Been in the Storm So Long (58 page)

By choosing to make an issue of racial separation in public places, black men and women in the aftermath of Union occupation provoked a prolonged and often heated controversy that sometimes spilled out into the streets of southern communities. By 1867, on the eve of Radical Reconstruction, blacks in such cities as Mobile, New Orleans, Savannah, Richmond, Charleston, Nashville, and Baltimore had already challenged the ordinances, company rules, and customs barring them from or segregating them in the horse-drawn streetcars. “For as long as distinctions will be kept on in public manners,” the black newspaper in New Orleans announced,
“these discriminations will react on the decisions of juries and courts, and make impartial justice a lie.”
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If unable to obtain court injunctions against the operation of exclusive city railway lines, blacks boarded the streetcars, ignored the conductor’s order to leave, waited to be forcibly removed, and then sued the company for assault and battery. Hoping to avoid such confrontations, the newly launched City Railway Company in Charleston initially proposed to establish separate and equal cars or to partition the same cars between blacks and whites. But blacks rejected these proposals as demeaning and in violation of their newly acquired civil rights and demanded nothing less than fully integrated facilities. In April 1867, the attempt of police to eject two blacks who had refused to leave a streetcar precipitated a riot in which crowds of blacks tried to force their way into the police station to release their brethren who had been arrested. The police finally restored order, the blacks decided to press their case in the courts, and the City Railway Company announced a month after the “riot” that it had decided to eliminate all racial distinctions on its cars.
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Despite the force of custom and white opinion, blacks managed to win a sufficient number of court decisions and favorable rulings from local Union Army commanders to compel the transportation companies to reconsider their racial policies. Seeking to retain a semblance of distinction between blacks and whites, the streetcar company in Richmond provided two classes of cars, one of which would be confined to white women and white men accompanying them while the other would be open to all persons. In a variation of that system, Richmond also established alternate cars for white and black passengers, with the cars for the latter distinguishable by a black ball perched on the roof.
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That resembled the “black star” cars in New Orleans, which had come under steady attack from blacks since the early days of Union occupation. The
New Orleans Tribune
, the voice of the influential colored community, not only denounced the “black star” cars in its editorials but permitted its columns to be used to advocate direct action: “Let every colored citizen of New Orleans, on and after the fifteenth of August [1865], enter into any car of the C.R.R.C., and if ordered out—take a seat, and if afterwards ejected, sue the company.” Nearly two years later, after considerable litigation and numerous confrontations, the superintendent of a local railway company informed the mayor that blacks had threatened to force their way onto the cars reserved for whites “and that should the driver resist or refuse their passage, they would compel him to leave the car and take forcible possession themselves.” Fearing a riot, he requested the mayor to take all measures necessary to preserve the peace. Several days later, the chief of police issued an order forbidding any interference with blacks riding on the streetcars. After hailing this triumph of equal justice, the black newspaper turned its editorial fire on racial distinctions in the public schools.
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To the blacks, freedmen and freeborn alike, the challenges to segregated seating in public conveyances were inseparable from the issues over
which they claimed the war had been fought. But to many whites, this flagrant disregard for racial etiquette gave rise to even more fearful apprehensions about the results of emancipation and the extent to which they would be able to exert power over the former slaves. Few whites needed to be reminded of what was ultimately at stake. Behind every discussion and skirmish involving racial separation lurked the specter of unrestrained black lust and sexuality, with that most feared of consequences—racial amalgamation or, as it was now popularly called, miscegenation. Now that enslavement no longer marked a distinction between blacks and whites, the implications of physical contact were sufficiently obvious to whites. Equal access to public vehicles, theaters, restaurants, hotels, schools, parks, and churches would eventually open the door to the home, the parlor, and the bedroom. The absence of distinctions in public life thus prepared the way for no distinctions at all. “If we have social equality,” one native white warned, “we shall have intermarriage, and if we have intermarriage we shall degenerate; we shall become a race of mulattoes; we shall be another Mexico; we shall be ruled out from the family of white nations. Sir, it is a matter of life and death with the Southern people to keep their blood pure.”
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Much of the furor over racial separation in public vehicles grew out of fears that white women and black men might otherwise find themselves seated next to each other. In the absence of restrictions, blacks would gain access to the “ladies’ car” (hitherto reserved for nonsmoking men and for women) on the railroads and to the sleeping compartments on the steamboats. The issue in both cases was eminently clear. On a Mississippi River steam packet running between Memphis and Vicksburg, the white passengers applauded the action of the captain in refusing to grant a stateroom to a black couple. Expressing his relief at the decision, one of the passengers posed the central question to a skeptical northern visitor, “How would you feel to know that
your wife was sleeping in the next room to a nigger and his wife?”
After reflecting over that question, the visitor realized soon enough that his fellow passengers expected no response. “The argument was unanswerable: it was an awful thought!” As for the unwelcome couple, they were cast ashore to wait for still another boat but their chances seemed dim. “They won’t find a boat that’ll take ’em,” the captain declared. “Anyhow, they can’t force their damned nigger equality on to me!”
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In playing upon postwar fears of miscegenation, whites seemed almost oblivious to the hypocrisy of their sudden concern for the survival of the Anglo-Saxon race. Among others, Mary Chesnut knew better than to press this argument too far. “Like the patriarchs of old,” she had confided to her diary in March 1861, “our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines; and the mulattoes one sees in every family partly resemble the white children. Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household but her own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds.”
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Actually, whites made no attempt to deny the presence of a substantial mulatto population; those transgressions,
however, had violated black women, not the prevailing racial code, and they had taken place in a rigidly controlled setting, with white men exercising a power which the prevailing relationships in their society permitted them. But in this same context, with men setting the sexual code and regulating their own behavior, black male sexuality assumed even more menacing proportions, precisely because it was deemed to be uncontrollable.

