The Forgotten Career of Jim Crow
On the Origins of White Supremacy
November 29, 2024
There is a consistent vein running through both popular and many academic accounts of white supremacy. White supremacy—those social systems which (re)produce racial inequalities—is treated as the “normal” way by which American society operates. When one iteration of white supremacy ends (say, slavery) a new iteration automatically takes its place (Jim Crow). This, for instance, is the thesis of the extraordinarily influential book The New Jim Crow: one regime of white supremacy ends and a “new” version takes its place. White supremacy is treated as if it were “natural.” There were and are simply no alternatives: American society will always revert and adapt itself to the accommodation of white supremacy, even after it is successfully challenged in one form.
This understanding is, of course, wrong in the particulars and politically dangerous. White supremacist social systems often take decades to calcify; until that calcification, they tend to be extremely unstable and unevenly accepted. The fact that the wide acceptance of each major iteration of white supremacy required an immense amount of political and economic effort strongly suggests there were, as historian C. Vann Woodward has written, “forgotten alternatives.” Failing to acknowledge that creating a durable white supremacist regime is a process that can fail obscures the fact that white supremacy is often strongly and popularly resisted and—perhaps more importantly—obscures the identity and the reasons of those who initiate and nourish white supremacy. Are all white Americans equally responsible for the perpetuation of white supremacy? Do class interests play a role?
Populism and the Origins of Jim Crow
The first state laws disenfranchising Black male voters in the US South were not passed until the mid to late-1880s (see Table 1). Most southern states did not have a law designed to disenfranchise Black men until the early 1900s. Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court case ultimately resulting in the constitutionality of “separate but equal” Jim Crow laws, was not decided until 1896. For years after this decision, it was not uncommon for public accommodations to be racially integrated in the South and integrated railroad cars were the rule, rather than the exception, until the 1900s. Residential segregation by race was consistently and substantially lower in southern cities compared to Northern cities until the middle of the twentieth century.
Slavery was abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865; federal oversight of southern politics through radical Reconstruction formally ended with the Compromise of 1877 and the election of Rutherford B. Hayes to the presidency.
Patently, Jim Crow was not an immediate consequence of the abolition of slavery or even of Reconstruction. When Jim Crow did rear its ugly head, it did so more than a generation after the abolition of slavery—in most Southern states decades after the end of Reconstruction—and consisted of an uneven patchwork of state laws. If Jim Crow wasn’t an automatic response of southern society to reestablish white supremacy after the abolition of slavery, then, what was it? Answering this question requires a nuanced understanding of post-Civil War economic arrangements, political alliances, and working-class grievances.
After the Civil War, despite New South boosterism and an increase in manufacturing, the South continued to be dominated by single-crop (cotton) agriculture. The massive loss of land and wealth wrought by the South’s defeat resulted in a nearly universal reliance on credit, typically derived from recent arrivals from the North. These Northerners became large-scale landowners, or (more lucratively) “merchants” who monopolized the sale of essential commodities, from foodstuff, to fertilizer, seeds, tools, and livestock. Typically cashless, southern farmers would purchase what they needed from these merchants on credit—credit that was ultimately granted by the merchant. Interest rates of 100 to 200 percent were not uncommon. The next year’s crop yield was customarily used as collateral on the loan (the crop-lien). Given outrageous interest rates it was virtually impossible to pay off the loan with the sale of the next year’s crops, forcing the farmer to take out another line of credit to pay off the old loan, while borrowing even more principal to prepare for the next planting season. In this way the southern farmer—from the small-scale landowner to the sharecropper, Black and white—became both indentured to the merchant and unfathomably impoverished. Downward mobility was the rule, as even the most frugal and productive small-scale landowners eventually became tenant farmers, then sharecroppers. Child mortality was monstrously high, life expectancy shockingly short, and the quality of life made death a welcome relief. 1See, for example, Michael Schwartz, Radical Protest and Social Structure: The Southern Farmers Alliance and Cotton Tenancy, 1880–1890 (New York: Academic Press, 1976); Connie L. Lester, Up from the Mudsills of Hell: The Farmers’ Alliance, Populism, and Progressive Agriculture in Tennessee, 1870–1915 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006); C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South: 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971); Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978).
