South Carolina Negroes, 1877-1900

By George Brown Tindall

The history of African Americans in South Carolina after Reconstruction and before Jim Crow

First published in 1952, South Carolina Negroes, 1877–1900 rediscovers a time and a people nearly erased from public memory. In this pathbreaking book, George B. Tindall turns to the period after Reconstruction before a tide of reaction imposed a new system of controls on the black population of the state. He examines the progress and achievements, along with the frustrations, of South Carolina's African Americans in politics, education, labor, and various aspects of social life during the short decades before segregation became the law and custom of the land. Chronicling the evolution of Jim Crow white supremacy, the book originally appeared on the eve of the Civil Rights movement when the nation's system of disfranchisement, segregation, and economic oppression was coming under increasing criticism and attack.

Along with Vernon L. Wharton's The Negro in Mississippi, 1865–1890 (1947) which also shed new light on the period after Reconstruction, Tindall's treatise served as an important source for C. Vann Woodward's influential The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955). South Carolina Negroes now reappears fifty years later in an environment of reaction against the Civil Rights movement, a a situation that parallels in many ways the reaction against Reconstruction a century earlier. A new introduction by Tindall reviews the book's origins and its place in the literature of Southern and black history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Release date: Dec 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781643363004

Book preview

SOUTH CAROLINA NEGROES

1877–1900

SOUTHERN CLASSICS SERIES

Barbara L. Bellows and John G. Sproat, General Editors

SOUTH CAROLINA NEGROES

  1877–1900  

GEORGE BROWN TINDALL

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR

Published in cooperation with the Institute for

Southern Studies and the South Caroliniana Society

of the University of South Carolina

Original text © 1952 University of South Carolina

Introduction © 2003 University of South Carolina

Paperback edition published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2003

Ebook edition published in Columbia, South Carolina,

by the University of South Carolina Press, 2022

www.uscpress.com

Manufactured in the United States of America

31  30  29  28  27  26  25  24  23  22

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

The Library of Congress has cataloged the paperback edition as follows:

Tindall, George Brown.

South Carolina Negroes, 1877–1900 / George Brown Tindall ; with a new introduction by the author.

p. cm. — (Southern classics series)

Originally published: Columbia : University of South Carolina Press, 1952.

Published in cooperation with the Institute for Southern Studies and the South Caroliniana Society of the University of South Carolina.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

ISBN 1-57003-494-X (alk. paper)

1. African Americans—South Carolina—History—19th century. 2. African Americans—South Carolina—Social conditions—19th century. 3. African Americans—History—1877–1964. I. Title. II. Series.

E185.93.S7 T5 2003

ISBN 978-1-64336-300-4 (ebook)

Front cover photo: Julian Dimock. Courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History

To

Blossom

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Series Editors’ Preface

Introduction: Revisiting South Carolina Negroes, 1877–1900

Foreword to the First Edition

  1 Slavery and Reconstruction

  2 The Twilight of Reconstruction

  3 The Decline of the Republican Party

  4 Negroes in Politics

  5 Nullification of the Fifteenth Amendment

  6 Negroes in Agriculture

  7 Nonagricultural Pursuits

  8 The Liberian Exodus

  9 The Migratory Urge

10 The Negro Church

11 Education

12 The Context of Violence

13 Crime and Convict Leasing

14 Care of the Indigent and Defective

15 Social Life

16 The Color Line

17 Some Evaluations

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Negro Leadership

Public Service

Public Safety

An Editor and a Soldier

Peddlers and Proprietor

Organized Religion and Organized Labor

Charleston Normal and Industrial School

Social Life

Note: The illustrations are all from photographs taken during or shortly after the 1877–1900 period. With two exceptions, they were reproduced from the originals by the Munn and Teale Studio, Columbia. The Neptune Volunteer Fire Company was reproduced by the Globe Photo Service, Greenville, S.C., and the picture of the Charleston peddlers comes from the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress.

SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE

The Southern Classics Series is honored to bring back into print George B. Tindall’s South Carolina Negroes, 1877–1900 on the fiftieth anniversary of its publication by the University of South Carolina Press in 1952.

