Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-25wd4 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-25T16:37:36.565Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Law, Society, Identity, and the Making of the Jim Crow South: Travel and Segregation on Tennessee Railroads, 1875–1905

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Kenneth W. Mack
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article reexamines the well-known debate over the origins of de jure segregation in the American South, which began in 1955 with the publication of C. Vann Woodward's The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Arguing that the debate over Woodward's thesis implicates familar but outmoded ways of looking at sociolegal change and Southern society, the article proposes a reorientation of this debate using theoretical perspectives taken from recent work by legal historians, critical race theorists, and historians of race, class, and gender. This article examines the advent of railroad segregation in Tennessee (the state that enacted the nation's first railroad segregation statute) in order to sketch out these themes, arguing that de jure segregation was brought about by a dialectic between legal, social, and identity-based phenomena. This dialectic did not die out with the coming of de jure segregation; rather it continued into the modern era.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , Spring 1999 , pp. 377 - 409
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 1999 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

References

Abshire, David M. 1967. The South Rejects a Prophet: The Life of Senator D. M. Key, 1824–1900. New York: Frederick A. Praeger.Google Scholar
Ayers, Edward L. 1992. The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bardaglio, Peter W. 1995. Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex, and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Bates, Beth Tompkins. 1997. A New Crowd Challenges the Agenda of the Old Guard in the NAACP, 1933–41. American Historical Review 102:340–77.Google Scholar
Blassingame, John W. 1973. Black New Orleans, 1860–1880. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Brown, Charles A. 1963. William Hooper Councill: Alabama Legislator, Editor and Lawyer. Negro History Bulletin 26:171–73.Google Scholar
Brown, Elsa Barkley. 1994. Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African-American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom. Public Culture 7:107–46.Google Scholar
Cartwright, Joseph H. 1976. The Triumph of Jim Crow: Tennessee Race Relations in the 1880s. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.Google Scholar
Cell, John W. 1982. The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Clark, Elizabeth B. 1990. Matrimonial Bonds: Slavery and Divorce in Nineteenth-Century America. Law and History Review 8:25–54.Google Scholar
Cogan, Jacob Katz. 1997. The Look Within: Property, Capacity, and Suffrage in Nineteenth-Century America. Yale Law Journal 107:473–98.Google Scholar
Collins, Patricia Hill. 1991. Mammies, Matriarchs, and Other Controlling Images. In Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Polittics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Crenshaw, Kimberlé, Gotanda, Neil, Peller, Gary, and Thomas, Kendall, eds. 1995. Crical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement. New York: New Press.Google Scholar
Dale, Elizabeth. 1997. “Social Equality Does Not Exist among Themselves, nor among vs”: Baylies vs. Curry and Civil Rights in Chicago, 1888. American Historical Review 102:311–39.Google Scholar
Davis, Peggy Cooper. 1994. Contested Images of Family Values: The Role of the State. Harvard Law Review 107:1348–73.Google Scholar
De Costa-Willis, Miriam. 1991. Ida B. Wells's Diary: A Narrative of the Black Community of Memphis in the 1880s. West Tennessee Historical Society Papers 45:35.Google Scholar
ed. 1995. The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Delgado, Richard, ed. 1995. Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Duster, Alfreda M., ed. 1970. Crusade for Justice: Tfve Autobiography of Ida B. Wells. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Edwards, Laura F. 1997. Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Folmsbee, Stanley J. 1949. The Origin of the First “Jim Crow” Law. Journal of Southern History 15:235. Reprinted in African-American Life in the Post-Emancipation South, 1861–1900, ed. Donald Nieman, G. Vol. 11: African-Americans and the Emergence of Segregation, 1865–1900 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994).Google Scholar
Folsom, C. W., ed. 1869. Tennessee Act of March 12, 1868, No. 46, chap. 66. In Certain Acts of the General Assembly and Extracts from the Code of 1857–58 of the State of Tennessee Relating Generally to Railroads. Nashville, Tenn.: Republican Banner Office.Google Scholar
