But there were other, more clever and more subtle ways of maintaining white supremacy than just putting a white sheet over one's head and going out and burning a cross on a lawn or hanging someone from the nearest tree limb. Of all the clever ways, the most direct was found, appropriately enough, by the state of Mississippi. Mississippi led the way, followed by many other Southern states, in holding a state constitutional convention to rewrite the constitution of the state in such a way that black influence in politics came to an end.

Voting Restrictions: In 1890, a new constitutional convention in the State of Mississippi wrote a new constitution in which there was a direct clause stating that Negroes were denied the right to vote because as long as they had voted, corruption, fraud, had characterized government in the state of Mississippi. There was a "purity" clause in the new constitution that said, "To restore purity to the governance of the state of Mississippi blacks must no longer be allowed to vote." There were some liberals, believe it or not, even in the state of Mississippi, who were outraged by this provision of the new Mississippi constitution, or, as it became known throughout the South and the nation, the Mississippi Plan. Those liberals brought suit against this new state constitution. The suit made its way to the Supreme Court of the United States. In 1897, a case entitled Williams v. Mississippi was heard and decided by the Supreme Court which, in its august wisdom, upheld the 1890 Mississippi Plan to deny African-Americans access to the vote.

An even more subtle way than the Mississippi Plan was set forth in the state of Louisiana. Louisiana, by the 1890s, like most states throughout the South (and some states elsewhere in the United States), tried to control voting, particularly the voting of its black population, but also the voting of its poor white population, by two means: either property tests (one had to own a certain amount of property and pay taxes on that property to be able to vote), or by literacy tests.

Finally, the leaders of Louisiana, eager to eliminate all black participation in politics, invented what came to be know as the Grandfather clause. In 1898, the state legislature passed this Grandfather clause. The clause said, "Literacy and property tests for registering to vote will not be given to any individuals whose fathers or whose grandfathers were legally entitled to vote on January 1st, 1867," right after the war. In Louisiana, no black man was legally entitled to vote on January 1st, 1867. Hence, the Grandfather clause, once adopted by the state, eliminated all black participation in politics.

Editorial cartoon of Plessy v. Ferguson case, which established the "separate but equal" principle Source: Cover of Brook Thomas's, "Plessy v. Ferguson," St. Martin's Press, 1996. ISBN: 0312137435

Segregation laws: From the middle-1880s every Southern state also adopted laws which required separate accommodations for blacks and whites in schools, separate accommodations on public transportation, separate accommodations in the courts, in the libraries, in cemeteries. Under the laws of every Southern state, no black man and no white man could even be put in the same insane asylum together. These laws, collectively, all came to be known as "Jim Crow" laws (Jim Crow was a caricature figure in the pre-Civil War South, an image of the kind of shiftless, plantation, Southern African-American). And so, collectively, these Southern state laws denying equal facilities to blacks became known as "Jim Crow" laws. The point that I want you to take away from this is that these Jim Crow laws defined, in a far more strict, legalistic manner, race relations between whites and blacks than even had existed in the years before the Civil War.

These Jim Crow laws became subject to a number of lawsuits. Those lawsuits made their way through the federal courts. The legality of Jim Crow legislation finally was tested in the Supreme Court of the United States in 1896. In one of the great landmark decisions given by the Court in the nineteenth century, a decision titled Plessy v. Ferguson*, the Supreme Court of the United States said that "separate but equal" facilities for blacks and whites was constitutional and legal in the United States. That separate but equal status would be challenged from time to time between 1896 and our own day. But, again, it was not until 1954 that the law of the land changed and a different Supreme Court struck down the separate but equal facility clause.

*The case came from Louisiana, which in 1890 passed the Separate Car Law, ordering that separate rail cars be provided for whites and blacks. In 1892, a black passenger, Homer Plessy, refused to sit in a Jim Crow car. He was brought before Judge John H. Ferguson of the Criminal Court for New Orleans. In the original trial, Plessy was found guilty, a decision upheld by the Louisiana Supreme Court. The law was then challenged in the U.S. Supreme Court on grounds that it conflicted with the 13th and 14th Amendments. 

Conclusion: The Thirteenth Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment, the Fifteenth Amendment had defined a new legal status, a new legal position. Jim Crow legislation, the Grandfather clause, the Mississippi Plan, and other schemes by Southerners had denied the validity of that new legal situation for African-Americans. And so, here, it seems to me that, in this sense, the so-called New South was more than ever the Old South. So, when Henry Grady, in 1886, painted in glowing terms this rise of the New South, he was, in reality, only setting forth an advertising brochure. In some ways, to be sure, especially in industrial advancement, the South had the appearance of being a new section, even though all of that industrial development affected only about fifteen percent of the total population of the South by 1900. In race relations, the situation was the same or, in many respects, worse than it had been in the years before the war. Henry Grady had provided only a plain brown wrapper for an old book. Oh, by 1900, the cast of the characters of this old book had changed, but the plot remained the same, and each chapter heading began with the words, "white supremacy." And so, in many respects, the New South, as advertised by Grady and others, was a myth--a self-serving myth built by Southerners eager for profit, eager for industrial advancement, eager to forget, as we can understand, the pains and tragedy of war.

But, while this myth of the New South was rising across the land, another myth was being created elsewhere in the nation. The myth of a place called "The Old West." And, the story of the Old West is, of course, fascinating, and at the core of our popular culture. It's an extraordinarily important story. How important? So important, that we'll take it up in our next lecture.

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