Tindall tells the sad story of a revolution that went backwards. After Reconstruction, the political rights and economic protections once enjoyed by freed slaves under Federal military rule were gradually legislated away until by 1900 South Carolina had developed an intricate caste system enforced by both civil law and white terror. As he chronicles this process, Tindall revises the traditional stereotype that portrayed African Americans as mere pawns or victims in this tragedy. He traces a bright thread of Negro progress as South Carolina blacks actively resisted their oppression and developed institutions and leadership outside of politics that would eventually be instruments of their own liberation.

Few historical works can make the same claim to relevance as South Carolina Negroes. Although segregation was still deeply entrenched throughout the South at the time Tindall completed his study, his original research proved the mutability of race relations over time and provided solid evidence for advocates of change during the civil rights movement. The world of institutionalized segregation had not always been, he argued, and by logical deduction, did not have to be.

George B. Tindall, a native South Carolinian, belongs to a remarkable generation of clear-eyed southern historians who returned home from fighting for democracy in World War II and pursued doctoral studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. They had gained a deep appreciation of the power of ideas in shaping great events, and cultivated an idealistic hope that they might be able to improve the world through their work. For Tindall, South Carolina Negroes was the first book in a long and productive career of teaching and scholarship that has profoundly shaped the modern understanding of the southern past.

Tindall’s second book, The Emergence of the New South, 1913–1945 (1967), a volume in the History of the South series, was honored with the most prestigious awards given to southern historians, including the Jules F. Landry Award, the Charles S. Sydnor Award, and the Lillian E. Smith Award given by the Southern Regional Council. Among his other works are a series of essays, The Ethnic Southerners (1977), and a widely used textbook, America: A Narrative History (1984).

Tindall has held Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships, and spent time at both the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and the Center for Advanced Study at Stanford. He was the president of the Southern Historical Association in 1973. After holding positions at several southern institutions, including the University of Mississippi and Louisiana State University, he returned in 1958 to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he taught until his retirement in 1990 as Kenan Professor Emeritus.

Southern Classics returns to general circulation books of importance dealing with the history and culture of the American South. Sponsored by the Institute for Southern Studies and the South Caroliniana Society of the University of South Carolina, the series is advised by a board of distinguished scholars who suggest titles and editors of individual volumes to the general editors and help establish priorities in publication.

Chronological age alone does not determine a title’s designation as a Southern Classic. The criteria also include significance in contributing to a broad understanding of the region, timeliness in relation to events and moments of peculiar interest to the American South, usefulness in the classroom, and suitability for inclusion in personal and institutional collections on the region.

JOHN G. SPROAT

BARBARA L. BELLOWS

Associate Editors

Southern Classics Series

INTRODUCTION: REVISITING SOUTH CAROLINA NEGROES, 1877–1900

This book, like all books, is an artifact of its time. If it had been published just after the civil rights movement instead of just before, it no doubt would have had another title. Probably South Carolina Blacks. In 1952, however, proper usage excluded both black and lowercase negro, either of which would have branded one as insensitive if not worse.¹ Published twenty years earlier, the book might have been called South Carolina Afro-Americans or South Carolina Colored People. Published today it might be South Carolina African Americans. But South Carolina Negroes, 1877–1900 came out of the mid-twentieth century. It was a time when the legal assaults on Jim Crow and the white primary were scoring their first major triumphs and when the revisionist history of Reconstruction was very much in the air and beginning to be in print.

In the spring of 1946, I became a graduate student at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, where Professor Howard K. Beale, a leading champion of revisionism, was a member of the faculty. In 1940 Beale had published On Rewriting Reconstruction History in the American Historical Review.² The article reviewed the earliest assessments of Reconstruction, then looked at the work of the Dunning school, the prevalent interpretation during the first half of the twentieth century, before Beale proceeded to examine more recent departures from that interpretation, which were the main point of his article.

The Dunning school, so named because it had grown mainly out of Professor William Archibald Dunning’s seminars at Columbia University, had produced a series of state histories of Reconstruction beginning around 1900.³ These studies had been the work of the first generation of academic historians from the South, serious efforts based on extensive research but themselves artifacts of their own time, a time when white supremacy movements were triumphant in the South and racist theories were rampant throughout Western civilization. The Dunning school, in short, held that Reconstruction had been an affliction imposed on a prostrate South by corrupt carpetbaggers and scalawags, who had exploited the votes of ignorant blacks to impose an oppressive regime on a defeated people.

