Managing White Supremacy

Race, Politics, and Citizenship in Jim Crow Virginia

J. Douglas Smith

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780807854242, 9780807827567
• eBook ISBN: 9780807862261
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Tracing the erosion of white elite paternalism in Jim Crow Virginia, Douglas Smith reveals a surprising fluidity in southern racial politics in the decades between World War I and the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.

Smith draws on official records, private correspondence, and letters to newspapers from otherwise anonymous Virginians to capture a wide and varied range of black and white voices. African Americans emerge as central characters in the narrative, as Smith chronicles their efforts to obtain access to public schools and libraries, protection under the law, and the equitable distribution of municipal resources.

This acceleration of black resistance to white supremacy in the years before World War II precipitated a crisis of confidence among white Virginians, who, despite their overwhelming electoral dominance, felt increasingly insecure about their ability to manage the color line on their own terms. Exploring the everyday power struggles that accompanied the erosion of white authority in the political, economic, and educational arenas, Smith uncovers the seeds of white Virginians' resistance to civil rights activism in the second half of the twentieth century.

1

A Fine Discrimination Indeed

PARTY POLITICS AND WHITE SUPREMACY FROM

EMANCIPATION TO WORLD WAR I

The destinies of the two races, in this country, are indissolubly linked together, and the interests of both require that the common government of all shall not permit the seeds of race hate to be planted under the sanction of law…. If evils will result from the commingling of the two races upon public highways established for the benefit of all, they will be infinitely less than those that will surely come from state legislation regulating the enjoyment of civil rights upon the basis of race. We boast of the freedom enjoyed by our people above all other peoples. But it is difficult to reconcile that boast with a state of law which, practically, puts the brand of servitude and degradation upon a large class of our fellow citizens, — our equals before the law.
— JOHN MARSHALL HARLAN, dissenting in
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

A majority of white Virginians who assumed positions of leadership in the 1920s and 1930s were born into a late-nineteenth-century political culture dominated by chaos, electoral fraud, and racial violence. Educated by their fathers and mothers to distrust democracy in general, and the postemancipation political alliance of blacks and whites known as Readjusters in particular, Douglas Southall Freeman, Harry Byrd, and their contemporaries learned well the lessons of their childhood. Throughout their lives, they sanctioned segregation and disfranchisement as necessary to prevent a return to the embittered days of Virginia's experiment with manhood suffrage and interracial political cooperation. As one-party democracy and white supremacy became the guiding principles of twentieth-century politics in the Old Dominion, white Virginians defined blacks out of the body politic. Only at this point, after silencing the political voice of African Americans, did white elites in Virginia reconfigure their management of white supremacy along paternalistic lines.

Virginia became the only state of the former Confederacy to avoid postwar military rule by agreeing to a new constitution in 1869 that granted the suffrage to black men. During that year's elections, the first since the end of the Civil War, black men flocked to the polls. Consequently, the 180 new members of the Virginia General Assembly included twenty-seven blacks, not an overwhelming number given that blacks outnumbered whites in forty of the commonwealth's ninety-nine counties. In the words of one historian, “an appearance of moderation and amiability” developed among the black and white legislators. Members of the ruling Conservative Party, however, soon revealed their true colors. In addition to pushing through a series of laws that chipped away at black political rights, conservatives played the race card with greater intensity in subsequent campaigns, successfully warning of the danger of black domination.¹

In part, the effective use of racial rhetoric allowed the Conservative Party to downplay class differences that otherwise might have erupted sooner than they did; the party's policies consistently ignored the needs of the state as a whole and instead favored the agenda of the railroad and large business interests that controlled most of the wealth in the state. Rather than earmarking scarce funds for the public school system provided for by the new constitution, for instance, the legislature directed monies to pay off the state's debt. At the same time, corporations paid minimal taxes. Not surprisingly, most supporters of the Conservative Party resided in Virginia's cities and small towns, the hubs of commercial and industrial activity; bankers, lawyers, and railroad executives from Richmond, all of whom served on one another's boards of directors, dominated the party's leadership.²