With so much evidence to the contrary around them, blacks found it hard to take seriously the white man’s sudden preoccupation with racial purity. But if whites were serious in their protestations, they were advised to direct that concern to the principal source of the problem—themselves. “The white man says he don’t want to be placed on equality with the negro,” Abraham H. Galloway, a mulatto, told a convention of freedmen in North Carolina in 1865. “Why, Sir, if you could only see him slipping around at night, trying to get into negro women’s houses, you would be astonished.” The other delegates indicated their agreement, one of them shouting out, “That’s the truth, Galloway.” The
New Orleans Tribune
thought it highly ironic that some of the most “devoted apostles of miscegenation” now proclaimed themselves as the principal defenders of the white race.

Looking to the future, a Virginia freedman testified that he apprehended no greater danger of racial amalgamation now than during slavery. “It was nothing but the stringent laws of the south that kept many a white man from marrying a black woman.” He thought the strongest inclination to interracial sexual relations still rested with whites, though he would not deny the possibility that some blacks might wish to indulge themselves in what whites had already made fashionable. “I will state to you as a white lady stated to a gentleman down in Hampton, that if she felt disposed to fall in love with or marry a black man, it was nobody’s business but hers; and so I suppose that if the colored race get all their rights, and particularly their equal rights before the law, it would not hurt the nation or trouble the nation.”
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Despite white apprehensions, few blacks rushed into sexual liaisons or marital relationships with white partners. If anything, the abolition of slavery tended to diminish such contacts by freeing black women from the whims and lusts of their masters; moreover, as a Freedmen’s Bureau agent
in South Carolina reported, “young gentlemen did not want mulatto children sworn to them at a cost of three hundred dollars apiece.” When it came to domestic relationships at least, blacks welcomed the implementation of racial separation. To the charge that they coveted the daughters and sisters of white men, Henry M. Turner replied that black men wished only to live with and love their own women without having to fear white intervention. “What do we want with their daughters and sisters? We have as much beauty as they. Look at our ladies, do you want more beauty than they? The difficulty heretofore has been, our ladies were not always at our own disposal. All we ask of the white men is to let our ladies alone, and they need not fear us.”
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No matter how carefully or eloquently blacks tried to clarify the differences between “social equality” and “public equality,” insisting that they had already suffered “social equality with a vengeance,” whites would continue to raise the bugaboo of miscegenation and to press for legislation to outlaw it. It was as though they could not trust themselves to heed their own warnings. “By his loud out-cry against the
dreadful
thing,” the black newspaper in Augusta, Georgia, said of the white man, “he seems to be afraid that some of his daughters may do what a good many of his sons and himself has done time and again, and therefore he wants laws made to prevent
them
doing so.”
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Actually, the white man’s rhetorical concern for racial purity served him well by helping to mask his own complicity in its compromise. At the same time, the obsession with miscegenation and racial supremacy proved to be effective banners around which whites could be mobilized to resist any encroachments on the traditional practices and social usages governing race relations. During the next decade, whites would be repeatedly rallied to those banners to combat the more threatening manifestations of black freedom, but in the immediate aftermath of the war they singled out for special attention the black soldier, whose continued presence most graphically symbolized their defeat and humiliation and whose behavior set the most dangerous example for their former slaves.

W
HEN ASKED TO EXPLAIN
the origins of the rapist, Myrta Lockett Avary immediately thought of the black soldier. “The rapist is a product of the reconstruction period. His chrysalis was a uniform; as a soldier he could force his way into private homes, bullying and insulting white women; he was often commissioned to tasks involving these things. He came into life in the abnormal atmosphere of a time rife with discussions of social equality theories, contentions for coeducation and intermarriage.” Asked to comment on the rampant violence that prevailed in the postwar South, Governor Benjamin Humphreys of Mississippi thought the presence of black troops sufficient explanation. “Everyone is afraid of the negro soldiers—they
crowd everybody off the sidewalks, and shoot and kill us, and protect the freedmen in their indolence and acts of crime.” Despairing over the breakdown of the plantation labor system, Edmund Rhett of South Carolina placed the blame directly on the influence of the black troops. “If your desire is to restore quiet, and orderly labor to the land,” he advised the Freedmen’s Bureau commissioner in Charleston, “nothing in my judgment is more pernicious in its effect than the example, and presence of colored troops, amongst a class of colored agricultural laborers.”
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