Consolidating Support for a Law “Incapable of Enforcement”: Segregation on Tennessee Streetcars, 1900–1930

Abstract

On September 19, 1905, a Shelby County Criminal Court grand jury in Memphis, Tennessee, indicted Mary Morrison for violating state's recently enacted streetcar segregation statute. The indictment charged that ten days earlier, Morrison, an African American, had boarded a car of Memphis Street Railway Company and refused to take a seat designated for colored passengers. Her trial, four months later, attracted attention throughout state, with Tennessee's white press--which described Morrison as belonging to society element of her race--reporting that she had violated law to test its constitutionality. After court decided against Morrison and fined her $25 penalty provided by statute, she appealed. Though a number of whites feared her challenge would become streetcar segregation's undoing, her suit was unsuccessful. The Tennessee Supreme Court upheld new law in August 1906. Morrison's suit capped a seven-year period of legislative and judicial deliberation over streetcar segregation in Tennessee. After court's decision, racial separation on public conveyances outlasted streetcars as a fixture of life in state. Taken as a means to explore Jim Crow more generally, Morrison v. State (1906) suggests an orderly expansion of segregation in Tennessee. As they had for schools, hospitals, and railroads, state's white legislators came to see racial separation aboard streetcars as necessary for the comfort of public--an explanation state supreme court accepted in its review of law. Like those who participated in Morrison's action as parties, jurists, and witnesses, Tennesseans supported or opposed statute depending on their side of color line. And streetcar conductors, given authority under law to enforce statute, both could and dutifully did exercise that power. While court's opinion in Morrison might be taken as evidence of de jure segregation's linear spread, it obscures a counternarrative of suppressed knowledge, political and legal calculations, and feigned enforcement that marked this turn-of-the-twentieth-century segregation fight. The legislators who passed, jurists who upheld, and white public who came to insist on streetcar segregation did so despite acknowledging problems they foresaw--or experienced--with racial separation on street railways. White Tennesseans approved of streetcar segregation over objections of both street railway companies and African Americans, even as they admitted impossibility of complying with its strictures. They devised strategies to avoid its requirements and made political compromises to lessen of noncompliance. They also recognized poor fit between mainstream conceptions of bifurcated racial difference, on one hand, and range of faces they encountered daily, on other. The counternarrative lurking behind Morrison reveals a white public acting not in ignorance of Jim Crow's impracticality but in full knowledge of it, bringing into relief chasm between cultural knowledge and political consensus during period. The fissures in Tennesseans' embrace of racial separation aboard streetcars offer a window to consider what W. Fitzhugh Brundage has called exceptions, contradictions, and unintended consequences that underlay segregation. Historiographical attention to such matters is largely a development of last several decades. For nearly half a century, two questions drove study of post-Reconstruction South: when did region turn to Jim Crow, and did that pivot owe more to legal codification or to a culture of racial separation that predated legal change? While that debate demonstrated Jim Crow's contingency and continues to be productive, social and cultural historians in 1990s turned their attention elsewhere. They uncovered, among other things, relationship between sexual anxieties and Jim Crow's enforcement, contributions of black women in contesting segregation, and efforts of white elites to use segregation to shore up meaning of whiteness. These scholars also demonstrated that African Americans resisted racial separation in hitherto unacknowledged ways. What emerges from these studies is a complex, messy account in which competing motivations, timelines, and degrees... Language: en