by H. W. Brands
Washington liked to say that what he knew of public speaking he learned from General Armstrong, who told him: “Give them an idea for every word.” Washington briefly thanked the organizers of the exposition for including him in the program and then launched directly into his theme: the inescapable connection between the races in the South. “One-third of the population of the South is of the Negro race,” he said. “No enterprise seeking the material, civil, or moral welfare of this section can disregard this element of our population and reach the highest success.” It was fitting, he continued, that he should be speaking at an exposition celebrating business enterprise, for therein lay the future of both races in the South. Blacks had sometimes lost sight of this fact. “Ignorant and inexperienced, it is not strange that in the first years of our new life we began at the top instead of at the bottom; that a seat in Congress or the state legislature was more sought than real estate or industrial skill; that the political convention or stump speaking had more attractions than starting a dairy farm or truck garden.” But blacks had learned, and they now were putting first things first.
Like the lay preacher he was, Washington wrapped his message in a story.
A ship lost at sea for many days suddenly sighted a friendly vessel. From the mast of the unfortunate vessel was seen a signal, “Water, water; we die of thirst!” The answer from the friendly vessel at once came back, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” A second time the signal, “Water, water; send us water!” ran up from the distressed vessel, and was answered, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” And a third and a fourth signal for water was answered, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” The captain of the distressed vessel, at last heeding the injunction, cast down his bucket, and it came up full of fresh, sparkling water from the mouth of the Amazon River.
The story had a moral for both the races. Some blacks, despairing of improvement in the South, were leaving the region for the North and West and even other countries; others sought to create a wholly separate sphere for blacks within the South. To them Washington said, “Cast down your bucket where you are—cast it down in making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded. Cast it down in agriculture, mechanics, in commerce, in domestic service, and in the professions.” Those who did so would discover a secret of the South: “Whatever other sins the South may be called to bear, when it comes to business pure and simple, it is in the South that the Negro is given a man’s chance in the commercial world.” The current exposition, which showcased the accomplishments of blacks as well as whites, attested to this truth. Yet it bore repeating. “Our greatest danger is that in the great leap from slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by the productions of our hands, and fail to keep in mind that we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labor, and put brains and skill into the common occupations of life; shall prosper in proportion as we learn to draw the line between the superficial and the substantial, the ornamental gewgaws of life and the useful. No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.”
The moral for whites was similar. Some white employers were looking to foreign immigrants to fill the mines and mills of the South. “Were I permitted, I would repeat what I say to my own race,” Washington declared. “Cast down your bucket where you are. Cast it down among the eight millions of Negroes whose habits you know, whose fidelity and love you have tested in days when to have proved treacherous meant the ruin of your firesides. Cast down your bucket among these people who have, without strikes and labor wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, builded your railroads and cities, and brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth.” Whites would never regret such a vote of confidence in blacks. “You and your families will be surrounded by the most patient, faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful people that the world has seen. As we have proved our loyalty to you in the past, in nursing your children, watching by the sick-bed of your mothers and fathers, and often following them with tear-dimmed eyes to their graves, so in the future, in our humble way, we shall stand by you with a devotion that no foreigner can approach, interlacing our industrial, commercial, civil, and religious life with yours in a way that shall make the interests of both races one.” At this point Washington raised his hand high, with fingers outstretched, then drew it dramatically toward him as he clutched his fingers together. “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”
This was the image and the message that stuck in the minds of everyone present. Yet Washington wasn’t quite finished. He had been allotted ten minutes and he meant to use them. He stressed again the shared fate of blacks and whites in the South. “Nearly sixteen millions of hands will aid you in pulling the load upward, or they will pull against you the load downward,” he told his white listeners. “We shall constitute one-third and more of the ignorance and crime of the South, or one-third its intelligence and progress; we shall contribute one-third to the business and industrial prosperity of the South, or we shall prove a veritable body of death, stagnating, depressing, retarding every effort to advance the body politic.”
