Lecture #24: Color Lines, Part 2: Landscape Legacies of Jim Crow

Suggestions for Further Reading:

Jonathan Earle, The Routledge Historical Atlas of the African American History (2000).

Andrew K. Frank, The Routledge Historical Atlas of the American South (1999).

W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Available online at
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/408

Eric Foner, Reconstruction Updated Edition: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (1988; rev ed, 2014); also available in abridged edition, A Short History of Reconstruction (2015).

Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (1977).

John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (1st ed, 1947; 9th ed, with Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, 2010). A pioneering textbook survey by leading African American historian of his generation, itself playing a vital role in the Civil Rights Movement:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hope_Franklin

C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955, 1974, 2002). A classic historical study that helped shape the Civil Rights Movement's protests against segregation.

Ida B. Wells, The Light of Truth: Writings of an Anti-Lynching Crusader (2014). Samples of Wells's crusading journalism can also be downloaded from Project Gutenberg:
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/5765

Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (2002).

Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (2010).

Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality (1975; 2004).

Mark Fiege, "The Road to Brown v. Board: An Environmental History of the Color Line," in Fiege, The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States (2012), 318-57.

Timothy B. Tyson, The Blood of Emmett Till (2017).

Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63 (1988); Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-65 (1998); At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68 (2006). (classic three-volume biography of Martin Luther King, Jr., is also among the best available narrative overviews of the Civil Rights Movement and this period of U.S. history)

Martin Luther King, James Melvin Washington, ed, A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1986). Best one-volume collection of King's writings.

James Baldwin, Collected Essays: Notes of a Native Son / Nobody Knows My Name / The Fire Next Time / No Name in the Street / The Devil Finds Work / Other Essays (Library of America, 1998). Best single edition of the non-fiction works of this supremely eloquent writer.

Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (1996; 2014).

Lauret Savoy, Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape (2015). A beautifully written memoir, family history, and meditation on the many meanings of race in the American landscape. Highly recommended.

For online overviews of some of the themes discussed in today's lecture, see

Racial Segregation in the United States
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_segregation_in_the_United_States

Civil Rights Movement:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_rights_movement

See also the extensive collection of primary documents curated on Tougaloo College's Civil Rights Movement Veterans website: https://www.crmvet.org

Finally, when next you're in Washington, DC, you won't regret planning an extended visit to the superb new National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened in 2016. It is easily among the most compelling of all the Smithsonian museums:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Museum_of_African_American_History_and_Culture
https://nmaahc.si.edu

 

I. Black and White in the American Landscape

I pick up today where I left off in the last lecture by repeating what I said then: although the story of race and ethnicity in the United States and in the making of the American landscape is extraordinarily diverse and complex, involving the journeys and histories of peoples from literally all over the world, the racial experience of African Americans is unique. Not only did the brutal experience of slavery seek to suppress many of the diverse experiences that enslaved Africans brought with them from that vast continent, but the oppressively policed racial boundaries that were so fundamental a part of slavery in the United States made the Black / White binary foundational to the racial history of the entire nation. To ignore the African American experience in the United States and in the making of the American landscape is thus to misunderstand quite fundamentally the American experience itself.

I'll talk in the next lecture about the history of zoning, and part of that story will be the role of zoning in policing racial boundaries. But since we've asked you for this week's last section assignments to study the University of Virginia's racial dot map for Madison
https://demographics.virginia.edu/DotMap/
and to compare it with the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) maps that placed the power of the federal government behind institutionalized racial "redlining" in American cities
https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/#loc=4/36.71/-96.93&opacity=0.8
I'll open with slides of what these maps look like for the city of Milwaukee, which I've already described to you as the most racially segregated city in the United States.

