Jim Crow's (Non-Governmental) Foes
P.S. HuffMonday, February 16, 2009
Jeff Jacoby, writing in the Boston Globe, brings to light a neglected aspect of American history:
Many people might intuitively assume that Southern racism had led to entrenched public segregation long before Southern legislatures made it mandatory. Not so. Separate facilities for blacks and whites were not routine in the South until the early 20th century. Racism there surely was, but as C. Vann Woodward observed in "The Strange Career of Jim Crow," the idea of separating the races in places of public accommodation initially struck many white Southerners as daft. . . . .Read the whole piece; it's fascinating.
. . . .
Far from craving the authority to relegate blacks to the back of buses and streetcars, for example, the owners of municipal transportation systems actively resisted segregation. They did so not out of some lofty commitment to racial equality or integration, but for economic reasons: Segregation hurt their bottom line. It drove up their expenses by requiring them - as the manager of Houston's streetcar company complained to city councilors in 1904 - "to haul around a good deal of empty space that is assigned to the colored people and not available to both races." In many cities, segregation also provoked blacks to boycott streetcars, cutting sharply into the companies' profit.
The moral of the story: Never underestimate the power of monetary incentives.
