The Folly of Jim Crow: Rethinking the Segregated South

Abstract

This essay collection on segregation begins with the premise that locating the emergence of segregation is both “folly,” as the title suggests, and has limited the scope of historical inquiry (p. 5). Seeking to offer other directions, these six essays erode the boundary between customary and legal segregation and reveal intensely local and varied Jim Crow Souths. They reveal that for much of the last century, civil equality and social equality had different meanings. Both civil rights leaders and architects of white supremacy agreed, albeit for different reasons, that interracial sex and marriage were separate from other matters of civil and political equality. Yet, on the ground, social equality in marriage, in schools, in travel, and in matters of identity and reproduction mattered to everyday people and were central to the shifting terrain of a segregated South. The authors depart from familiar institutions, actors, and places, and suggest that the creation of a Jim Crow South spilled out from the courts, polling stations, railroad cars, and legislative halls into routine and intimate matters of everyday life. In the opening essay, Peter Wallenstein argues that antimiscegenation laws and segregated schools predated the 1896 Plessey v. Ferguson decision. He finds that antimiscegenation laws created multiple color lines and that these lines shifted from place to place. In relatively short periods, they could even shift in a single location, making racial identities incredibly fluid. Wallenstein destabilizes the idea of a single South-wide color line and in so doing dismisses stable categories of “white” and “black.”