Here's Milwaukee's racial dot map from 2010, showing Milwaukee as the most segregated city in the United States (though the racial segregation of its neighborhoods is in fact very similar to other northern cities like Chicago, Detroit, Buffalo, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and others. You can compare this map to the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) map showing neighborhoods in 1930s Milwaukee, graded by most to least desirable for mortgage lending. You can map Milwaukee's contemporary racial geogragraphy on the racial dot map above right onto this 1930s map:
https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/#loc=11/43.0295/-87.9655&opacity=0.8&city=milwaukee-co.-wi

To further demonstrate how history matters and how the past repeats itself, let's look at this third map, of mortgages given in Milwaukee in the past decade. The absense of mortgages on this map are almost identical to those areas outlined in red—deemed "very undesirable" for mortgage lending—on the HOLC mortgage map from the 1930s.
https://thinkprogress.org/milwaukee-segregation-d653da20d7d2#.yr1i7xane

Let me make one further argument here that can serve as a master thesis for this entire lecture. I suspect there are times when you've wondered whether topics I've discussed in this course are really about "landscape," as opposed to simply being important historical subjects that deserve to be studied whether or not they relate to the Making of the American Landscape. It's possible that some of you may think that about this topic. If so, I want to assert in the strongest possible terms that it's impossible to understand the history of racism in the United States, especially as it has been directed against African Americans, without seeing it as fundamental spatial and geographical in its expressions. I made that claim about slavery, and I'll make it again here relative to the experience of Jim Crow and the racial segregation that continues today. Segregation may be institutionalized in law and policy. It may be enforced by violence and the threat of violence. It may embody myriad ideas and cultural values. But it inherently expresses itself in space and landscape, on every conceivable scale. Not to notice this essential fact is to misunderstand the entire history of race in America. As such, segregation is an attribute of landscape, and cannot be understood apart from its spatial expressions: who gets to live where, who goes to which school, who gets which job, who encounters police where, who gets held in which prison, who gets to love whom, even who dies where ... whatever else these may be, they all involve people in space, place, and landscape, and cannot be understood without reference to the places in which they occur.

The history of race in America is a history of landscape. The history of landscape is a history of race. And although the racial history of the United States is extraordinarily complex and diverse, the African American experience truly deserves the word unique.

 

II. Legacies of the Civil War and Reconstruction

Before I launch into today's lecture, I'll remind you that although we're talking about African-American landscape history, there have always been other racial groups present as well. We're are focusing on African-American landscape history today because African Americans were the one racial group of individuals that could legally be bought and sold as human chattel in the U.S., with myriad laws and practices and ideas constructed to enforce the boundary between slave and free. This makes African-American experiences fundamentally different from those of individuals in other racial or ethnic groups, though in truth the laws written to exclude African Americans would shape the exeriences of many other racial groups in the U.S..

Recall the Black Belt, the area of cotton agriculture in the interior of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, and along the Lower Mississippi River. The fact that slaves could seek freedom by physically moving to the U.S. North or across the border into Canada meant that interstate and international boundaries were very significant to shaping this story. In Missouri, if an enslaved person could just escape across the river to Illinois, freedom might then become a possibility. Various police forces were employed to try to stop enslaved people from fleeing north. Sometimes these police forces were agents of the state, i.e. government agents. But sometimes these police forces were privately hired and litigated under Article 1 Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution, which denied states the power to impair the obligation of contracts. Some of the most horrific actions were perpetrated by hired agents in the private sector.

A warning: in this lecture, we'll see some of the most violent and horrifying images we'll encounter all semester, though I've tried to be very careful about when and how I show those images. Violations of the color line came with brutal implications: we will not understand the meaning of the color line on the landscape unless we ponder such images with care, horrific and traumatic.

Again, I'll remind that there were people fleeing slavery out of the U.S. South up until the end of the Civil War in 1865, and continued to do so after the CIvil War, though after 1865 (especially after the end of Reconstruction in 1877) they fled because of violence and difficult social conditions rather than the presence of slavery as a legal institution.

The 1857 Supreme Court decision in the Dred Scott v. Sandford case meant that freedom would no longer be the result when an enslaved Black man or woman fled north to free states like New York or Massachusetts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dred_Scott_v._Sandford
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dred_Scott
The decision affirmed the absolute legal right of slave agents to go north and pull former slaves back into slavery. The decision also challenged earlier federal statutes like the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 that had prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territory and in the territories of the trans-Mississippi West, reversing what had appeared to be seventy years of settled law. The Dred Scott decision played a very significant role in the political upsets that led to the Civil War, and is widely regarded as one of the most worst decisions ever made by the U.S. Supreme Court. In large measure, this was because of its impact on the landscape geography of slave and free: in effect, it declared that slaveowners could own human property in every state of the Union, whatever statutes a state might have passed forbidding slavery.

After Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln was elected as president in 1860, most southern states seceded from the U.S. With the outbreak of the Civil War, growing numbers of Black soldiers were allowed to join the Union Army and carry guns--precisely the nightmare long harbored by southern slaveowners who feared their slaves might rise against them. Maps show us that many of the Black soldiers fighting for the Union side—and a smaller number for the Confederate cause—came from slave states in the U.S. South. The large numbers that fought for the Northern cause is an example of the role that African Americans themselves played in shaping the way the war was fought. Their northward flight to freedom, abandoning their southern owners and fields, helped dismantle the political economic foundations on which the southern economy relied, and their decision to take up arms against the Confederacy likewise reinforced the lesson that no matter how the war ended, the South could never return to the conditions that had characterized the antebellum landscapes of the region.

In the middle of the war, the North's victory at the Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862, gave Lincoln the political maneuvering room he needed to announce the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862 that slavery would be abolished in any Confederate state still in rebellion against the Union as of January 1, 1863.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_Proclamation
Lincoln's immediate legal justification for it was as a wartime action directed solely against the slaveowning states of the Confederacy. Its limited terms meant that enslaved men and women in the four slave states that still remained in the Union—Maryland, Missouri, Delaware, and Kentucky—would not be legally freed on January 1, 1863, a choice that seemed to Lincoln an unavoidable act of pragmatism at that moment. The Proclamation was nonetheless a huge step toward ending slavery, and encouraged larger numbers of enslaved people to flee the South.

The end of the Civil War in 1865 was followed by the ratification of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, collectively known as the Reconstruction Amendments. These amendments reshaped the country and continue to reshape it into the present day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstruction_era
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstruction_Amendments

The 13th Amendment (1865) completed the work of the Emancipation Proclamation by abolishing slavery in the entire U.S.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution

The 14th Amendment (1868) is arguably among the most sweeping additions to the United States Constituion of all the amendments passed over the course of the nation's history. It was the chief justification for the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, and its clauses continue to shape American politics today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
The 14th Amendment created birthright citizenship for anyone born within the boundaries of the United States as a way to make sure that southern states could not prevent freed slaves from becoming citizens. Notice its spatial/landscape implications: it declared that the mere act of being born within the boundaries of the United States conferred citizenship in the republic and in the state where that person was born. Although some politicians have recently made light of this basic American right, it seems likely that they're unaware of the powerful history and hard-won battles that underlie its inclusion in the Constitution.

But that's not all that the 14th Amendment accomplished. To assure that southern states would not abridge the legal rights of former slaves, the same clause that created birthright citizenship includes this remarkable language:

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Remarkably, this one clause ensures equal protection under the law for all U.S. citizens, and requires legal due process before the government can force someone to forfeit their property, freedom, or property. It extended these rights not just to federal law, but to all the states as well, so that no state could abridge the rights of citizenship, including voting rights, or abridge equal treatment or due process under the law. This one clause laid the foundation for much of the civil rights movement a century later, and is among the most celebrated and contested (and litigated) clauses in the entire constitution.

Finally, the 15th Amendment established that former slaves could now vote as citizens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
Although the 15th Amendment makes no mention of gender, it implicitly extends voting rights only to men. Not by accident, this amendment giving black men the right to vote helped energize women's suffrage movements agitating for voting rights for women.

One key symbolic image of the many changes ushered in by the Reconstruction Amendments: a Black man voting. That act of a black man—a former slave liberated by the Civil War, legally freed from bondage by the 13th Amendment, formally given equal rights by the 14th Amendment, and empowered to vote under the 15th Amendment—became a symbol of the dramatic changes enacted during the period of Reconstruction (1865-1877). During these twelve years, the South was in effect occupied territory, with federal agents and military troops stationed in many parts of the region to oversee the end of slavery.

In this period, a number of African-Americans were elected as members of Congress, though that number would diminish to zero by the late 19th century and early 20th century as Reconstruction ended in 1877 and was replaced by the regime of Jim Crow that we'll track in the rest of this lecture.