The earliest challenges to the Dunning school came from black historians, with W. E. B. Du Bois, a younger contemporary of the Dunningites, in the forefront of the critics. In 1910 the American Historical Review published his defense of black suffrage. Based on a paper he had presented to an earlier meeting of the American Historical Association, the article held that black suffrage was responsible for a positive record of democratic reform. Twenty-five years later he wrote a history of the period, Black Reconstruction, which presented much new material on the role of African Americans but presented it in a Marxist context, something more prevalent at the time than now.⁴ The Journal of Negro History, which Carter G. Woodson founded in 1916, was another important force in promoting new viewpoints in black history.

Far more influential in fixing the public image of Reconstruction history, however, had been the writings of Thomas Dixon and especially The Birth of a Nation (1915), a film based on his novel, The Clansman. Directed by David Wark Griffith, the film was both a triumph of cinematic art and a distortion of history, a movie which recycled myths of Reconstruction with villainous Radicals, sinister mulattoes, black rapists, faithful darkies, and exemplary whites. At its climax, the Ku Klux Klan rode in to rescue white civilization from a cowardly black militia.⁵

Most of the action took place in and about a fictional town called Piedmont, South Carolina (unrelated to the textile town of that name), but it was based largely on Dixon’s knowledge of the white supremacy frenzy at the beginning of the twentieth century in his native North Carolina.

About thirty years after The Birth of a Nation, a revisionist novel appeared: Howard Fast’s Freedom Road (1944) was also set in South Carolina.⁶ The story focused on Gideon Jackson, newly freed from slavery and suddenly thrust into politics. Illiterate at the outset, Jackson quickly learned to read, gave himself a liberal education in books, and became a congressman. Unlike Griffith’s movie, which focused on racial divisions, Fast’s book highlighted class divisions. In the course of the novel, a group of freedmen ally themselves with whites of the lower orders, buy up confiscated lands, and establish an interracial utopia. In the end, in a scene reminiscent of the climax of The Birth of a Nation, the villainous Klan, agent of the upper orders of South Carolina, destroys the community, murders Jackson and its other leaders, and puts an end to the experiment in democracy.

Both tales telescoped the chronology of Reconstruction and the following years. In both there was first Reconstruction, then there was white supremacy, with no time in between. Such fictions simply ignored the decades one chapter of South Carolina Negroes called The Twilight of Reconstruction: the period when African Americans still retained a presence in politics, and served in the legislature, in a few state or local offices, and in such federal positions as postmasters or collectors of customs, the last nearly always under Republican presidents. The few blacks who served in the legislature were commonly consulted on local matters in their counties and sometimes, when whites were closely divided, had their votes count for something.

In reaction to the Dunning approach, Professor Beale had written in 1940, we need to stop passing judgment on persons and to begin studying forces. It is not so important to know whether a few more or a few less carpetbaggers or so-called scalawags were righteous or iniquitous as it is to know what social and economic forces brought them to power and motivated them.⁷ Upon rereading the article, I have been surprised at the degree to which Beale laid out the agenda that southern historians pursued in subsequent years. He asserted the need to examine Reconstruction in the context of the last half of the nineteenth century, and to explore social and economic as well as political subjects. Reconstruction, moreover, needed to be seen from the perspective of national as well as regional history.

Influenced by Beale’s writings, my graduate work in history however was directed by Professor Fletcher M. Green. Entering the University of North Carolina, I soon discovered that J. Isaac Copeland, whom my bride and I had known as librarian at Furman University when we were undergraduates, was a graduate student in history. When I got restless about my initial choice of English as a major, he took me over to meet Professor Green. That summer I returned as a history major. Green, I found, had the air of an old-time southern gentleman but was a stern taskmaster. He approached historical study with what might best be called a Germanic thoroughness and attention to sources. He never sought to develop a school of interpretation through his students, but encouraged them to pursue their own interests in their research. He had in fact directed the study most featured in Beale’s revisionist article, Vernon Lane Wharton’s The Negro in Mississippi, 1865–1890, a dissertation still not published in 1946 but about to be.

The research, writing, and publication of South Carolina Negroes, 1877–1900 took place entirely during the administration of Harry S. Truman. It was first a dissertation completed in 1950.⁸ Condensed and revised, it became a book in November 1952. That was just eight years after the Supreme Court had struck down the white primary in Texas elections and five years after Judge J. Waties Waring had done the same in South Carolina. It was just four years after the Supreme Court first ruled against segregation in postgraduate education, two years before it ruled against segregation in the grade schools, and four years after President Truman had directed an end to segregation in the armed services.