Forbath, William E. 1991. Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Forbath, William E., Hartog, Hendrik, and Minow, Martha. 1985. Introduction: Legal Histories From Below. Wisconsin Law Review 1985:759–66.Google Scholar
Franklin, John Hope. 1974. The Enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Prologue 6:225–35.Google Scholar
Fredrickson, George M. 1971. The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Gaines, Kevin K. 1996. Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
1997. Rethinking Race and Class in African-American Struggles for Equality, 1885–1941. American Historical Review 102:378–87.Google Scholar
Gilmore, Glenda Elizabeth. 1996. Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Gordon, Sarah Barringer. 1996. “The Liberty of Self-Degradation”: Polygamy, Woman Suffrage, and Consent in Nineteenth-Century America. Journal of American History 83:815–47.Google Scholar
Greenwood, Janette Thomas. 1994. Bittersweet Legacy: The Black and White “Better Classes” in Charlotte, 1850–1910. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd. 1979. Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women's Campaign Against Lynching. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
1983. “The Mind that Burns in Each Body”: Women, Rape, and Racial Violence. In Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Snitow, Ann, Stansell, Christine, and Thompson, Sharon. New York: Monthly Review Press.Google Scholar
Harris, Cheryl I. 1993. Whiteness as Property. Harvard Law Review 106: 1707–91.Google Scholar
Hart, Roger L. 1975. Redeemers Bourbons and Populists: Tennessee 1870–1896. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.Google Scholar
Hartog, Hendrik. 1987. The Constitution of Aspiration and “The Rights that Belong to Us All. Journal of American History 74:1013–34.Google Scholar
1997. Lawyering, Husbands' Rights, and “the Unwritten Law” in Nineteenth Century America. Journal of American History 84:67.Google Scholar
Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. 1992. African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race. Signs 17:251–74.Google Scholar
1993. Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Hodes, Martha. 1997. White Women, Black Men: lllicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Hooks, Bell. 1981. Aint I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Boston: South End Press.Google Scholar
Hunter, Tera W. 1997. To Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors After the Civil War. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Iola, [Ida Wells, B.]. 1885. Woman's Mission. New York Freeman, 26 December. Reprinted in DeCosta-Willis 1995.Google Scholar
1886. A Story of 1900. Fisk Herald, April 1886. Reprinted in DeCosta-Willis 1995.Google Scholar
1887. Our Women. New York Freeman, 1 January. Reprinted in DeCosta-Willis 1995.Google Scholar
1888. The Model Woman: A Pen Picture of the Typical Southern Girl. New York Freeman, 18 February. Reprinted in DeCosta-Willis 1995.Google Scholar
Johnson, Franklin. 1979. The Development of State Legislation Concerning the Free Negro. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press.Google Scholar
Kelley, Robin D. G. 1994. Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class. New York: Free Press, Macmillan.Google Scholar
Key, David M. 1885. The Legal and Political Status of the Negro. Reprinted In Journal of Negro History 54 (1969):288.Google Scholar
King, Martin Luther Jr. 1964. Letter From Birmingham Jail. In Martin Luther King, Jr. Why We Can't Wait. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Klarman, Michael J. 1994. How Brown Changed Race Relations: The Backlash Thesis. Journal of American History 81:81–118.Google Scholar
Knupfer, Anne Meis. 1995. “Toward a Tenderer Humanity and a Nobler Womanhood”: African-American Women's Clubs in Chicago, 1890 to 1920. Journal of Women's History 7(3):58–76.Google Scholar
Kousser, J. Morgan. 1973. Post-Reconstruction Suffrage Restrictions in Tennessee: A New Look at the V.O. Key Thesis. Political Science Quarterly. 88:655–83. Reprinted in African-American Life in the Post-Emancipation South, 1861–1900 , ed. Donald Nieman, G. Vol. 6: African-Americans and Southern Politics from Redemption to Disfranchisement (New York: Garland Publishing. 1994).Google Scholar
1974. The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880–1910. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Lamon, Lester C. 1977. Black Tennesseans 1900–1930. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.Google Scholar