In 1870 and 1871 the legislature passed a series of laws that committed the state to paying in full a $46 million debt incurred prior to the Civil War. Proponents, known as Funders and representative of the financial and corporate interests most likely to benefit from full payment, argued on behalf of maintaining the state's honor and credit rating. Opponents considered the measures excessive and asked why the state's corporations should not assume a share of the commonwealth's financial burdens. Enormous sums of money were spent in procuring this legislation, which, in the words of one historian, resulted from “‘an unholy combination of the forces of the bankers, brokers, speculators, and railroads.’”³

The two sides continued to differ on a fair settlement of the debt issue throughout the 1870s. When the Conservative governor vetoed a bill passed in 1877 to provide for a mild readjustment of the debt and instead slashed funding for schools and other state services, the most significant political revolt in Virginia's postbellum history erupted. The Readjusters, led by former Confederate general William Mahone, took control of the legislature in 1879 and elected the state's governor two years later. Mahone himself went to the U.S. Senate. The Readjusters funneled money into the nascent public school system, eliminated the poll tax, raised taxes on corporations, lowered property taxes that had become burdensome to farmers, and readjusted the state debt to coincide, in the words of one student of the movement, with their belief that “‘the state's creditors should be compelled to share in the general loss occasioned by war and reconstruction.’”⁴

Black voters remained in the background during the initial Readjuster victory in 1879, but many soon joined the nascent movement, drawn to the party's platform and its openness to all persons “without distinction of color.” African Americans enthusiastically supported two tenets at the core of the Readjuster agenda: opposition to debt payment and the establishment of a vibrant public school system. They believed that decades of enslavement constituted more than their fair share of the state's obligations and recognized education as absolutely essential for the full realization of their citizenship. Mahone, according to the most recent historian of the Readjusters, “never intended to challenge white supremacy,” but he quickly recognized that his success depended upon black votes; as white Virginians divided their support between the Conservatives and Readjusters, the black vote became decisive. Unlike the Republican Party, which had effectively ignored blacks in Virginia since 1870, Mahone and the Readjusters rewarded the black members of their coalition with a share of the patronage appointments that came under their control. For their part, blacks understood that patronage entailed not only material benefits, but also the recognition of their electoral influence.⁵

Highly dependent on the votes of black men, white Readjusters recognized their vulnerability to charges leveled by many southern whites that black political power would lead to social equality, often a code phrase for interracial sexual relations. Consequently, white Readjusters went to great lengths to distinguish between the presence of blacks in the public and private spheres. Acknowledging their support for African American political, legal, and commercial rights, Readjusters simultaneously affirmed their commitment to white supremacy and argued for the sanctity of segregation in the home. Opponents of the Readjusters, however, refused to accept any such distinction and instead emphasized that black gains in the public sphere, particularly in the schools, threatened the private sphere. Conservatives turned the appointment of two black men to the Richmond school board into a major election issue in 1883 by stressing that most teachers were women and that the black members of the board therefore exercised direct control over white women. Not only did the situation, in the minds of conservative whites, pose an obvious and menacing sexual threat, it also raised specific fears of “Negro domination.”⁶

In that same 1883 election, Mahone's Readjusters lost at the polls, ending for the next eighty years any chance of significant interracial political cooperation in the Old Dominion. Amidst charges of corruption, bossism, and catering to blacks, scores of supporters deserted the insurgent party. The Conservative Party reconstituted itself as the Democratic Party, adopted many of the changes instituted by the Readjusters, including debt readjustment and support for the public schools, and organized efficiently in every precinct in the state. Focusing on Mahone's corrupt practices and on his support of black political participation, the Democrats received a boost to their efforts when a race riot erupted in Danville just days before the November election. While ostensibly precipitated by white perceptions that blacks increasingly failed to show proper deference in public, the riot's deeper causes stemmed from the inclusion of blacks in the Readjuster coalition. At the time of the riot, blacks in Danville sat on the city council, served on the police force, and held other public positions. Although white incumbency in the offices of mayor, commonwealth's attorney, judge, city sergeant, commissioner of the revenue, and chief of police made it unlikely that blacks ever exercised significant control over Danville's government, whites lost no opportunity to warn against such domination. Word of the riot spread throughout the state, blacks were intimidated and forced from the polls, and the Democrats swept two-thirds of the seats in the legislature.⁷