And the book appeared just seven years after I had first encountered token integration in the Army Air Forces Officer Candidate School at Maxwell Field, in a class which included one black candidate.⁹ That encounter occurred just outside Montgomery, Alabama, ten years before the Montgomery bus boycott first brought Martin Luther King Jr. to prominence.

World War II had widened the horizons of countless young southerners by taking them to parts of the world they had not seen. While stationed at Hickam Field near Honolulu, for instance, I had been impressed by Hawaii’s pride in its ethnic diversity and in the Japanese-American Hawaiians then fighting the Nazis in Italy. To the South, which Franklin D. Roosevelt had dubbed the Nation’s No. 1 economic problem, the war brought an economic boom.¹⁰ It was, moreover, a South where the New Deal had fostered new political stirrings in the 1930s and 1940s.

White liberals of the time included an active element of church people, another element of intellectuals (academics, journalists, and writers), and a somewhat smaller element of New Deal politicians. These categories overlapped and at least one person managed to fit all three: Frank P. Graham, who was president of the University of North Carolina (1930–1949) and, briefly, a United States senator (1949–1951).

There was also a smattering of labor unionists and radicals. These people, historian Numan V. Bartley said, pointed southern liberals toward a popular front focused on issues of economic justice. In 1946 a drive to organize southern labor promised a union base for such a coalition. But Operation Dixie, led by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), quickly ran afoul of corporate hostility, rivalry with the American Federation of Labor (AFL), and disputes over the presence of Communists, real or imagined, within the ranks of labor. The drive, and a competing drive by the AFL, failed within the year.¹¹

Then, in Bartley’s words, as racial issues, and most especially segregation in the South, moved to the top of the agenda for national reform, what had been the nation’s number-one economic problem took on the aspect of the nation’s number one moral problem and an embarrassment in Cold War diplomacy.¹²

Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944) gave expression to the emerging awareness of the race problem.¹³ The Carnegie Foundation had chosen Myrdal, a Swedish economist and sociologist, as an unbiased man from Mars to direct a diverse team of scholars in research projects in the fullest survey ever made of black life and race relations in America.

At bottom, Myrdal wrote, our problem is the moral dilemma of the American—the conflict between his moral valuations on various levels of consciousness and generality.¹⁴ White Americans, he said, were torn between their belief in the American Creed of liberty, equality, justice, and fair play on the one hand and their practices of racial oppression on the other.

Myrdal emphasized the competition and hostility between working-class blacks and whites rather than their basic compatibility of interests—an ironic departure for a Swedish Social Democrat. The more natural allies of blacks, Myrdal held, were the upper classes of whites, who were economically secure and not in competition with blacks.¹⁵ Such beliefs both were not new and were contradicted, on the one hand, by evidence that upper-class whites exploited racial tensions to their own advantage and, on the other hand, by evidence that working-class blacks and whites sometimes collaborated.

Looking back at South Carolina Negroes, I find the influence of Myrdal’s ideas at work in the book. In many places my assessments leaned toward the idea that blacks benefitted from the attitudes of a moderate white aristocracy: clearly Wade Hampton and his kind held off, for a while, the onset of the rawest white supremacy.¹⁶ Such people, however, could also be seen as stalking horses for the triumph of white supremacy in the 1890s. The shock troops of nineteenth-century white supremacy in South Carolina were the extremist followers of Martin Witherspoon Gary and Benjamin Ryan Tillman, populist politicians from the county that had earned the nickname Bloody Edgefield.

The more benign elements among whites, whether post-Reconstruction Hamptonites or latter-day liberals, took the lead neither in the rise of white supremacy nor in its decline. They may have delayed its triumph after Reconstruction and may have influenced the white South to accept its decline, but they did little more than that.

I had been born and had grown up in Greenville, an upcountry textile town with a black minority, during the age of segregation in South Carolina. My family ran a retail hardware store, and except for first grade in North Carolina, my formal education through college was all in Greenville, in the public schools and at Furman University. Born into the world of Jim Crow, as a child I took that world as a given. Just what impelled me to curiosity about the racial mores of my surroundings is hard to say. My colleague Joel Williamson, another South Carolinian, has said that growing up in South Carolina was enough to focus one’s attention on race. He has a point.