By the late 1870s, farmers in Texas—the population of Texas would triple from 1860 to 1880, as farmers from other southern states unsuccessfully searched for an escape from the crop-lien—organized what would eventually be known as the Farmers’ Alliance, a cross between a mass social movement, a labor union, and a farmers’ cooperative. The Farmers’ Alliance’s demands were broad, and their sense of working-class solidarity extremely wide. Consistent in their demands, though, was an end to the exploitation of all who labor. As their 1892 platform read: “Wealth belongs to him who creates it, and every dollar taken from industry without an equivalent is robbery. ‘If any will not work, neither shall he eat.’ The interests of rural and civic labor are the same; their enemies are identical.”2The People’s Party of America, “The Omaha Platform of 1892,” available at https://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5361/, accessed November 25, 2024. In short, rural (agricultural) and civic (industrial) workers create all value, capitalists and merchants derive their well-being from paying workers less than the value they create (robbery), and, as such, they are the united working class’s enemy.
Initially, the Farmer’s Alliance attempted to sidestep politics to achieve their immediate goal of ending the crop-lien through cooperative selling and cooperative stores. The Alliance—with a peak total membership in the millions, and roughly 1.2 million Black members separately organized in the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Cooperative Union—opened warehouses throughout the South where farmers sold their crops cooperatively, under the assumption that they would receive better prices than if they sold the crop independently. While these warehouses were modestly successful, they did not meaningfully address the crux of the farmers’ problem: the merchant as the sole source of credit. The Alliance attempted to establish a cooperative borrowing system, but itself needed credit if it were to begin to loan money to its members. No major bank found this to be a particularly prudent investment, and the cooperative borrowing scheme failed.
This failure, though, generated rank-and-file support for a politicized Alliance, and the farmers soon drafted and democratically endorsed a platform of revolutionary demands. Beyond old-school greenbacker demands—deviating from the gold standard would increase inflation, thereby lessening the debts farmers owed—the Alliance demanded government ownership of the means of transportation and communication, thereby nationalizing perhaps the most lucrative American industry, the railroads. They demanded federal laws to protect the right to strike and organize a labor union—the Alliance provided material support to the Knights of Labor in the massive Great Southwest Strike of 1886, and the Knights would eventually endorse the Alliance’s platform wholescale. They also attracted, and were influenced by, a large Black membership by supporting a federal antilynching law, as well as an end to the convict lease. They were also likely the largest organization up to that point to support women’s suffrage. Perhaps the most revolutionary of their demands was the “sub-treasury plan,” which would transform and decommodify capitalist agriculture in the South. Under this plan, the federal government would build warehouses (sub-treasuries) in rural areas across the South. Farmers would take their crops to the sub-treasury and store it until prices were satisfactorily high. Before the final sale, though, the US government would give 80 percent of the final sale price to the farmer (at 1 percent interest), so the farmer could begin planting the next season’s crop. In this way, the Alliance hoped, the federal government could generalize and maintain small-scale farm ownership, while eliminating landlords and the hated merchant.
The Alliance entered politics by endorsing both Democrats and Republicans that would, in turn, endorse the Alliance’s platform. In 1890, Alliance-endorsed candidates swept state elections throughout the South: The Alliance elected the governor and half of both houses of the state legislature in Tennessee; they claimed more than half of the Alabama state legislature and a US Senator; in Georgia, Alliance-endorsed candidates won the governorship and an overwhelming majority of all other state offices. The story was much the same throughout the South. Overall, the Alliance held a majority in eight state legislatures, there were six Alliance-endorsed Southern governors, and fifty US congressmen. The problem, however, was that most of these “Alliance politicians” were completely uncommitted to the Alliance platform and exploited the Alliance’s popularity opportunistically. The Alliance called for all Alliance-endorsed elected officials to only support legislation or the selection of legislative leadership (that is, Speaker of the House) if they were explicitly in line with the Alliance’s platform. Only one Alliance-endorsed congressman actually did this. Radicals in the movement called for a clean break from both of the major parties and the formation of a third party. By 1892, the People’s Party (or the Populist Party), using an expanded and far more radical sounding Farmers’ Alliance platform, started participating in state and national elections.
White supremacist social systems often take decades to calcify; until that calcification, they tend to be extremely unstable and unevenly accepted. The fact that the wide acceptance of each major iteration of white supremacy required an immense amount of political and economic effort strongly suggests there were, as historian C. Vann Woodward has written, “forgotten alternatives.”
