also led to the super-giant projects like the Tennesee Valley Authority and the Rural Electrification Association, the Federal Highways Act
• New Deal programs solidified the view among many Southern and national leaders that government spending, regulation, and coordination could indeed be used to fix the South's cycle of poverty -- and this included Southern politicians
• States acted too, not just federal government:  Mississippi launched "BAWI", Balance Agriculture With Industry, a program to give all kinds of assistance to any industry which would locate to Missisippi.
• Kudzu introduced around the South to help stop erosion.  Oops.

Just about everything you can think of changes or begins to change.

• Military-related (or justified) spending floods in
• Climate allows for round-the-year training of forces
• Strategists don't want all production plants to be in one area of the Country (one attack could halt all production)
• Southern politicians, due to seniority, were extremely powerful, could get programs directed their way.

4 Million Southerners served

• For many if not most who served as enlisted troops, this was a better life than they had ever seen -- fresh, good food 3 times a day, new clothes of good materials, quality housing, and medical care
• Millions received skilled training, in machinery, service
• Thousands received academic training for the 1st time

Government and media direct a campaign against Fascism worldwide

Emphasizes how all must united to fight tyranny and the racial hatred practiced by the Nazis, the Italian Fascists, and the Japanese Empire

Black GI's fought against the Nazis, marched across Europe, and were even among those helping liberate concentration camps -- would they return to the treatment they had left?

In public eye, harder to justify US' racial hierarchies while condemning Fascist race hatred

Women gained a new prominence

• Industrial work of course nothing new to Southern women, unlike the "Rosie the Riveter" image, but they did gain access to positions and responsibilities ordinarily restricted to males

• Huge government programs assist (white) GI's returning home:
• GI bill
• Low Interest Housing loans & Mortgage Guarantees
• From this time until such federal programs were made accessible to all racial groups, trillions of dollars of wealth were thus invested in whites alone
• Though helping to cement a racial economic divide, these programs begin addressing an enormous inequality in the US of home ownership and college education by working and the less wealthy parts of the middle classes
• Government expenditures usually justified by Cold War reasons
• Companies in North seeking cheap labor, no unions, cheap land, cheap resources, etc., could finally consider coming to the South (which had all of the above), as government and taxpayer-funded infrastructures such as roads, bridges, ports, and electricity production made relocation possible
• Technological changes reorient business, social life once again
• Air conditioning allows not only homes but large industrial plants in the warmest of locations
• Liquid propane gas (for heating and cooking) means that Southerners, in many areas without electricity, could depend on regular heat for homes and cooking without depleting a local wood supply
• Mobile homes make quality housing available for millions who couldn't afford fixed housing
• Television, ah, television
• Environmental degradation enters a new phase, as the rapid increase in industry usually not accompanied by pollution controls -- for example, pollution of rivers near factories