Letwin, Daniel. 1998. The Challenge of Interracial Unionism: Alabama Coal Miners, 1878–1921. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Litwack, Leon F. 1961. North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790–1860. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Lofgren, Charles A. 1987. The Plessy Case: A Legal-Historical lnterpretation. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
López, Ian F. Haney. 1996. White By Law. The Legal Construction of Race. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Maclean, Nancy. 1994. Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
McCluskey, Audrey Thomas. 1997. “We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible”: Black Women School Founders and Their Mission. Signs 22:403–26.Google Scholar
Meier, August, and Rudwick, Elliott. 1969. Negro Boycotts of Jim Crow Streetcars in Tennessee. American Quarterly 21:755–63.Google Scholar
Minter, Patricia Hagler. 1995. The Failure of Freedom: Class, Gender, and the Evolution of Segregated Transit Law in the Nineteenth-Century South. Chicago-Kent Law Review 70:993–1009.Google Scholar
Painter, Nell Irvin. 1988. “Social Equality,” Miscegenation, Labor, and Power. In The Evolution of Southern Culture, ed. Numan Bartley, V. Athens: University of Georgia Press.Google Scholar
Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Meeting of the Bar Association of Tennessee (Proceedings). 1885. Naslwille, Tenn.: Marshall and Bruce.Google Scholar
Rabinowitz, Howard N. 1976. From Exclusion to Segregation: Southern Race Relations, 1865–1890. Journal of American History 63:325–50.Google Scholar
1978. Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865–1890. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
1988. More Than the Woodward Thesis: Assessing The Strange Career of Jim Crow . Journal of American History 75:842.Google Scholar
Riegel, Stephen J. 1984. The Persistent Career of Jim Crow: Lower Federal Courts and the “Separate but Equal” Doctrine, 1865–1896. American Journal of Legal History 28:17.Google Scholar
Schechter, Patricia Ann. 1993. “To Tell the Truth Freely”: Ida B. Wells and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Reform in America, 1880–1913. Ph.D. diss., Princeton University.Google Scholar
1998. “All the Intensity of My Nature”: Ida B. Wells, Anger, and Politics. Radical History Review 70:48–77.Google Scholar
Somerville, Diane Miller. 1995. The Rape Myth in the Old South Reconsidered. Journal of Southern History. 61:481–518.Google Scholar
Stover, John F. 1955. The Railroads of the South 1865–1900: A Study in Finance and Control. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Terrell, Mary Church. 1940. A Colored Woman in a White World. Washington, D.C.: Ransdell.Google Scholar
Thomas, William Griffith III. 1995. Lawyering for the Railroad: A Study of Business and Law in the New South, 1880–1916. Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia.Google Scholar
Thompson, E. P. 1975. Whigs and Hunters: The Orgin of the Black Act. New York: Pantheon Books, Random House.Google Scholar
Tomlins, Christopher L. 1993. Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Tucker, David M. 1975. Black Pastors and Leaders: Memphis, 1819–1972. Memphis, Tenn.: Memphis State University Press.Google Scholar
Tushnet, Mark. 1987. The Politics of Equality in Constitutional Law: The Equal Protection Clause, Dr. Du Bois, and Charles Hamilton Houston. Journal of American History. 74:884–903.Google Scholar
Wade, Richard C. 1964. Slavery in the Cittes: The South, 1820–1860. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Welke, Barbara Y. 1995. When Ali the Women Were White, and Ali the Blacks Were Men: Gender, Class, Race, and the Road to Plessy, 1855–1914. Law and History Review 13:261–316.Google Scholar
White, Deborah Gray. 1985. Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South. New York: W. W. Norton.Google Scholar
1993. The Cost of Club Work, the Price of Black Feminism. In Visible Women: New Essays on American Activism, ed. Nancy Hewitt, A. and Lebsock, Suzanne. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
White, John H. Jr. 1978. The American Railroad Passenger Car. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Williams, Patricia J. 1991. The Alchemy of Race and Rights. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Williamson, Joel. 1965. After Slawry: The Negro in South Carolina During Reconstruction, 1861–1877. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
1968. The Origins of Segregation. Boston: D.C. Heath, Raytheon Education.Google Scholar
1984. The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Wing, Adrien Katherine, ed. 1997. Crtical Race Feminism: A Reader. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Woodward, C. Vann. 1971a. Origins of the New South 1877–1913. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.Google Scholar
