Week 10 Day 2 Recap

Today, we finished the Reconstruction notes. We talked about the rise of Jim Crow segregation and its effect on economics, politics, and social structure.

• Economics: The southern economy was based on agriculture and therefore on cheap labor. Before the Civil War, the slaves had acted as this labor; now, this workforce became more dependent on sharecropping. Sharecropping was a system where white plantations would be divided up and free blacks or poor whites would work on the farm and give part of their yield to the white plantation owners. This led to crop-lien, or a credit system where sharecroppers would get their supplies and food on credit from local merchants. Southern prisons came up with a system called convict – lease, where prisons would rent out their prisoners to work and collect the money for themselves. This was basically slavery all over again. All of this understandably led to lack of opportunities for blacks, and though they were technically free, they were still oppressed and looked down on by whites.
• Politics: 
• The Civil Rights Act of 1875: This law was a landmark for racial equality. It said discrimination and racism were not allowed in any public accommodation. This was supposed to ensure that everyone would be treated equally under the law.
• Civil Rights Cases of 1883 and the 14^th Amendment: Many people didn’t like the Civil Rights Act and claimed they should be allowed to do whatever they wanted and that the government should not be able to stop them. One key argument these people used was that the 14^th Amendment only talked about the states, not the people. This, they said, meant individual people could do what they wanted. This went to the Supreme Court, who ruled that the Civil Rights Act was unconstitutional and that people should be able to do whatever they want and act however they want.
• Plessy v. Ferguson (1896): This famous case involved a partially black man named Homer Plessy who sat in the white area of a train. He was kicked off and sued the train owner, Ferguson. The Supreme Court ruled that as long as black and white facilities are equal, it is okay if they’re separate. This essentially put segregation into law. It also presented many problems – the term “equal” is very subjective and can be interpreted in many different ways.

•  Social: White supremacists used terror to keep people in line. They used lynching, an extralegal activity, to enforce social laws and take the law into their own hands. This instilled in people the concept of segregation and got many whites to believe that blacks are second-class and don’t deserve fairer treatment.
• The Black Response: There are two famous blacks who tried to stop the subjugation of their race: Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois. Washington believed that the easiest place for blacks to gain power was economically. As a southerner, he knew the dangers of standing up to white supremacists and thought blacks should build an economic base of power before challenging the political base. DuBois believed that blacks could only defeat segregation by gaining political power. As a northerner, DuBois did not fully understand how dangerous this could be.