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Show The Development of Jim Crow By POLLY STEWART Spotlight Chairman The term "Jim Crow" comes from a Northern minstrel song of the 1830's. Hence all the elements of paternalism, of bigotry, of lack of understanding of white supremacy are implicit in the name. Although it may seem ironic that the term is a Northern one S' u j (blackface minstrelsy did not, of course, flourish flour-ish in the South) one should remember that segregation in the social so-cial not in the legal sense originated in the North, and that before be-fore the turn of thp than real; the need for a scapegoat to encourage political unity among whites. But segregation cannot be viewed as a mere political expedient. In a much broader sense, it is the South's modern-day modern-day expression of white supremacy. Before Be-fore the Civil War the South's expression of white supremacy was slavery. In both cases, the white man's attitude atti-tude toward the Negro has been highly ambivalent; it is impossible to capsulize the Southerner's complex feelings about Negroes in a simple, all-or-nothing statement. state-ment. Indeed, in terms of "feelings," segregation segre-gation is alien to the earliest Southern traditions. Technically the Jim Crow approach ap-proach denies any intermingling of the races in any sense. The negative approach of Jim Crow legislation thus denies a very real aspect of Negro-white relations which dates from slavery days. Countless Count-less Southern writers have told, in all sincerity, of a certain warmth of intimacy and love between themselves and some forgotten Negro child in the distant past. Margaret Mitchell's account of Mammy however cloying, nevertheless puts forth an aspect of the old Negro-white relationship rela-tionship which came to be more and more pushed into the background as segregation laws became more and more strictly enforced. Not that I'm mourning for the old days. But it is important to remember that the very idea of segregating the races completely, by law, was so alien to the thinking of W one newspaperman m lished an editorial wjjgfe politicians who were a g.8 segregation. In that eoi -erated sarcastically and . f, fancifully some of the s segregation laws wouM I life, including JimT.w B' Crow street cars, Jim jc?, which to swear m court. of this editor's conjectures, satire, came true. Violence pr"ed?Jbe? Crow. Before JJin tion had taken firoh0'tN the form of lynch ng , time high. An ears were lynched miD them Negroes f ' Sy-nigM : was a kind of tertainment in ntf e deep-rooted enmjtybet whites stems largay the turn of the c ent uff , In retrospect it " and vers, both Nor, , not to th nk of imS0Uthem traditional of ail However, as I hope I J y gation has not afncrea fhe South. from both the Negro tioB munities to end timeIv- Jim,cSU unstable and basic' ' century Boston was Stewart more highly segregated than Charleston. The fact that the American South has not always been a hotbed of segregation segrega-tion is most difficult to grasp. It is much easier, I admit, to think of present conditions con-ditions in terms of absolutes and not in the relative terms of change; nevertheless neverthe-less it is of great importance, in trying to understand the South, to note that Segregation did not become entrenched as a way of Southern life until after the turn of the twentieth century. Some of the reasons for the advent of Jim Crow I discussed in last week's article: Economic rivalry between the races; sexual obsessions more imagined |