Virginia's big-city and small-town newspapers eagerly supported the determination of the Democratic Party to “redeem” the state from the “vice, venality, corruption, and unscrupulous rapacity” of Mahoneism. The new legislature passed statutes that weakened the powers of the Re-adjuster governor and placed the state's election machinery firmly in the hands of the Democratic Party. Nevertheless, elections remained hotly contested for the rest of the decade, and both sides openly sought the support of black voters. Ballot-box stuffing, vote buying, and other forms of fraud, usually justified as necessary to avoid “Negro domination,” led to no less than twenty contested congressional elections in Virginia between 1874 and 1900.⁸

The most contentious of these elections occurred in 1888 in the Fourth District, the heart of Virginia's heavily black Southside. John Mercer Langston, the son of a white planter and a freed slave, educated at Oberlin College and Howard Law School, a former U.S. minister to Haiti and president of Virginia State College for Negroes, rejected Mahone's uneven treatment of blacks and ran as an independent in a three-way race. Mahone condemned Langston as an enemy of the Readjusters and of blacks. Democrats warned of the danger of black rule and left no stone unturned in an effort to win the seat. In an election rife with fraud and vote buying, Langston came in second to the Democratic nominee but demanded a recount. In 1890 the Republican-controlled House of Representatives declared him the winner by the smallest of margins, and Langston served out the remaining months of the term, becoming the Old Dominion's first black member of Congress, and the last for nearly a century.⁹

When Langston ran for reelection in 1890, the Democrats and their allies in the press announced that party politics no longer mattered, “‘but rather whether intelligence or ignorance should rule, whether civilization should be preserved, in short, whether the white man or the negro should rule the Commonwealth of Virginia.’” The Richmond Dispatch acknowledged that Langston “‘is one of the best educated men of his race’” but then declared that “‘he is still a negro, with all of a negro's conceit, pomposity, credulity, and stupidity.’” Langston lost decisively, and one year later, in 1891, all remaining black candidates for the Virginia General Assembly lost for the first time since 1869.¹⁰

Events of the 1870s and 1880s convinced supporters of the Democratic Party that they ought to eliminate blacks from politics in the Old Dominion. Although white elites most feared another insurgent movement like the one led by Mahone, they chose to make blacks the scapegoats. As long as blacks remained enfranchised, many whites were able to deny responsibility for their own culpability in demeaning the electoral process. Nearly twenty years after he was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1893, Thomas Staples Martin, the recognized head of the Virginia Democratic Party until his death in 1919, defended his corrupt use of railroad money as the necessary price of restoring white supremacy and ending fear of black domination. Although such fears were unfounded, pedaling to them paid remarkable political dividends for the Democratic Party.¹¹

Backed fully by railroad and corporate interests desirous of political and social calm, Martin and his cronies proceeded to build a machine with almost total control over political affairs in each of Virginia's counties. Using election laws and appointive powers, the Democratic Party worked through county chairmen who tapped election boards that were confirmed by the legislature. Election boards then appointed election judges and clerks, but only after consulting with the county chairman. Such control over the machinery ensured the election of favored candidates to the state legislature and to the major local offices: treasurer, sheriff, clerk of court, commissioner of revenue, and county supervisor. These “courthouse cliques” dominated Virginia politics for the next seventy-five years.¹²

In 1894 the Democratic Party took a significant step toward disfranchising black Virginians when the General Assembly passed the Walton Act, a secret ballot measure aimed at illiterates, who were disproportionately black. The statute ordered the use of ballots that contained no symbols or other designations of party affiliation. Voters were instructed to vote in secret and to cross out the names of the candidates they did not support, leaving only the name of the candidate of their choice. Although the legislation allowed special constables to assist illiterates, the Democratic Party's control of the election machinery ensured that whites received far more help than the 50 percent of black Virginians who were illiterate. One Democratic stalwart deemed the law “the Democratic salvation,” and the subsequent plunge in black voting confirmed the assessment.¹³

