Racial attitudes and social mores in the south: 1900-1950

The South in the early 1900’s was a place of civil unrest. This unrest was caused by a lack of proper amount of time for people to change and adjust. For many white members of the south that were old enough to remember Reconstruction, the laws that the North had made had little to no affect on how they felt about the treatment of Blacks, and many of them were passing down these feelings of racial superiority that had been passed down to them by their parents and grandparents to new generations of Southerners. These new generations began to have feelings of resentment for the North, although they had not themselves experienced Reconstruction, and began to secretly undermine it. These defiant natures began to show themselves when the governments of many states enacted what were termed the Jim Crow laws in the 1880’s.

Jim Crow laws were an individual state’s way of limiting its black population legally. These laws were very moderate in the North, but in the South they took on a very aggressive and active part in the daily lives of its inhabitants. The South had a long and established series of custom for the interaction between the races before the Ci

The Ku Klux Klan played a role in the stressed race relations of the early 1900’s in the South. This group of white supremacist were often a violent group, which is most often linked with cross burnings and lynching of black men. This group was made up exclusively of whites, and did not just persecute blacks; it was against any non-white, and non-Christian, such as Jews. This discrimination towards Jews permeated throughout the South and is clearly evident in the case of the Scottsboro Boys.

Plessy vs. Ferguson in 1896. The Supreme Court’s decision in this case establishes a “separate but equal” policy, thus allowing states to legalize segregation. (Wormser, 99) It was this Supreme Court decision that really solidified the Jim Crow laws. A previous decision from the Supreme Court in the case U.S. vs. Reese said that it was not an individual’s fault when a racial crime was committed, but the State’s and that made it the state’s problem to deal with. These such rulings encouraged the defiant white Southerners to continue in their supremacist ways. The Jim Crow laws even seemed to legalize the black’s inferiority in the minds of many of the southern whites.

only to a certain degree. This is where the school of thought that the “white man’s floor is the black man’s ceiling” comes from. (Class discussion)

Not all of the whites in the South believed that Blacks should be treated badly, but most of them did believe that blacks were inferior. This belief is sometimes realized in the act of Paternalism, or a field of thought where the white society feels that it is their duty to help the black people rais

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