Slaves had formerly had no right to marry, and no right to remain with their families if their owners chose to separate them. Former slaves, called "freedmen," a term which included both men and women, obtained the right to marry. The Freedmen's Bureau, the federal agency charged with overseeing the post-Civil War implementation of legal and economic changes, oversaw the extension of the right to marry, and also the creation of schools where many former slaves learned to read for the first time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedmens_Bureau'

Many slaves had also been denied literacy, so access to the written word was a crucial part of Reconstruction. This lack of access was one of the things that made Frederick Douglass, the Black social reformer and statesman, so extraordinary as a former slave. He would emerge as one of the most powerful orators of the late 19th century. The appearance of schools for Black children, coupled with the emergence of Black newspapers, symbolize more generally the emergence of a Black professional class: doctors, lawyers, newspaper owners, teachers, and especially ministers.

Along with schools came the emergence of colleges and universities welcoming Black students. One of the most important of these universities was chartered by the federal government in 1867: Howard University in DC. Its law school, particularly its graduate Thurgood Marshall, would play an important role in the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_University

Along with schools was the flourishing of a rich religious tradition. The free Black church had two important strands: the African Methodist Episcopal Church (often referred to as AME) and the many Southern Baptist congregations. Particularly in the Baptist congregations, the charismatic practice of Protestant religiosity would contribute to forming of Black leaders who became prominent not just in Black religious life but in politics, the best-known symbol of which is surely Martin Luther King, Jr. The role of the Baptist church in the southern landscape was crucial to shaping African-American experiences in the decades following the Civil War.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_church

The active role of African Americans in building their own communities encountered resistance especially from white southerners who fought these Reconstruction-era changes in the wake of the war. A major political economic problem confronting White plantation owners was how to replace the labor previously supplied by enslaved people. To solve it, many turned to sharecropping, an agreement that involved assigning old plantation lands to former slaves who then worked that land as tenants or even sometimes as owners.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping
Whether as tenant farmers or owners, these Black sharecroppers owed rents for the use of the land, and even if they owned it outright still needed money to pay for farming expenses. A form of debt peonage emerged as a structural feature of the system. Half of whatever a Black farmer raised on the land was collected by the creditor at the end of the harvest, creating a cycle of debt from which it was almost impossible to escape. Sharecropping was not quite slavery, but not very far from it. It became of the defining attributes of rural agriculture in the South, and would continue well into the 20th century.

III. Segregated Landscapes of Jim Crow

The period we refer to as Reconstruction ended in 1877. Thereafter, we see an important political shift: the Republican Party had been the Party of Reconstruction. During Reconstruction, many elected officials in the occupied South were Republicans, but between 1872-1876 southern Congressional delegations shifted from mostly Republicans to mostly Democrats. In consequence, the South would be solidly Democratic for the next 75 years. The 1876 presidential election was among the most hotly disputed in U.S. history. The Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio, eventually won the presidency from Democratic candidate Samuel J. Tilden, who won the popular vote but not the electoral college. In a complicated political compromise, Democrats accepted Hayes' election on the understanding that he would oversee the end of Reconstruction by withdrawing all U.S. military forces from the South, terminating federal oversight of southern politics. This set the stage for the era of Jim Crow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_(character)

Jim Crow derived its name from minstrel shows where White performers would wear blackface and perform foolish, buffoonish Blackness. White supremacy was asserted legally and extralegally during the era of Jim Crow. Laws passed in this period were fundamentally about landscape: who could go where, where boundaries of segregation existed on the landscape, who controlled and policed those boundaries, who punished and was punished for crossing those boundaries.

Jim Crow also see the emergence of private interventions alongside state and municipal laws to police racial boundaries. Most notable of these private interventions were lynching and other forms of racial violence that I'll address in a moment.

Jim Crow laws had numerous goals, among the most important of which was to suppress Black voting. One strategy was the imposition of a poll tax, where voters were required to pay, say, $1 in order to vote.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poll_taxes_in_the_United_States
In additional to disenfranchising poor people, who were predominantly black, in several states poll tax laws included a grandfather clause, which stated that if your grandfather had voted prior to the Civil War--which could of course only be true of white southerners--you didn't need to pay a poll tax. The grandfather clause did not explicitly invoke race, but its purpose was to disenfranchise Black voters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandfather_clause
Literacy tests would also function to disenfranchise Black voters along with poor, less educated White voters—again, a reminder that not just race but also class shaped these legal innovations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test
Literacy tests could be extraordinarily arcane, so that even many of us today would have difficulty passing them. To get a sense of how you yourself might have fared had you been forced to take such a test, check out some of the examples linked from this page:
https://www.crmvet.org/info/lithome.htm