To the whites, but equally to the blacks, he declared, “The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing.” Again affirming his faith in the redemptive power of capitalism, Washington asserted, “No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized. It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of these privileges. The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera-house.” Washington spoke of capitalism as akin to religion. “Here bending, as it were, over the altar that represents the results of the struggles of your race and mine …,” he said of the exposition, “I pledge that in your effort to work out the great and intricate problem which God has laid at the doors of the South, you shall have at all times the patient, sympathetic help of my race.” With God’s blessing, the white race and the black race, working together, would bring to the South “a new heaven and a new earth.”30
JOHN MARSHALL HARLAN had his own views about race and capitalism, and they were rather surprising for one of his background. Harlan’s father had named him John Marshall for the great chief justice, whose Southern origins and nationalist sentiments the elder Harlan shared. Harlan senior was a Kentucky contemporary and close friend of Henry Clay, with whom he served in Congress; like Clay he owned slaves but never became an apologist for the peculiar institution (at a time when John Calhoun and others were extolling slavery as a boon to both the white and the black races). The younger Harlan owned slaves briefly but was even less enamored than his father of the institution. After studying law at Transylvania College in Lexington, John Marshall Harlan joined his father’s law practice and might have followed him into the Whig party, but the Whigs fell apart amid the sectional troubles of the early 1850s, prompting Harlan (and his father) to seek refuge in the American, or Know-Nothing, party. Harlan won his first elective office, a county judgeship, as a Know-Nothing. Yet that party, too, dissolved, and Harlan migrated to the Constitutional Unionists and eventually the Republicans. During the Civil War he served as an officer in the Union army and became a friend of fellow Kentuckian Benjamin Bristow, Grant’s treasury secretary. Harlan was a delegate to the 1876 Republican national convention, at which his well-timed shift to Rutherford Hayes helped the Ohioan win the nomination. Hayes returned the favor by appointing Harlan to the Supreme Court seat vacated in the postelection maneuvering. As a Southerner, Harlan suited Hayes’s policy of reconcilia
tion, but as a Republican he didn’t alienate the rest of the GOP.
Harlan’s thinking on race shifted with the changing times. During the war’s early going he argued that Kentucky should secede if Lincoln imposed emancipation on the state. He called the Emancipation Proclamation unconstitutional and initially condemned the Reconstruction amendments as “a complete revolution in our republican government.” Blacks, he said, were inferior to whites and should be kept in a subordinate position. But by the time he ran for Kentucky governor in 1871 on the Republican ticket he was disavowing his previous positions. “There is no man on this continent …,” he said, “who rejoices more than I do at the extinction of slavery.”31
He lost this race (and another in 1875) but didn’t abandon his new convictions, and after he joined the Supreme Court he gained a reputation as the regular odd man out—to the point that his fellow justices teased him for his chronic “dissent-ery.” He stood alone against the other eight in the Civil Rights Cases of 1883, which struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875. The majority held that Congress had overstepped by barring private discrimination (albeit in public conveyances and accommodations); the Fourteenth Amendment, the majority said, forbade only state discrimination. “It does not authorize Congress to create a code of municipal law for the regulation of private rights,” Associate Justice Joseph Bradley wrote. Harlan dismissed this reasoning as sophistry. The point of Reconstruction, he said, and in particular of the Thirteenth Amendment, had been not simply to end slavery but to remove the “burdens and disabilities which constitute badges of slavery and servitude.” The drafters of the Thirteenth Amendment had recognized that African Americans, given their history as slaves, might require special protection. “Congress, therefore, under its express power to enforce that amendment by appropriate legislation, may enact laws to protect that people against the deprivation, on account of their race, of any civil rights enjoyed by other freemen.… Such legislation may be of a direct and primary character.”32
The 1883 decision encouraged Southern states to experiment with new forms of discrimination—to write, among other laws and regulations, the municipal codes Justice Bradley denied to Congress. Much of daily intercourse between the races was governed by custom and followed patterns decades in place. Whites generally associated with whites and blacks with blacks. In those areas where interaction was unavoidable—in commerce, for example—contact was often brief and clearly a matter of business. Black customers might patronize white department stores, and white customers black barbers, and no one feel threatened or unusually demeaned. In certain public places and events, the races could associate quite freely. Charles Dudley Warner, Mark Twain’s friend and collaborator, traveled to New Orleans for a business exposition in 1885 and remarked the easy interaction between the races. “On ‘Louisiana Day’ in the Exposition, the colored citizens took their full share of the parade and the honors,” Warner wrote. “Their societies marched with the others, and the races mingled on the grounds in unconscious equality of privileges.” Even observers attuned to discrimination could be hard pressed to find it. T. McCants Stewart, the African American lawyer, had been born in South Carolina but was living in Boston when he decided, in 1885, to return to his native state as part of a larger tour of the South. “On leaving Washington, D.C., I put a chip on my shoulder and inwardly dared any man to knock it off,” he wrote. His railcar filled up; passengers had to sit on their luggage. “I fairly foamed at the mouth, imagining that the conductor would order me into a seat occupied by a colored lady so as to make room for a white passenger.” But the conductor said nothing, and the black and white passengers crowded elbow to knee. Stewart continued to Columbia, South Carolina, where the tolerant atmosphere astonished him. “I feel about as safe here as in Providence, R.I.,” he wrote. “I can ride in first class cars on the railroads and in the streets. I can go into saloons and get refreshments even as in New York. I can stop in and drink a glass of soda and be more politely waited upon than in some parts of New England.” In other Southern cities the situation was much the same. No one harassed him; whites struck up conversations with him apparently oblivious to his color. “I think the whites of the South,” he concluded, “are really less afraid to have contact with colored people than the whites of the North.”33
Yet the situation changed, for several reasons. The political campaign to disfranchise black voters fostered, indeed almost required, an increasingly rigid ideology of white superiority. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments might be nullified in Southern practice, but not without emotional effort. Meanwhile the emergence of Southern industry, at a time of labor strife nationally, disposed white employers toward any measures that would weaken the bargaining power of their black workers. Marginalizing the black race as a whole served the capitalists’ purpose well. Similarly, the development of an agrarian protest movement gave opponents of the protesters an incentive to try to split the movement along racial lines, as some attempted with the Lodge elections bill. Finally, at the level of mere logistics, the spread of railroads across the South put blacks and whites in closer contact for longer periods of time than most had ever experienced.