• No simple story, in reality:  the struggle for civil rights and black freedom was ever ongoing, from the moment the first Africans landed, from escape to insurrection.  In the 1930s, everything from strikes to petition and letter campaigns was attempted:  A. Philip Randolph, leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, mobilized to lead a million African-American workers on Washington, DC, in 1941 -- though long before Pearl Harbor -- due to unfair labor discrimination against black workers.  Roosevelt, to avoid such dissent in the nation's capital as war doubtlessly approached, created the Fair Employment Practices Commission.
• Remember the international context:  there had been a war against Fascism in which race hatred was condemned (for example, the Nazi treatment of Jews);  the Soviet Union and allies could return criticism from the U.S. by pointing to how blacks were treated in the U.S.;  people of color around the world who had been controlled by European (white) governments were struggling for, fighting for, or even had achieved independence (India free from England in 1949, the French were fighting to hold onto colonies in Asia and North Africa with Viet Nam and Algeria;  and Ghana would be the first colonial territory to become an independent nation in Africa in 1957;  and U.S. were arguing worldwide that the U.S. was a leader in democracy.
• For our purposes, we will consider two general strategies of 1950s civil rights movements:
• The Legal Strategy
• Charles Hamilton Houston of Howard University and the NAACP decides in the 1930s to use education to bring cases which will attack the "but equal" part of "separate but equal" (See Plessy versus Ferguson in the late 1800s) first, and then after a successful effort, to move onto the whole legal support behind "separate but equal"
• Starts with a University of Texas law student Herman Sweatt.  (You really have to read about what they did to this guy.)  Surprisingly the U.S. Department of Justice (i.e., the Attorney General) joins the suit, and they win, but the case is made super-specific so as not to be too usable for other cases.
• The NAACP sues against "white primaries" (primary elections which exclude black voters).  In 1944 the Supreme Court ruled (in Smith v. Allwright) that since primaries were integral to elections, you can't exclude blacks -- though since there weren't any enforcement requirements, states and localities kept doing just that.
• Finally, many cases are launched as the 2nd stage attack on the whole legal basis for segregation under the law.
• Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 was actually a set of 5 cases.  The Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, managed to make a unanimous decision (think about it--would you want a divided court on such a momentous case?):  in education, separate was inherently unequal.
• Yet States held off from implementing the decision, as the court more or less left it to their discretion.
• The Movement:  A very brief selection
• Philosophically, try to remember that the whole protest movement grew out of very brave, very local community work -- nobody was waiting around passively until Martin Luther King Jr. came into town.
• The murder of Emmett Till a young Chicago boy in Mississippi who is said to have flirted with a white woman, his mother's choice of an open casket funeral for the body which had been badly beaten, shot, wrapped in barbed wire and left to rot in a river, and the blatantly biased acquittal of the murderers galvanizes millions in 1955
• White Citizens' Councils spread throughout South to block civil rights activities
• Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955), in Montgomery, Alabama
• Organizers select trained activist and worker Rosa Parks to challenge the segregated bus system (she wasn't just "tired," though she was indeed tired)
• Jo Ann Robinson and E. D. Nixon call in the new preacher in town, Martin Luther King Jr., who had just come to the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery.  Robinson & Nixon wanted church support for a massive boycott mobilization.
• Remember, this isn't about people just not riding buses -- this is about people who have to work, and who don't have cars.
• For over a year, Montgomery's African Americans walked miles and miles to work, arranged thousands of carpools, patronized black-owned taxi companies, and otherwise avoided the official bus system.
• After a local attorney filed for a federal injunction against the segregated bus system, the case went back and forth until the Supreme Court ruled on the activists' behalf.
• Little Rock:
• Governor Orval Faubus tries to block integration at Central High with Arkansas National Guard, and by closing down schools (probably to head off a more desegregationist candidate for the governor's race).  Mobs form, harassment, etc.  Local judge counters with an injunction, ignored.  President Dwight D. Eisenhower sends 1,000 troops in from the 101st Airborne, assumes override command of the Arkansas National Guard.
• Strategy of Noviolent Resistance -- putting yourself in harm's way without reacting violently -- gains acceptance due to King's leadership and Gandhi's example
• Greensboro Sit In follows similar efforts in Durham
• Ella Baker organizes SNCC ("snick"), the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee;  it and core support "Freedom Rides," integrated buses which would tour the South to challenge segregating interstate facilities.  After buses attacked, President John F. Kennedy gets Mississippi Governor John Patterson to protect the riders on their way through Mississippi.
• James Meredith tries in 1962 as a student to attend the University of Mississippi, but again he is blocked until JFK sends in the troops;  however, in the rioting, 2 students are killed before the National Guard arrives..
• MLK leads protests in Birmingham (where he is then pastor at 16th St. Baptist Church) April - May 1963:  this is the famous televised protests which gets attacked by police dogs, firehoses, clubs
• Unfortunately, FBI still tends to emphasize working with local police to monitor protesters rather than racist local authorities
• 1963 March on Washington:  250,000+ African Americans and those in solidary march to demand equality, led by A. Philip Randolph (among others), as he might have done in 1941;  MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech (audio)
• In response, perhaps, the 16th St. Baptist Church is firebombed, killing four young girls (see Spike Lee's "Four Little Girls")
• Murder of 3 civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Mississippi (African American Chaney and white {Jewish} Schwerner and Goodman) helps lead to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act , introduced and lobbied for by a Texan, President Lyndon Johnson
• March from Selma to Montgomery, 1965
• In response to the murder of a demonstrator by a state trooper, King and organizers agree to march directly from Selma to the capital to demand Governor Wallace stop the brutality and recognize their struggle for equality.
• Sheriff Clark attacks marchers on the Edmund Pettis Bridge
• ABC interrupts its broadcast of "Judgment at Nuremburg," about the trial of Nazis, to show unarmed marchers being beaten bloody and attacked by dogs;  to generalize recklessly, the nation is horrified.
• 1 week later President Johnson sends what (fortunately) would become the 1965 Voting Rights Act to Congress, signed 06 August 1965.
• Movement begins to deepen and radicalize
• King begins focusing more and more on economic inequality and the US war in Vietnam;  he was assisting a Sanitation Workers Strike in Memphis when he was killed (last speech, "The Promised Land," audio)
• SNCC takes voter registration drives to the heart of the white-dominated but black-populated Deep South, where the Lowndes County, Alabama voting drive leads to the Black Panther symbol and Black Power phraseology
• African Americans begin to increasingly run for, and win, local office.
• Riots occur in over 100 U.S. cities (one source suggests 164);  President convenes a commission to study;  the Kerner Commission announces U.S. is becoming "two nations:  one black, one white."