Along with voting laws were laws creating and policing the spatial boundaries of separate spaces across the landscape—on railroads and streetcars, between schools, across neighborhoods—to separate Blacks from Whites. (Notice how the emergence of public mass transit, with many passenger sharing seats in a large vehicle, created the occasion for a number of these laws, as well as the early court cases that tested their legality.) These segregation laws arguably posed a direct challenge to the 14th Amendment's guarantee of "equal protection" for all U.S. citizens. Anti-miscegenation laws also sought to ostracize and outlaw the possibility of intimate romantic relations between White and Black partners, making interracial marriage impossible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-miscegenation_laws

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) was another important Supreme Court case, in which a light-skinned Black man, Homer Plessy, participated in an act of civil disobedience—sitting in the "Whites only" section of a New Orleans railcar—in order to test the constitutionality of the Louisana law forbidding Black passengers from riding in White railroad cars. (His action directly paralleled the decision by Rosa Parks in 1955 to refuse to ride in the back of a Montgomery, Alabama, bus.) The test case following Plessy's arrest eventually resulted in the notorious Supreme Court decision in 1896 known as Plessy v. Ferguson.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plessy_v._Ferguson

In its final ruling, the Court's majority affirmed the "separate but equal" doctrine, arguing that the equal protection guaranteed by the 14th amendment could be achieved while keeping Americans of different races separate from each other. Plessy v. Ferguson essentially declared Jim Crow laws of all kind to be constitutional, beyond the reach of the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection and due process clause. The majority opinion made the follow declaration, essentially blaming Blacks and others who objected to "separate but equal" for thinking that forced segregation represented a problem:

We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff's argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.

Plessy was just one vote short of being unanimous. John Marshall Harlan, an Associate Justice from Kentucky, dissented from the majority decision, writing a fiery dissent that eventually proved to be among the most influential in the Court's history:

The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country. And so it is in prestige, in achievements, in education, in wealth and in power. So, I doubt not, it will continue to be for all time if it remains true to its great heritage and holds fast to the principles of constitutional liberty. But in view of the constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved. It is therefore to be regretted that this high tribunal, the final expositor of the fundamental law of the land, has reached the conclusion that it is competent for a state to regulate the enjoyment by citizens of their civil rights solely upon the basis of race.

In my opinion, the judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott Case.

The Court's rejection of the plaintiff's case in Plessy legitimized efforts by municipalities, states, business owners, and others in positions of power to exclude Black Americans from restaurants, theatres, hotels, and other public facilities, or to insist that they remain in segregated places like separate railroad cars or the backs of buses. Perhaps most symbolic were separate drinking fountains. Paired drinking fountains with signs saying "Colored only" and "White only" became symbols of the racial boundaries of Jim Crow, present in public place throughout the landscapes of the post-Reconstruction South.

Racial boundaries in the Post-Reconstruction South happened partly as states created laws and enforced them with its police power. But the actions of private groups and individuals were also crucial to maintaining and policing racial boundaries. The most notorious of these was the Ku Klux Klan, or KKK. The KKK has been active in three phases: 1865-1879s
1915-1944
1946-present

One of the founders of the Klan was Nathan Bedford Forest, a Confederate general who resisted the Federal government's presence in the South. The KKK became an active instigator of racial intimidation, most horrifically in the form of lynching, which became endemic especially in southern states during the period of Jim Crow. Racial violence was deployed systematically to maintain the color line. Black men were lynched for any number of actions that gave offense to whites, most aggressively for seeming to threaten the honor of white women. The boundaries of race were never more fraught than when they converged with boundaries of gender and class--boundaries that many whites were willing to defend with the most ghastly violence.

In class, I chose not to display on screen the terrible images of black men killed and often mutilated by lynch white lynch mobs. Instead, I cropped a few of those photos to show only the faces of the white people present as witnesses and participants in mob violence. Contemplating the faces of those perpetrators, you gain powerful insight into the racist passion that drove this awful form of public violence.