As it happened, the railroads were where much of the new discrimination—the Jim Crow system, named for a black caricature—was first formalized. In 1890 Louisiana adopted a law “to promote the comfort of passengers on railway trains”; the crucial clause mandated “equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races.” Like nearly all such legislation, this measure was race-neutral on its face; whites could no more sit in black cars than blacks could sit in white cars. And there were exceptions: black nurses attending white children might ride in the white cars (and, theoretically, vice versa). But the intent of the law was as plain as that of the other laws curtailing African American rights. And it was emphasized by the cinders and ash that blew into the black cars, which were placed in the least desirable spot in the trains, just behind the locomotives.34
Louisiana wasn’t the first state to pass a segregationist railroad law. Florida had done so in 1887, Mississippi in 1888, and Texas in 1889. Other states were poised to follow. But Louisiana’s circumstances were unusual. As Charles Warner had noted just five years earlier, the races in Louisiana mingled more freely than in many other Southern states (and, indeed, than in several Northern states). The descendants of the gens de couleur libres—the free blacks of French heritage and culture—were accorded respect denied to most African Americans elsewhere. If legally enforced segregation took root in Louisiana, it could spring up anywhere.35
For this reason advocates of racial equality determined to challenge the Louisiana law. “We’ll make a case, a test case, and bring it before the federal courts,” wrote Louis Martinet, the editor of the leading black paper in Louisiana, the New Orleans Crusader. A committee of prominent Louisiana African Americans was formed, and funds were solicited. Northern civil rights advocates offered to help. Albion Tourgée, a New York lawyer who had carpetbagged in North Carolina during Reconstruction, winning a seat on the state’s superior court, wrote Martinet volunteering his services. Tourgée suggested having a woman, nearly white in appearance but black by Louisiana law, sit in a white coach. She would make a sympathetic defendant, he reasoned.36
Martinet replied that things were more complicated in Louisiana than Tourgée realized. “It would be quite difficult to have a lady too nearly white refused admission to a ‘white’ car,” Martinet said. “There are the strangest white people you ever saw here. Walking up and down our principal thoroughfare—Canal Street—you would be surprised to have persons pointed out to you, some as white and others as colored, and if you were not informed you would be sure to pick out the white for colored and the colored for white. Besides, people of tolerably fair complexion, even if unmistakably colored, enjoy here a large degree of immunity from the accursed prejudice.” If Martinet and the committee were to have their test case, they might have to announce the presence of the intruder in the white car
and insist on his or her black identity.37
Things came to that, but not at once. Even while debating the skin tone of their test subject, Martinet and the committee had trouble finding a railroad that enforced the separate-car law. The railroad corporations were agnostic on the morality of segregation but didn’t like its impact on their bottom lines. The separate cars were expensive to operate, and the law alienated black passengers, some of whom threatened a boycott. In time the committee found a company willing to enforce the law, in the hope—of the company no less than the committee—of having the law overturned. Daniel Desdunes, the son of a member of the committee, boarded a train at New Orleans bound for Mobile. He sat in the white car, was told to relocate, refused, and was arrested. Tourgée came from New York to direct the case, which ascended through the lower Louisiana courts to the state supreme court, where it intersected another case, brought by the Pullman Palace Car Company and alleging that the Louisiana law infringed the commerce clause of the Constitution. The Louisiana high court agreed, voiding the law as it applied to interstate travel. Because Desdunes was bound for Alabama, the charge against him was dismissed.38
On their next try the New Orleans committee made sure the test passenger bought an intrastate ticket. Homer Plessy later described himself as seven-eighths Caucasian and one-eighth African; he commonly passed for white in New Orleans. In June 1892 he purchased a ticket from New Orleans to Covington, Louisiana, on the East Louisiana Railroad. Either at the time of purchase or when he sat down in the white car, Plessy identified himself as a black man. By agreement, the conductor asked him to move; he refused and was arrested.