rn black Southerners were strivers, and the extent of their successes during and after Reconstruction alarmed the white supremacists determined to reassign all black people a subordinate place in the social order. Still, white supremacists had to be clever. Disenfranchisement laws, like those from the 1898 Louisiana state constitution, did not mention race explicitly because to do so would openly violate the 15th Amendment (see Primary Source Louisiana Grandfather Clause ). Textbooks remain silent on the economic context in which de jure segregation was created as well as how ideas about manhood and womanhood influenced the rationale for imposing it. Interracial political alliances in the Republican and Populist parties informed the timing of Jim Crow's debut, but Southern Democrats wrapped their justifications in the cloak of protecting white women from African American men. They relied on rape scares to convince all white men that they must unite along racial lines, not shared class interests or party alliances, to rid politics of African American men.
Textbooks do not adequately link the disenfranchisement of African American men to its consequences. Reviews of specific legislation hardly provoke a deeper consideration of what the vote accomplishes, particularly with regard to the allocation of resources for schools, neighborhoods, and social services. Nor do textbooks explain how the narrowing of the Southern electorate and the region's domination by one political party affected national politics. Seniority in Congress meant that Southern legislators had an inordinate amount of power to shape all federal legislation. Textbooks also ignore the fact that the South's opposition to the 19th Amendment was rooted in the realization that enfranchising women would bring African American women to the polls too.
Displaying photos of segregated water fountains utterly fails to convey how Jim Crow's long reign shaped life for generations of African American and white Southerners. Whether in neighborhood stores or on public sidewalks, segregation established an intricate set of rules to govern every kind of interracial contact that were reinforced by its repeated daily humiliations. Laws and practices that assigned African American laborers the most menial and lowest-paying jobs and kept them out of labor unions ensured their economic subordination.
White newspapers stirred fears of black criminality and white police often arrested black people for the most minor infractions. As the primary source from the Cleveland Advocate in 1918 suggests, all-white juries and white judges punished African Americans more severely than whites, even when whites had committed the greater crime (see Primary Source "'Colored' Gets Three Years -- 'White' Gets Thirty Days" ). More broadly, Southern courts sentenced a disproportionate number of African Americans to chain gangs and prison.
Segregation literally rendered African American life less valuable than white life. Black Southerners had higher mortality rates, for example, because they lived in areas where white officials did not invest in improving sanitation and because the lack of public spending on health services for black people typically meant fewer hospitals and treatment options. An untold number of black adults and black children died as a result.
Students need a clear understanding that violence—or the threat of it—was central to maintaining segregation, and what made racial terrorism so effective was its randomness in execution. Rumors of rape might spur a lynching or a race riot in which white mobs attacked entire black communities.
Textbooks obscure how lynching functioned as a political and economic tool. They do not explain spectacle lynchings which were highly ritualized events that drew hundreds or thousands of onlookers. Nor do the textbooks examine the specific contexts in which racial violence flourished and how these changed over time. Textbooks also fail to call adequate attention to the reality that this violence was national in scope. Primary sources like Claude McKay's 