To learn more about lynching, you can visit the following web pages--but be forewarned, they are illustrated, and the images they depict, which are important historical documents, are nonetheless deeply disturbing to view:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States
The new Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opened in Montgomery, Alabama, in 2018, puts this history on display and seeks to memorialize the victims of racial violence in the United States in a powerful series of displays:
https://museumandmemorial.eji.org https://eji.org/national-lynching-memorial
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_National_Memorial_for_Peace_and_Justice

There were African Americans who led the effort to publicize and resist the horrors of lynching, none more important than Ida B. Wells.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ida_B._Wells
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/5765
Lynchings of both black and white individuals began to decline beginning in the 1930s, in part because of the assertion of police power by the state in the form of imprisonment. Incarceration recreated some of the enslavements of Black men we see earlier, including disenfranchisement and forced unpaid labor.

Iconic cultural products like D. W. Griffith's film The Birth of a Nation (1915) celebrated the Klan, showing how mainstream and far-reaching racist white attitudes toward African Americans were in the early 20th-century U.S.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birth_of_a_Nation

 

IV. Great Migrations

African Americans began to migrate out of the U.S. South after the end of Reconstruction in 1877. One group of migrants, who called themselves "Exodusters" (recalling the Biblical Book of Exodus), sought new lives for themselves in the U.S. West.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exodusters
Exodusters headed to places like Kansas; Linda Brown and her family, who would play central roles in the 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, were descendents of these Black families fleeing the post-Reconstruction South.

The invasive boll weevil began to devastate Southern cotton crops in the years following 1892, making it harder for Blacks to earn a living in southern agriculture. When combined with the attraction of higher wages in northern factories, expecially during and after the First World War, the result was the beginning of northward migrations by large numbers of African Americans from the rural South, fundamentally changing the racial geographies of the American landscape. This large-scale movement out of the South has since come to be called The Great Migration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Migration_(African_American)

The African American artist Jacob Lawrence painted a striking series of 60 paintings depicting these migrations, now held by the Museum of Modern Art in NYC and the Phillips Collection in DC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Lawrence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migration_Series
You can view MOMA's portion of these paintings here:
https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2015/onewayticket/
and all 60 of the panels here:
https://lawrencemigration.phillipscollection.org

As a result of these migrations, Harlem in New York City emerged as an important hub of Black artistic creation, and a key place where the Black musical traditions of jazz and the blues entered American popular culture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlem_Renaissance
Another driver of the Harlem Renaissance was the temperance movement; the ratification of the 18th Amendment (1919-1933) made alcohol illegal and thereby created an underground economy very similar to the illegal trade in drugs today. Gang leaders saw opportunities for profit in the illegal distribution of alcohol made possible by Prohibition. Places like Harlem were full of speakeasies where drinks were easily obtained. Harlem became a place where Black nightclubs, music, and entertainment flourished, often attended by White audiences. It was a center of an extraodinary artistic Renaissance that had its roots in the south and was carried to cities in the north. The great American musician, bandleader, and composer Duke Ellington gained a national profile performing in Harlem's Cotton Club, and is today regarded as one of the nation's greatest composers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Ellington
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_Club

The Negro Leagues (baseball) also created a space for African American athletes to compete in sports, leading eventually to the decision by the owners of the Brooklyn Dodgers to hire Jackie Robinson to play first base in 1947, the first time a Black player was hired by a major league team in the United States.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackie_Robinson

At the same time that Black performers and athletes were gaining prominence in American popular culture, the northward migration of southern Blacks was provoking some of the sames kinds of resistance to their presence in the North that had long typified their treatment by whites in the South. Private contracts in the 1920s-1940s, particularly real estate covenants, began to include racial clauses barring properties from ever being sold to or occupied by Black familes. Similar clauses were sometimes directed against Jews, who many whites also regarded as "undesirable" objects of anti-Semitic segregation during this period.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covenant_(law)
The Federal Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) maps of the 1930s that we've encouraged you to study for Madison show how such covenants were reinforced by federal policies, a topic addressed in our lecture on zoning laws.