1971b. American Counterpoint: Slavery and Racism in the North-South Dialogue. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.Google Scholar
1974. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. 3d rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
1986. Thinking Bach The Perils of Writing History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.Google Scholar
Wynes, Charles E. 1961. Race Relations in Virginia, 1870–1902. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.Google Scholar
Yngvesson, Barbara. 1997. Negotiating Motherhood: Identity and Difference in “Open” Adoptions. Law and Society Review 31:31–80.Google Scholar

Cases and Statutes

Baiky v. Louisvilk & N. R.R. 1898. 44 S.W. 105 (Ky.).Google Scholar
Brinkley v. Louisville & N. R.R. 1898. Trial Record. U.S. Circuit Court, Memphis, Western District of Tennessee, B/50/12/36, Box 80. National Archives, Atlanta Regional Archives Branch, East Point, Georgia.Google Scholar
Brinkley v. Louisville & N. R.R. 1899. 95 F. 345 (C.C.W.D. Tenn.).Google Scholar
Brown v. Memphis & C. R.R. 1880a. 4 F. 37 (C.C.W.D. Tenn.).Google Scholar
Brown v. Memphis & C. R.R. 1880b. 5 F. 499 (C.C.W.D. Tenn.).Google Scholar
Brown v. Memphis & C. R.R. 1881. 7 F. 51 (C.C.W.D. Tenn.).Google Scholar
Charge to Grand Jury–Civil Rights Act. 1875. 30 F. Cas. 1005 (C.C.W.D. Tenn.) (No. 18,260).Google Scholar
Chesapeake, O. & S.W. R.R. v. Wells. 1885a. Trial Record. No. 312, Circuit Court of Shelby County, Microfilm Accession Number 1425. Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville, Tennessee.Google Scholar
Chesapeake, O. & S.W. R.R. v. Wells. 1885b. Trial Record. No. 319, Circuit Court of Shelby County, Microfilm Accession Number 1425. Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville, Tennessee.Google Scholar
Chesapeake, O. & S.W. R.R. v. Wells. 1887. 4 S.W. 5 (Tenn.).Google Scholar
Civil Rights Cases. 1883. 109 U.S. 3.Google Scholar
Conley v. Central &. Troction Co. 1913. 154 S.W. 41 (Ky.).Google Scholar
Councill v. Western & A. R.R. 1887a. Trial Record. RG134, Formal Dockets 1887–1924, Interstate Commerce Commission, Box 6, Docket No. 21. National Archives at College Park, College Park, Maryland.Google Scholar
Councill Western, V. & , A. R.R. 1887b. 1 Interstate Com. Rep. 638, 1 I.C.C. 339.Google Scholar
Edwards v. Nashvilk, C. & St. L. Ry. 1907. 12 I.C.C. 247.Google Scholar
Logwood v. Memphis & C. R.R. 1883. Trial Record- Civil No. 2792, U.S. Circuit Court, Memphis, Western District of Tennessee, B/15/25. National Archives, Atlanta Regional Archives Branch, East Point, Georgia.Google Scholar
Logwood v. Memphis & C. R.R. 1885. 23 F. 318 (C.C.W.D. Tenn.).Google Scholar
Mayfield v. Louisville & N. R.R. 1906. Trial Record. Middle Tennessee, Box 1755, Tennessee State Library and Archives, Naslwille, Tennessee.Google Scholar
Memphis & C. R.R. v. Benson. 1884. Trial Record. Circuit Court of Shelby County. Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville, Tennessee.Google Scholar
Memphis & C. R.R. v. Benson. 1887. 4 S.W. 5 (Tenn.).Google Scholar
Memphis St. Ry. v. State. 1903a. Trial Record. West Tennessee, Box 854, Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville, Tennessee.Google Scholar
Memphis St. Ry. v. State. 1903b. 75 S.W. 730 (Tenn.).Google Scholar
Morrison, V. State. 1905. Trial Record. West Tennessee No. 961, Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville, Tennessee.Google Scholar
Morrison, V. State. 1906. 95 S.W. 494 (Tenn.).Google Scholar
Murphy v. Western & A. R.R. 1882. Trial Record. United States Circuit Court, Chattanooga, Eastern District of Tennessee, Record Group 21, B/50/01/1, Box 2. National Archives, Atlanta Regional Archives Branch, East Point, Georgia.Google Scholar
Murphy v. Western & A. R.R. 1885. 23 F. 637 (C.C.E.D. Tenn, S.D.).Google Scholar
Quinn v. Louisville & N. R.R. 1895. 32 S.W. 742 (Ky.).Google Scholar
Robinson v. Memphis & C. R.R. 1879. Trial Record. United States Supreme Court, Records and Briefs, Civil Rights Cases , 109 U.S. 3 (1883).Google Scholar
State, V. Smith. 1896. Trial Record. Middle Tennessee, Box 1258, Tennessee State Library and Archives, Naslwille, Tennessee.Google Scholar
State ex rel. Michael v. Witham. 1942. 165 S.W.2d 378 (Tenn.).Google Scholar
Civil Rights Act of 1875, 18 Stat. 335 (March 1, 1875).Google Scholar
Florida Acts 1887, chap. 3743 (May 19).Google Scholar
Tenn. Acts 1875, chap. 130 (March 24).Google Scholar
Tenn. Acts 1881, chap. 155 (April 7).Google Scholar
Tenn. Acts 1882, 3d extraord. sess, chap. 6 (May 22).Google Scholar
Tenn. Acts 1891, chap. 52 (March 27).Google Scholar
Tenn. Acts 1905, chap. 150 (April 4).Google Scholar
Texas Gen. Laws 1889, chap. 108 (April 6).Google Scholar
Texas Gen. Laws 1891, chap. 41 (March 19).Google Scholar
Texas Gen. Laws 1891, chap. 103 (April 11).Google Scholar
Wood v. Louisville & N. R.R. 1897. 42 S.W. 349 (Ky.).Google Scholar