Black America in the 1890s

Warning: graphic photo of a lynching below

The failure of Reconstruction

The period following the Civil War is known as Reconstruction, during which the Federal Government implemented programs that attempted to heal the country’s wounds and help freed slaves integrate into society. Unfortunately, Reconstruction was largely adandoned by the late 1870s.

While the Civil War ended slavery, it did not end white supremacy; discrimination against blacks in the South continued to exist in harsh forms, both legally and illegally. White mob violence against blacks was common, and numerous laws were enacted in the South to prevent blacks from voting and keep them economically subordinate. These were known as “black codes” and Jim Crow laws. Also, an economic depression in 1873 created fierce competition among lower class blacks and whites for jobs, and in the racist South whites generally prevailed. Southern racism and economic competition forced Republicans to abandon the agenda of Reconstruction and allowed Democrats (who were pro-slavery before the war) to regain political control in the South. By the late 1870s the situation in the South was very grim for most blacks (27).

The "Nadir" of African American history

Many historians consider the 1890s to be the “nadir”—meaning lowest point—of post-slavery black history. In the South, conditions continued to worsen after Reconstruction. Many blacks found themselves working in the near-feudal crop-lien system, in which they were forced to rent farming capital at high interest rates from white land-owners. They would then owe a large share of their profits to the land-owner, resulting in a continuous cycle of debt and poverty (28).

The legal structure was also deeply racist in the 1890s. Throughout the South, numerous policies had been put into place that prevented blacks from voting. The Civil Rights Act of 1875, which was designed to give blacks equal protection under the law, was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in in 1885. In 1896, the Supreme Court also declared that legal segregation was constitutional (“separate but equal”) in Plessy vs. Ferguson. As the momentum of Reconstruction fully wore off, the Republican Party also began to abandon its more radical agenda for black rights, leaving Africans Americans with even less representation in politics (29).

Racial violence also plagued the country, especially the South, most often in the form of lynching. Lynchings were public executions of black men (occasionally women and children were also murdered) by white mobs, and often included brutal torture; victims endured beating, burning, and castration, among other things. Lynching was was a display of vigilante “justice” in response to rumors—usually false—that a black man had raped a white woman. They revealed a specific aspect of American racism: white fears of black male sexual dominance (29).

Two black lynched men. The white mob is gathered below.

Segregated public facilities were a common feature of the Jim Crow South after Reconstruction

Warning: graphic photo of a lynching below

Social Darwinism

Finally, there was a new ideology that justified racism in the late 19th century, Social Darwinism, which took hold of American public discourse in the 1890s. Social Darwinism explained society’s racial disparities by drawing on the theories of the famous scientist Charles Darwin. Darwin theorized that in nature, organisms were constantly struggling for scarce resources, and those who were best fit for this struggle would survive and pass along their genes to the next generation. Therefore, weaker organisms would die off while stronger organisms would survive, and both deserved their fate according to the laws of nature. Through this process, nature was always “improving,” as stronger organisms survived and weaker ones died off. This is Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection, and is often summarized by the phrase “survival of the fittest.”

Social theorists appropriated Darwin’s ideas in explaining racial disparities, arguing that the white race had demonstrated their superiority over darker races. Social Darwinists argued that the validity of this theory was self-evident; white people had created science, founded the United States of America, and clearly occupied superior positions in society than the darker races, many of whom had been enslaved by whites. Thus, they argued that racial inequality was “natural;” it was an objective, scientific reality that blacks were inferior to whites. Social Darwinism ignores significant historical, political, and economic forces that lead to a condition of racial inequality, as well as important contributions by people of color to the development of civilization. However, in the late 19th century it was the most important way of understanding racial disparities, and informed racial discourses among both blacks and whites (30).

Today, most scholars agree that the biological differences between people of different races are not real. Race is now considered to be a social construct. This means that the categories of race, and the stereotypes ascribed to those categories, are a result of social and historical processes, not the result of biological differences.

This is a description of Eugenics, an offshoot of Social Darwinism. Eugenics argued that many social problems were inherited traits that could be "bred out" of the human race. How does this relate to racism?