A conventional Baptist upbringing had something to do with it. There was a certain dissonance between the teachings of the faith and the ways of the world around me. And the influence of the interracial movement, although I knew nothing of its existence, may have reached me indirectly through some of my teachers.¹⁷

While I have dealt with the details of my growing awareness of race elsewhere, I must include here one special epiphany, something that occurred in the spring of 1938 in a high school course in South Carolina history.¹⁸ The teacher, J. Mauldin Lesesne, mentioned that in South Carolina’s Constitutional Convention of 1895 a delegate had moved to change the legal definition of Negro from a person with at least one-eighth Negro blood (that is, with at least one black great-grandparent) to a person with any Negro blood at all.

At that point, former congressman George Tillman, Ben’s older brother, objected on the grounds that such a change would afflict certain families around Edgefield who had been accepted in white society despite a remote black ancestry. To the further consternation of the delegates, George Tillman said that probably not a single pure Caucasian sat in the convention. All had colored ancestry, he argued, not necessarily Negro but from one of the colored races. George Tillman therefore proposed to set the definition at one-fourth black ancestry, but the convention left it at one-eighth.¹⁹

Still intrigued by that episode when I entered graduate school at Chapel Hill after the war, I decided, and Fletcher M. Green agreed, that the convention would make a suitable masters thesis topic. In 1947, while I was working on the thesis, Vernon Lane Wharton’s pioneering work, The Negro in Mississippi, 1865–1890, appeared in print, and suddenly I had found a dissertation topic, a study that would incorporate my thesis and try to do for South Carolina what Wharton had done for Mississippi.²⁰

Given the existence of Alrutheus A. Taylor’s study of The Negro in South Carolina during the Reconstruction, however, reinforced as it was by Francis B. Simkins and Robert Woody’s South Carolina during Reconstruction, I decided to pick up where they left off.²¹ As it turned out, the years from Reconstruction to the end of the century made a unit better defined than I had realized at first. Those were the years when South Carolina and other southern states adopted the new modus vivendi (Wharton’s term) of race relations, a move which reached its peak around the turn of the century. Those were the years during which the basic patterns of the new white supremacy were established: the disfranchisement, segregation, and economic dependency of African Americans became part of the southern landscape.

Now, at the turn of a new millennium, it is hard to recapture the sense of excitement that came from finding that segregation dated from much later than the foundations of the earth, that there were in fact people who could remember different practices—a point first driven home to me by a conversation with a black pharmacist who recalled when Charleston’s opera house, the Academy of Music, was first segregated just after the turn of the century. He never went there again, he said.

By the time of that interview, in the late 1940s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had long been challenging Jim Crow in the courts. My topic, it seemed, more and more had to do with live issues. If, in the past, law had changed behavior in one direction, it seemed plausible that it could change behavior in another. The claims of conservative sociologist William Graham Sumner and his followers notwithstanding, there was evidence that stateways had changed folkways, and rather quickly at that.²² The point was illustrated vividly by Pitchfork Ben Tillman himself. In 1895, on a train between Augusta and Columbia, Tillman explained his plans for disfranchisement to a black reporter seated beside him; three years later such an act would have put Tillman in violation of the new Jim Crow law. If you could not change hearts and minds with laws, as segregationists kept saying, clearly you could change behavior with laws. It had happened within living memory, and that in turn had a way of making new practices customary—to such a degree that earlier practices were soon forgotten.

Vernon Wharton, who in his Mississippi study was far ahead of other historians, also saw that he was dealing with live issues. In his 1939 dissertation preface, in the same words that appeared in the 1947 book, he wrote that no serious person could believe that Mississippi’s modus vivendi offered a final answer. In fact, there is abundant evidence that it is even now breaking down, and that the rate of the breakdown is increasing. If this be true, it is essential that more knowledge be gained of the forces that have been at work.²³

By the time I had finished my dissertation, the forces at work had become far more evident. In 1952, at the Knoxville meeting of the Southern Historical Association, I read a paper drawn from the chapter on The Color Line. That same month South Carolina Negroes, 1877–1900 appeared in print.