Firmly in control, Martin and the Democratic Party set out to reclaim Virginia's antebellum tradition of responsible political and social leadership exercised by a small elite on behalf of the majority. Ignoring their own complicity in the past quarter-century of political chicanery, Democrats blamed the Underwood Constitution of 1869, the rapaciousness of Mahone and the Readjusters, and the presence of black voters. By the late 1890s, in the words of one historian, the Democrats came to recognize “complete white supremacy” as the most effective means of achieving their ends. Although legislation had already limited the participation of most black voters in the Old Dominion, sentiment among elites favored a constitutional restriction that offered a greater degree of permanency. Efforts in this direction were greatly aided by the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Williams v. Mississippi, a ruling that sanctioned Mississippi's use of the poll tax and literacy tests to restrict its electorate.¹⁴

During the 1900 legislative session, the Virginia General Assembly called for a referendum on the holding of a constitutional convention. A handful of partisan newspapers came out strongly in favor of the convention, which they perceived would destroy the flawed constitution forced upon Virginia during Reconstruction. During a party meeting held several weeks before the referendum, some critics worried that new suffrage restrictions would disfranchise illiterate whites as thoroughly as blacks. To allay such fears, the Democratic Party convention pledged that no whites would be stripped of the franchise. Just as significantly, the Democratic convention instructed that the constitutional convention submit its work to the voters of the whole state for ratification.¹⁵

A small percentage of Virginia voters turned out for the May referendum, barely half the number who would vote in that November's presidential election. One historian cites the low turnout as evidence that the Old Dominion's white populace never demanded a new constitution or new suffrage laws, but that, rather, a handful of politicians and newspapers pushed the cause. Of those who did vote, large numbers of whites from the mountains and valleys of the west and from the Northern Neck along the Chesapeake Bay voted against the referendum. Both constituencies, long supporters of the Readjusters, distrusted the effect of new suffrage laws on the high numbers of poor and illiterate whites in their populations. Nevertheless, sufficient support existed in the cities and the Southside, home to the heaviest concentrations of blacks, to carry the day for those in favor.¹⁶

Despite earlier reassurances, delegates to the constitutional convention adopted suffrage restrictions that not only decimated what remained of the black vote but substantially reduced the white vote as well. A handful of delegates openly acknowledged their desire to disfranchise illiterate and lower-class whites as well as blacks. Most, however, admitted only that these restrictions were essential for eliminating the black electorate, a necessary first step in cleaning up the electoral process. Democrats argued that the very presence of black voters tempted unscrupulous politicians of both parties to commit illegal acts. One Republican delegate mocked Democrats who “say the negro…has irritated them and caused them to sin.” Instead, remarked the same delegate, these self-styled “best people” sought “to take the government out of the hands of the common people and to organize a highly-paid aristocracy.” To blunt the effect of these claims, the convention adopted a number of literacy, understanding, and grandfather clauses that left open the possibility that generous registrars might allow illiterate whites to register while denying the privilege to black aspirants.¹⁷

No individual in Virginia matched the determination or commitment of Lynchburg's Carter Glass in achieving these goals. A newspaper editor and sta...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Epigraph
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Illustrations and Maps
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction SEPARATION BY CONSENT
• Chapter 1 - A Fine Discrimination Indeed PARTY POLITICS AND WHITE SUPREMACY FROM EMANCIPATION TO WORLD WAR I
• Chapter 2 - Opportunities Found and Lost RACE AND POLITICS AFTER WORLD WAR I
• Chapter 3 - Redefining Race THE CAMPAIGN FOR RACIAL PURITY
• Chapter 4 - Educating Citizens or Servants? HAMPTON INSTITUTE AND THE DIVIDED MIND OF WHITE VIRGINIANS
• Chapter 5 - Little Tyrannies and Petty Skullduggeries
• Chapter 6 - A Melancholy Distinction VIRGINIA'S RESPONSE TO LYNCHING
• Chapter 7 - The Erosion of Paternalism CONFRONTING THE LIMITS OF MANAGED RACE RELATIONS
• Chapter 8 - Traveling in Opposite Directions
• Chapter 9 - Too Radical for Us THE PASSING OF MANAGED RACE RELATIONS
• Epilogue TOWARD THE SOUTH OF THE FUTURE
• Notes
• Bibliography