Gender and Jim Crow

Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore. Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920. University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that state laws enforcing racial segregation were constitutional. In 1920, The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibited any citizen from being denied the right to vote based on sex, was ratified. These two events might not seem intimately related, but one of the many pleasures of this book is how Gilmore manages to uncover multiple ways in which race and gender mixed in the making of segregation and African-American disenfranchisement in North Carolina.

Although disenfranchisement did not come to North Carolina until 1899, rolling in from points further west and south like a slow-motion nightmare, the validation of legal segregation is an appropriate starting point, as one of the racist rationales for "separate but equal" was that Black institutions and facilities were the equal of those for whites. This of course was not true, but educated, middle-class African-American class from which most of Gilmore's subjects are drawn did indeed prove to be a formidable parallel to the white middle class. The cruel irony was that, at the beginning of this period, they refused to see themselves as a neatly segregated mirror image.

Rather, North Carolina's African-American middle class of this era had come of age as the inheritors of the empowerment of black Americans during Reconstruction, and the creation of a network of educational and social institutions which aggressively sought to create a "better sort" of people; in short, they were class-conscious as much as they were race conscious. Proud, ambitious, and deeply invested in Victorian mores and values, they were not willing to accept the eventual imposition of Jim Crow and the loss of the vote without a fight.

The fight that Gilmore chronicles was one fought by the women; women who used their membership in various organizations as well as their genuine interest in continued education and later many of the civic improvement ideals of the Progressive movement. Gilmore notes that prior to losing the vote, African-American men often viewed themselves as ambassadors or, as she puts it, "family delegates to the electoral sphere". (18)  By the end of this period, African-American women took the role of ambassador, negotiating the very cramped space given to black Americans in the public sphere by removing the bogey-man of the dangerous black man from interracial civic engagement with white women in a variety of institutional settings.

The final test for the tenuous interracial connections which were forged in this period was the campaign for women's suffrage. That campaign dashed the hopes for a real breakthrough, as most white women ultimately chose race over gender; in the end, only a tiny fraction of black women who tried to register were successful. The political system was able to hold its ground and open the ballet to white women while maintaining segregation. But Gilmore argues that the seeds for later civil rights triumphs were laid during this period; two decades of interracial dialogue between black and white women created cracks in the foundation of Jim Crow which would, within a couple of generations, bring the entire edifice down. This is a story of a defeat, but one which was neither inevitable nor complete.