About three years after the book appeared, as I was drafting a proposal for a paper to be entitled Wanted: A History of Racial Segregation, somebody told me of having seen a notice of some lectures on the subject by C. Vann Woodward. I wrote Woodward to inquire, and I got in reply a set of page proofs for The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955), previously delivered as part of the Richards lecture series at the University of Virginia.²⁴ That book, appearing just as the Montgomery bus boycott was gaining national visibility for the civil rights movement, was later declared by Martin Luther King Jr. to be the Bible of the civil rights Movement.²⁵ Woodward gave generous credit to Wharton’s work and mine as major sources for his own.²⁶

To informed people today, of course, finding that race relations had a history is something like the hysterical discovery of the obvious. It did not seem so then. With new generations the origins of segregation had vanished from public memory as completely as if they had been thrust down that memory hole in George Orwell’s novel 1984.

At the mid-twentieth century though, segregation functioned as the most visible symbol of white supremacy, affording a daily reminder of black subjection. It became the prime target of attack in the courts and the growing attention it got bore out once again the truism that historians write out of a frame of reference. After the success of The Strange Career of Jim Crow, the genesis of segregation became a focus of historians and itself a subject of dispute.

When Wharton and I first looked into the subject, the startling discovery was not that a color line existed, but that there were so many breaches in it. Once the novelty wore off, however, other historians began to give more attention to evidence of widespread segregation both by choice and by private or legal imposition, and began to alter the research emphasis.

In 1961 Charles E. Wynes published the first study to question the fluidity of race relations that Wharton and Woodward and I had noticed. In Race Relations in Virginia, 1870–1902, Wynes wrote that while the Thirteenth Amendment made freedom a reality, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments assured blacks in practice neither equal protection of the laws nor the right to vote without impediment. With segregation and disfranchisement laws, blacks lost most of what they had gained, but in the world of social acceptance at hotels, inns, restaurants, bars, theaters, and other places of amusement,… the Virginia Negro had gained nothing which he could lose—despite occasional admission to such venues.²⁷

Then Joel R. Williamson took up the task of reworking the history of South Carolina’s Reconstruction and further challenged the new interpretation. He began his chapter on the color line with this: The physical separation of the races was the most revolutionary change in race relations between whites and Negroes in South Carolina during Reconstruction. It was, in practice, the beginning of a duo-chromatic order in the state.²⁸

The examples of separation which Williamson emphasized got a new assessment, in turn, with Howard N. Rabinowitz’s Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865–1890. Starting after emancipation, Rabinowitz argued, the rise of separate schools, churches, and other institutions could be seen as a step forward. Other writers’ emphasis on the alternatives of segregation and integration, Rabinowitz wrote, obscured the forgotten alternative, which was not integration, but exclusion.²⁹ The issue, he said, should not be merely when segregation first appeared, but what it replaced. Separate schools were better than no schools at all. Separate churches and businesses afforded training in management and a leadership free from white control.

Within a few years, however, discussions about the origins of segregation had run their course as curiosity about the subject faded along with the segregation itself. And Jim Crow’s years in power sank below the horizon of living memory just as their origins had done. Justice John Marshall Harlan in his dissent from the majority in Plessy v. Ferguson had said, The thin disguise of ‘equal’ accommodations … will not mislead any one, nor atone for the wrong this day done.³⁰ But more than 100 years later, according to a Zogby poll, it was still misleading a large minority of Americans aged 19 to 29: about 50 percent of young whites and about 40 percent of young blacks agreed that it’s okay if the races are basically separate from one another as long as everyone has equal opportunity.³¹

Along with new views on the origins of segregation in the various states, comparative histories of South Africa and Brazil have further enriched the literature on the subject, although the comparative studies generally offered more contrast than comparison. In South Africa the timing of apartheid was very different, and in Brazil race relations were less duo-chromatic than multi-chromatic along a broad scale from black to white.³²

If South Carolina Negroes, 1877–1900 has a claim on the title of Southern Classic, it lies less in the account of Jim Crow’s origins than in the rediscovery of a time and a people that had vanished from public memory. The chapter on the color line, after all, occupied only 12 pages of text in a total of 308. In its breadth of coverage the book emulated Wharton’s Negro in Mississippi. Both books pursued political history as well as changes in agriculture and other occupations, blacks’ legal status, disfranchisement, segregation and race relations, education, migration, religion, violence, crime, convict leasing, the black defective, and various aspects of social life. The central theme of both books was the evolution of white supremacy’s new modus vivendi before the turn of the twentieth century, and that involved patterns of life far more complex than the emergence of segregation in public facilities. More than that, separate but equal turned out in practice to be not only not equal but also not separate—blacks were commonly excluded from such public activities as concerts, lectures, motion pictures, and other entertainments.