The color line created a challenge for African-American travelers. If you were a middle-class Black family or individual, you couldn't easily move across the landscape without fearing for your safety or even your life: finding restaurants that would serve you in an unfamiliar town, or hotels that would let you spend the night, was a potentially dangerous challenge. Segregated mass transit was a problem. So you might buy a car, the great source of freedom in American popular culture. But where to drive that car when traveling cross country--how to avoid crossing one of those invisible racial boundaries that might provoke a violent confrontation with local whites--made travel by Black Americans a perilous and frightening experience. In 1937, the Negro Motorist Green Book began to published on an annual basis, the purpose of which was to identify for African American travelers places where they could safely lodge and eat in the U.S. without being threatened with racial violence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro_Motorist_Green_Book
You can download digitized copies of many editions of The Green Book from the New York Public Library's website:
https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/collections/the-green-book#/?tab=about

These boundaries of color certainly existed here in Madison, Wisconsin. In December 1934, the Loraine Hotel on West Washington Avenue refused to offer lodging to African-American cast members of the traveling musical Green Pastures (a production with an all-Black cast, akin to today's Hamilton). UW students, many of them Jewish, picketed the hotel in protest.
https://www.library.wisc.edu/archives/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2015/06/green_pastures_protest_1935.jpg

 

V. Reshaping Landscape with the Fourteenth Amendment: Equal Protection

The first large national institution in the U.S. to be fully integrated was the military. The continued segregation of the Army was an embarrassment to the U.S. government following World War II and during the start of the Cold War. This was partly because American support for dismantling European colonies around the world made the the country's domestic racism a growing political liability in confronting the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Harry Truman's Executive Order 9981 abolished discrimination in the Armed Forces "on the basis of race, color, religion or national origin."

The integration of the military pointed the nation towards the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case (1954), when attorneys for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) encouraged racial activists in Topeka, Kansas and elsewhere in the country to enroll Black children in segregated elementary schools.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Board_of_Education
This action was analogous to the test case more than half a century earlier in Plessy v. Ferguson. Notice how color lines show up on the landscape: the third-grader Linda Brown had to walk and take a bus all the way across Topeka to get to the segregated Black elementary school, rather than attend the white elementary school just a short walk from her family's house. A Howard University-educated team led the NAACP legal defense of Brown's case in the U.S. Supreme Court (along with several cases with which it was combined), where the Court declared that Plessy's "separate but equal" doctrine was in fact an unconstitutional violation of the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause. Mark Fiege's essay exploring the local geography of Topeka as it related to Brown v Board of Education is a close-grained analysis of how important landscape history can be for understanding much larger events in American history like the Civil Rights movement.

In fact, many of the most striking events of the Civil Rights movement -- Rosa Parks' refusing to give up her seat in the front of a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama; Black students refusing to give up their seats at segregated lunch counters in Greensboro, North Carolina; the crossing of the Pettus Bridge in the march from Selma to Montgomery, and many others -- all represented efforts by courageous activists to resist the racial geographies of the Jim Crow South.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Parks
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greensboro_sit-ins
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selma_to_Montgomery_marches

One of the most powerful early moments in this history of resistance to Jim Crow came with the death of 14-year-old Emmett Till in rural Mississippi in 1955. Till, who had been born and raised in Chicago, was visiting relatives in the Mississippi Delta region when his interactions with a white woman in a local grocery store led him to be seized by that woman's husband and half-brother, who proceeded to beat, mutiliate, and murder the boy, sinking his body in a nearby river. Till's body was recovered three days later and was returned to Chicago for a funeral and burial. Till's mother Mamie Till Bradley made national news by insisting that his body be put on public display in an open casket to reveal for all the world to see the violence that had been done to her son. It was a crucial event in the early years of the Civil Rights movement, even though the two men who had killed Till were acquitted of his murder later that year by an all-white jury (they later admitted that they had in fact killed the boy).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till

Seen from the point of view of landscape, Emmett Till was an African American boy raised in a northern industrial city whose visit home to relatives in the South left him unprepared for the kind of violence he might face in the different racial geographies he encountered in the Jim Crow South. But it set the stage for a growing series of confrontations between North and South, Blacks and Whites, Federal and state/local governments, segregated and integrated landscapes that would transform the national landscape by making Jim Crow illegal, even if other forms of racism and segregation have continued to persist down to the present day. Key events noted at the end of the lecture included:

And yet...the work of resisting racial oppression in the United States -- and resisting boundaries in the American landscape created by the complex history of the color line -- is far from over.