THE DIVIDED SOUTH
In the 1880s, the
South pushed hard to attract industry. Large inducements were offered
to investors to develop the steel, lumber, tobacco and textile industries.
Yet in 1900 the South's percentage of the nation's industrial base remained
about the same size as it had been in 1860. Moreover, the price of this
drive for industrialization was high: disease and child labor proliferated
in Southern mill towns.
Thirty years after
the Civil War, the South remained largely poor, overwhelmingly agrarian
and economically dependent. Its society enforced a rigid social segregation
of blacks from whites, and tolerated recurrent racial violence.
Intransigent white
Southerners, who resisted Reconstruction through their positions in
the national government
in Washington,
found ways to assert state control to maintain white dominance. Several
Supreme Court decisions bolstered the views of these Southerners, beginning
in the 1870s, by upholding traditional conservative views of the appropriate
balance between national and state power.
In 1873 the Supreme
Court found that the Fourteenth Amendment (citizenship rights not to
be abridged) conferred no new privileges or immunities to protect African
Americans from state power. In 1883, furthermore, it ruled that the
Fourteenth Amendment did not prevent individuals, as opposed to states,
from practicing discrimination. And in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) the
Court found that "separate but equal" public accommodations for African
Americans, such as trains and restaurants, did not violate their rights.
Soon the principle
of segregation by race extended into every area of Southern life, from
railroads to restaurants, hotels, hospitals and schools. Moreover, any
area of life that was not segregated by law was segregated by custom
and practice. Faced with pervasive discrimination, many African Americans
supported the program of Booker T. Washington, the most prominent black
leader of the late 19th and early 20th century, who counseled them to
focus on modest economic goals and to accept temporary social discrimination.
Others, led by the African-American intellectual W.E.B. DuBois, wanted
to challenge segregation through political action. But, with the complicity
of two major parties, calls for racial justice attracted little support,
and segregationist laws remained common in the South well into the second
half of the 20th century.