The tapestry of black life in post-Reconstruction South Carolina shows mainly a picture of frustration, but there were some bright threads of progress and achievement. One salient instance was the story of Robert Smalls, the Gullah Statesman, who had freed himself from slavery, along with his family and others, by delivering a Confederate cargo ship to the Union navy outside Charleston harbor and then serving the Union as a pilot familiar with the waterways of the sea islands. After the war Smalls achieved a degree of independence as a landholder, buying up at bargain prices lands that had been forfeited for taxes. He lived out his life in his former master’s home and gave his former mistress a haven in one room of her old home.

In Smalls’s home county of Beaufort, Union occupation in 1862 brought what historian Willie Lee Rose called a rehearsal for reconstruction.³³ Republican political control lasted almost three decades (1868–1896), thanks to an overwhelming black majority. Both voters and officeholders were predominantly black, so much so that Pitchfork Ben Tillman scornfully dismissed the county as that little niggerdom. Smalls served in two constitutional conventions (1868 and 1895), in both houses of the state legislature, and in Congress. He finally stepped down from the post of Collector of Customs for the Port of Beaufort in 1913.

Politically active African Americans belonged to a vanguard of the black population and formed a fairly sizable group who had some agency in the larger society, especially in larger towns like Charleston, Columbia, Sumter, and Orangeburg (site of Claflin and South Carolina State College) and in two coastal towns, Beaufort and Georgetown.

Blacks who had developed skills in both free and slave occupations formed the basis of a merchant-artisan class. Barbering, which could be seen as a servile occupation, had been practically a black monopoly. Although white barbers eventually moved into the profession, several black barbershops serving whites still survived at mid-twentieth century. In the early 1900s a barber at one such shop in York, according to my grandfather, was particularly outspoken. Once he said, wielding his razor, that it looked like the white folks were taking over everything but barbering and the chain gang, and damned if he didn’t think they were going to take over those too.

Porters and waiters in restaurants held positions that whites were slower to take away, and black artisans who had learned skills as free Negroes or slaves competed with whites as carpenters, bricklayers, stone masons, shoemakers, and the like. Black women found employment more widely as domestics and washerwomen.

It was mainly in the skilled trades that a few unions sprang up in those days, among artisans and among longshoremen. There were few examples of interracial unity, and some examples of hostility between the races, but in 1886 Charleston bricklayers, white and black, paraded together in the streets—no doubt a rare sight then and an unlikely one after the turn of the century.

The trends in economics and in education increasingly consigned black people to traditional trades in the face of growing competition from white labor. So while black artisans clung ever more precariously to their hold on skilled trades, the newly developing jobs in industry were largely for whites only—except for such jobs as floor sweeping and heavy lifting on loading platforms. Cotton textile mills, then the premier growth industry, were quickly typecast as a white haven from a depressed agriculture. Discussion about the suitability of black labor for cotton mills generated more heat than light, and a few ill-supported experiments with black labor generated more failure than evidence of their suitability.

Churches and schools offered avenues of upward mobility for African Americans. Black churches required an educated ministry, and by the end of the century, four institutions of higher learning existed to meet black educational aspirations: in Orangeburg, Claflin College (Northern Methodist) and South Carolina State College (a black land-grant college), and in Columbia, Benedict College (American Baptist) and Allen University (African Methodist Episcopal). Allen for a short time boasted a law school headed by a black lawyer, Daniel Augustus Straker. For a time, at least token integration of their faculties existed.

Across the state a corps of black teachers sprang up in the public schools and in secondary schools. Public high schools were not common even for whites, but some black academies existed, products of post-Civil War missionary zeal. Increasingly, high schools for blacks were designated industrial schools. Meant to prepare blacks for the workplace opportunities available to them, vocational education was part of a policy that saw advanced education as out of place for blacks, but it also served as a way to camouflage the liberal arts and classical courses that were being smuggled back into the curriculum. Coeducation of the sexes in those years was far more common in black schools than in white.