The Populists’ electoral strategy was to unite urban and rural working-class voters under the same party, while also uniting workers on the basis of interracial solidarity. The party’s goal was to eliminate the unfettered exploitation of the industrial worker, shatter the merchant’s stranglehold of the Southern farmer, and—as Populist leader and eventual vice-presidential candidate, Tom Watson put it—“wipe out the color line.” This strategy ended up being extraordinarily successful. Despite widespread voter intimidation, violence, lynching, and fraud, the Populists swept the major parties out of office. In 1894, the Populists took control of both houses of the legislature in North Carolina; Democrats were effectively eliminated as a political force in most counties in Alabama; they elected forty-seven state representatives in Georgia. Much like the former success of Alliance-endorsed Democrats and Republicans, Populists won the region. The party’s presidential nominee received over one million votes, and won the electoral votes of four states.
As the party of the Southern ruling class, the Democrats were mortified by these results. They first responded with violent repression. In Georgia alone, at least fifteen Black Populists were killed by Democrats while trying to vote in the election of 1892. In one illustrative case, one of Tom Watson’s most popular supporters, the Black minister H. S. Doyle, was threatened with lynching while campaigning on Watson’s behalf. Doyle fled to Watson’s home for protection, while upwards of 2,000 armed Populists surrounded the home for two nights to ensure Doyle’s safety. Forty armed Populists accompanied Doyle for the rest of the campaign.
In spite of this, the Democrats knew that ballot-stuffing and lynching would not dispel the Populist insurgency. Ultimately, they turned to the strategy the Democratic Party has used to eliminate every progressive social movement since: adopting and coopting the least radical or potentially transformative demand of the social movement. For the Populists, that demand was for the coinage of silver. The Populists supported essentially any attempt to devalue US currency, arguing that deflation favors lenders and banks while inflation favors debtors and workers. The coinage of silver—the least radical way to induce inflation (given the fact that the United States was still on the gold standard)—was officially adopted as part of the Democratic Party’s platform and the most famous free silver Democrat, William Jennings Bryan, was chosen as the Democrats’ presidential nominee for 1896.
On the national level, the Bryan campaign failed, losing decisively to William McKinley. But this was not the primary goal. The Democrats were able to attract a sufficient number of former Populist voters to rip control away from the Populists at the state level. Once back in control of state legislatures, Democrats would immediately call a convention to amend or rewrite the state constitution with the main goal of disenfranchising the Populist’s electoral base. The new state constitutions would include some combination of literacy or landownership requirements as well as a poll tax. These requirements disenfranchised what amounted to the South’s entire Black-male voting population. However, for many Democrats, the Black voter was neither the sole, nor even most important target of disenfranchisement: the poor white Populist was. As one delegate at the Virginia state constitutional convention said, it is “not the negro vote which works the harm…but the depraved and incompetent men of our own race.” Or, in the words of a poll tax proponent in Louisiana: “[The poll tax] reduces the electorate and places the political control of the State in the hands not of a minority of the voters alone, but of the minority of whites…the poll tax gets rid of most of the negro votes [and] it gets rid of a great many whites at the same time—in fact a majority of them.”3Woodward, Origins of the New South, 336. Disenfranchisement in the South was a consciously calculated act explicitly meant to eliminate those most attracted to the Populist’s message: Black and white workers. No disenfranchisement law was passed in any Southern state before the state experienced a successful electoral insurgency from either the Farmers’ Alliance or the Populist Party, save for Mississippi, whose legislature acted preemptively and whose laws were mimicked throughout the South following the Populist insurgency.
After its base was thoroughly denuded, the Populist Party died a death of attrition. Those Populists who remained politically active broke into two camps: a large right wing, and a minuscule left wing. The left-wingers typically fell into some flavor of socialism. For instance, Eugene V. Debs, a Populist Party member in the 1890s who had been floated as a possible Populist presidential candidate on multiple occasions, would go on to help found the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and repeatedly run as a perennial presidential candidate for the Socialist Party. Clarence Darrow, a founder of the Populist Party of Illinois and a Populist congressional candidate, would become one of the most important labor lawyers of the twentieth century and defend the likes of IWW leader, Big Bill Haywood. In a stroke of historic irony, Darrow would act as the defense lawyer in the Scopes Monkey Trial—where a high school teacher in Tennessee was accused of the at-the-time illegal act of teaching the theory of human evolution. The prosecution would be led by William Jennings Bryan.
