Jamelle Bouie on Jim Crow

I'm having one of those days where it has gotten late and there is so much overwhelmingly bad news from the Trump regime that I can't pick from among the possibilities. 

So instead, I've got this video from Jamelle Bouie about Jim Crow (sorry about the intervening, annoying ads... they can be skipped after a few seconds each). 

I knew that Bouie had taken to doing videos, at first on TikTok but then on YouTube for longer pieces, as he was trying out ways to reach different audiences than the usual New York Times column or BlueSky post. But I hadn't watched any of them until I saw Kottke.org mention this one and thought I would see what he had to say.

I knew it would be good because everything Bouie does is worth reading or listening to, but it exceeded my expectations.

As he assumes at the beginning, I had the type of high school education about Jim Crow that told me about de facto and de jure segregation. I think we learned about the Klan a bit, but not at any level that approached its violent, terroristic reality. I know we were taught that Northern carpetbaggers were a problem, rather than a propaganda creation of anti-Reconstruction white Southerners.

Bouie's main point in making the video is to show that Jim Crow was not about creating racial segregation for its own sake, but to establish an authoritarian system of labor control.

He says it was a response by the merchant land-owner class after the crash of 1873, which resulted in an agrarian populist uprising in the 1870s–1880s. It was an effort to cut off voting rights for Black men and poor white men, which in turn led to more economic exploitation of both kinds of people, who had been working in union in states across the South up until that point.  

The Eufala Massacre in 1874 was an early example of the kinds of violence used to enforce these new restrictions; the Wilmington coup in 1898 was one of the last attacks used to consolidate upper class white power across the South.

Bouie is clear that white supremacy was not the aim, but the byproduct: not all whites were supreme — that belonged to what he calls the merchant-landowner class — but even the poor whites got a sense that they were superior to Black people, with the possibility of advancement. That continues to this day

The Great Migration to the North in the 20th century was the only recourse for Black people to escape Jim Crow. The merchant land-owners couldn't control their borders since they were states in the U.S., and  preventing movement out of state was the one thing they could not do.  

Black people going to the North gradually changed the Democratic Party from the pro-Jim Crow party, Bouie says, because Democratic politicians saw their interest in changing with the new base that was building in Northern cities. 

Aside from all of this, one particular fact I learned fro the video that was completely new to me was that there was a bill in 1890 that passed the U.S. House but was defeated by the filibuster in the Senate, which would have ensured voting rights nationally. 

Called the Lodge Force Bill by its opponents, it was sponsored by Massachusetts' Henry Cabot Lodge. "The bill was created primarily to enforce the ability of blacks, predominantly Republican at the time, to vote in the Southern United States, as provided for in the constitution." It was defeated by a loose coalition of Southern Democrats (then pro-Jim Crow) and enough Western and Northern Republicans who sold out their party for special interests in their states. 

If it had passed, we would have had a Voting Rights Bill in 1890 and American history could have been entirely different.