Less numerous than the teachers were the black professionals who cropped up mainly in the towns. Some of them were migrants from the north, some were of free black backgrounds, and increasingly they were people of talent who had pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps. A sizable number of them had been at the University of South Carolina during its brief period of integration (1873–1877), when nearly all students and some faculty members were black.³⁴

With nothing but their labor to offer, however, most blacks became entrapped in the sharecropper/tenant and crop lien system. The laws governing the crop lien system became ever more severe, reaching their climax in lien and labor laws of 1889 and 1897, which gave the force of law to peonage. In 1907 the state supreme court struck down such laws as clearly unconstitutional, because they enforced involuntary servitude. But, as Congressman Thomas E. Miller had complained in 1891, farm workers struggled in a land where they receive little assistance from the courts and where juries are systematically formed to oppress them, where they work often on the promise to pay, where they receive no protection from the labor law.³⁵ Most South Carolina blacks had been remanded, to all effects and purposes, to a modified state of slavery.

And those who had escaped the tenancy and lien laws, those who had reason to see themselves as a vanguard of the freedmen, who had at least a modicum of education, who had become established in business, the professions, in education and the ministry, and those who continued to have at least a foothold in politics and some connection with the white leadership of the state and nation right on through much of the post-Reconstruction years—those who rode on trains that were segregated only by the relative costs of first and second-class coaches, all found that in the new century they had virtually no rights that the white man was bound to respect. Barriers were put firmly in place which made the twentieth-century an age of segregation and powerlessness for most blacks well beyond the mid-twentieth-century breaches in those barriers.

One of the two biographers of Robert Smalls wrote what may serve as an epitaph for the whole post-Reconstruction generation: He deserves better recognition for his accomplishments and should be hailed as an example to Americans of all races. He probably would have been more prominent in the memory of South Carolinians and in the South had not the post-Civil War society he helped to create been destroyed by the tide of reactionary forces.³⁶

That South Carolina Negroes, 1877–1900 reappears after a quarter century of reaction against civil rights gains, much like the quarter century of reaction against Reconstruction that was the subject of the book, is only fitting.³⁷ After fifty years, the book remains relevant to live issues.

NOTES

  1. See page 296 for reference to a gathering in Memphis in 1893 that canvassed various names and settled on Negro, capitalized.

  2. Howard K. Beale, On Rewriting Reconstruction History, American Historical Review 45 (July 1940): 807–27.

  3. John S. Reynolds, Reconstruction in South Carolina, 1865–1877 (Columbia, S.C.: The State Co., 1905) is the Dunning book for South Carolina, but not one of the best of its kind. The best overall presentation of the viewpoint is in E. Merton Coulter, The South during Reconstruction, 1865–1877, vol. 8, A History of the South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1947).

  4. W. E. B. Du Bois, Reconstruction and Its Benefits, American Historical Review 15 (July 1910): 781–89; Du Bois, Black Reconstruction: An Essay toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1935). The best overall presentation of new viewpoints is Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988).

  5. Everett Carter, "Cultural History Written with Lightning: The Significance of The Birth of a Nation," American Quarterly 12 (1960): 347–57; Lewis Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film: A Critical History (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1939), 175.

  6. Howard Fast, Freedom Road (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1944). A later edition includes a foreword by W. E. B. Du Bois and an introduction by Eric Foner (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1995). Fast’s presentation has a strongly Marxist slant. A television film of Freedom Road (1979), starring boxer Muhammad Ali, never achieved the notoriety or influence of The Birth of a Nation.

  7. Beale, On Rewriting Reconstruction History, 810.

  8. George Brown Tindall, The Negro in South Carolina after Reconstruction, 1877–1900 (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 1951).

  9. Or perhaps it was token segregation, since the one black classmate was given a room to himself while the others were housed six to a room. Otherwise, however, no segregation was imposed on activities, classes, or meals. The black officer candidate was Cecil F. Poole, later a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, 1979–1997, and now deceased.

10. Numan V. Bartley, The New South, 1945–1980, vol. 11, A History of the South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), 1–37.

11. Ibid., 38–73; Barbara S. Griffith, The Crisis of American Labor: Operation Dixie and the Defeat of the CIO (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988).

12. Bartley, The New South, 69.

13. Gunnar Myrdal, with the assistance of Richard Sterner and Arnold Rose, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy, 2 vols. (New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1944).

14. Ibid., xlvii.

15. Ibid., 466–73.

16. See page 53 for a tribute to Hampton by a former black congressman in 1927.

17. On the interracial movement see George B. Tindall, The Emergence of the New South, 1913–1945, vol. 10, A History of the South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967),