• By late 1960s, much of the population -- as you've seen in movies -- is severely divided over the war.  What is clear is that the drafting of many young men for an apparently deadly war effort heightens tensions of all kinds.  Sources I encounter argue that somehow the war provokes a degree of nationalism among Southerners, but I cannot yet find indications of the different groups in Southern society which would tend to be pro-war or anti-protester versus the groups which would be neutral or anti-war.  (I'm sure you can make your own guesses.)
• 1968:
• MLK assassinated in Memphis, in March 1968
• Robert F. Kennedy, popular brother of president John F. Kennedy (and his attorney general), and presidential candidate, assassinated June 1968
• Open Housing Act prompts white resistance to housing integration in the North, Midwest
• Tet Offensive in Vietnam helps change perceptions that US would inevitably win its war in Vietnam
• LBJ decides not to rerun (most likely because of the war and heart problems)
• The "Southern Strategy" of Goldwater / Wallace / Nixon:  it is argued commonly that this is what switched the South to a Republican stronghold
• Both Goldwater and Wallace were governors who had opposed desegregation but who also opposed many moderate and liberal social and economic policies, so their approaches tied many white conservatives between North and South.
• 1964, former Arizona Governor Barry Goldwater campaigns for the Republican presidential nomination, in part against the just-passed 1964 Civil Rights Act.
• Strom Thurmond of South Carolina follows by switching from Democratic to the Republican parties (but this was a guy who ran for president in 1948 as a "Dixiecrat" on the States Rights Party, so divisions had been mounting)
• Other conservative Southern whites -- presumably segregationist -- shift from Democrat to Republican to vote Wallace
• 1968, former Alabama Governor George Wallace (he had tried to stop U. of Alabama from integrating, stood in the door until stared down by US Attorney General in 1963) campaigns as an American Independent.  Nixon wins, but Wallace gets 46 Southern electoral votes, and heavily expanded Wallace's appeal beyond by opposing moderate to liberal policies, "big government" spending.
• 1972, Nixon adopts the recommendations of Republican writer Kevin Phillips, who recommends adopting the Goldwater / Wallace "Southern Strategy".
• Each party transforms -- conservative whites in South shift from Democrat to Republican;  yet Democrats gain millions of black voters
• Millions of blacks register to vote for first time, and continue to do so
• Residential segregation intensifies with new suburbs
• Integration in education focused on busing as a way of dealing with strongly racial living patterns (i.e., whites living in exclusively white communities and vice-versa for blacks)
• Busing provokes very strong and bitter divisions across the country, often worse in North
• Unfortunate side-effect (see Applebome's "insane jumble") was that successful African-American schools would be shut down to bus African Americans to white schools, leaving communities less in touch with their schools and black teachers jobless
• More positive media images of South appear (i.e., "The Waltons")
• Jimmy Carter elected as a conservative Southern Democrat
• Though he won 10 / 11 former Confederate states, he did so with only 46% of the white vote yet 90% of the black votes
• This voting pattern can serve as a model for Southern elections until today.