The much larger right-wing breakaway, typified by the once-radical Tom Watson, would blame the Black worker for Populism’s defeat.4C. Vann Woodward, Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 370–486. Many white Populists believed, typically correctly,5See, for example, Woodward, Origins of the New South, 346–49. that Populists lost many elections throughout the South because wealthy Democrats paid or violently compelled Black voters to vote for Democrats. Rather than blaming the wealthy Democrats for the fraud, white Populists generally blamed the Black voter. Some prominent white Populists went so far as to support both the poll tax and literacy and landownership qualifications for voting if it meant eliminating the Black voter; if it also eliminated the poor white voter, so be it. Realizing that wealthier—landowning or sufficiently affluent—former Populists could be seduced to support the Democratic Party by punishing the “cause” of Populism’s defeat, Democratic Party-controlled state legislatures throughout the South would pass a series of laws which would collectively be known as “Jim Crow.” As if disenfranchising the poor white and Black worker was not enough, the final nail in Southern agrarian radicalism’s coffin would be the concerted effort to blame and degrade the Black worker for all of the region’s problems.
Tom Watson, the most radical Populist leader—who once valiantly fought for racial equality in the South, organized an antilynch mob to forcefully repel racial violence, and attracted Black and white supporters through his insistence that “[workers] are deceived and blinded that you may not see how this race antagonism perpetuates a monetary system which beggars both”—would eventually lean into Jim Crow with an enthusiasm he once reserved for ending the convict lease, providing subsidized schooling for Black children, or outlawing the strikebreaking Pinkerton Agency. Watson became a kingmaker in Georgia, handpicking governors, senators, and congressmen so long as they shared his disdain for the Black worker, Catholics, immigrants, and Jews. His political and popular promotion of racism and xenophobia through his editorship of the most popular newspapers and magazines in the state has led many to blame Watson for the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in Stone Mountain, Georgia in 1915. Watson argued the Black voter was responsible for Populism’s defeat, while the new non-Protestant immigrant stained American soil by lowering wages and stealing jobs from native white workers. Watson would be elected to the US Senate in 1921 as a Democrat and died the following year.
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As W.E.B. Du Bois has convincingly argued, the emancipation of slaves was a result of a “general strike” of the enslaved during the Civil War. Slaves refused to work during the war en masse, and materially if not militarily aided the invading Union Army.6W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880 (New York: Free Press, [1935] 1998). It was the slaves that forced emancipation on the North as a condition of victory, as the Northern political class had no intention of freeing the slaves in the South, only in ensuring slavery would not spread further west. The enslaved freed themselves. This was the political reality the Southern ruling class had to face after the Civil War. They were unsuccessful in their attempt to re-enslave the Black population and were doubly unsuccessful in their attempt to replace the formerly enslaved with indentured coolie labor, which was successful in other post-emancipation societies like Jamaica. They were also unsuccessful in establishing “normal” capitalist agriculture, in which the landowner could hire and fire agricultural workers at will. Both poor whites and the newly emancipated preferred some semblance to landownership, even if it meant tenancy and sharecropping.
In this postemancipation South, poor white workers and Black workers often found more in common with each other than difference. Full-scale disenfranchisement or segregation of the Black Southerner was neither politically feasible (given the empowerment of the Black voter), nor politically desirable to the poor white worker (with whom they organized and voted with). That is, until the Southern ruling class found it both expedient and possible to disenfranchise workers from both races and scapegoat and punish the Black population for all of the South’s ills, ensuring their own hegemony.
The Populist movement should teach those of us on the US left a few things. First, there are multiple examples of successful mass interracial working-class movements in the US South. Southerners are not naturally or culturally predisposed to choosing white racial solidarity over working-class solidarity. They have been beaten into submission and their radicalism repeatedly coopted to ensure long-term docility. Second, the South is key to the perpetuation of capitalism in the US, primarily through its ruling class’s invention and diffusion of white supremacist institutions that divide and conquer the working class. Finally, in dismissing the Southern worker as an impediment to a more progressive future, we overlook those “forgotten alternatives” that were once, and can be again, the Southern workers’ dream.
Table 1: Year of Black Male Disenfranchisement:
Former Confederate States
| Florida | 1885 |
| Tennessee | 1889 |
| Mississippi | 1890 |
| Arkansas | 1891 |
| South Carolina | 1895 |
| Louisiana | 1898 |
| North Carolina | 1900 |
| Alabama | 1901 |
| Texas | 1901 |
| Virginia | 1902 |
| Georgia | 1908 |