Beating Jim Crow
What Republicans in the South are trying to do is to reimpose the political and social order that went by the name of Jim Crow.
Between the 1877 withdrawal of federal troops, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the South had a social order based on racism and the misogynistic tenets of the Southern Baptist Church. This required strict separation of the races, and the sexes. Blacks were either exiled to the North or condemned to lives of brutality. It wasn’t slavery. In many ways it was worse.
What sustained Jim Crow was a leaky economic boycott by the North. Atlanta tried to resist it, with economic exhibitions, with education, then with social pressure. (To learn more about the struggle, read anything by or about W.E.B. Dubois (1867-1963).)
The “white” history of this period, from Henry Grady’s New South Speech to the story of Coca-Cola, is much less heroic. What businesses mainly did was treat the South as a colony. Tobacco and cotton drew a price, but most of the value went elsewhere. What modernity came in, starting in the early 20th century, was a century-old order of textile manufacture, drawn from New England by cheap labor. The South remained backward.
The status quo was protected by white race riots, by lynching, and by laws like Georgia’s “county unit system,” which prevented liberals from ever winning statewide by requiring candidates to win a majority of its 159 counties. This was defended by poor white farmers, the “wool hat boys” whose muscle, and guns, maintained segregation.
The North built railway networks, utility systems, then scaled high-margin manufacturing. The South didn’t. That is, until the advent of air conditioning which, combined with the Civil Rights movement, blew the whole thing up.
Georgia was the epicenter. It wasn’t just about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. but about his father, “Daddy” King (known to contemporary whites as “Mike” King), who along with other preachers negotiated integration with folks like Coca-Cola CEO Robert Woodruff and Atlanta mayor William Hartsfield in the 1950s. In the face of stiff resistance there was the so-called “Atlanta Way,” which drew regional offices and, once the laws were changed, created the Sunbelt.
One thing I have learned since moving to Atlanta in 1981. There’s no reason for a city to be here. We have no port. The railroads were irrelevant after 1865. Atlanta is a marketing town. We sell a future that remains in the future. But that’s business. And the business of America is business.
What has been happening since 2008 is an accelerating effort to overthrow this. In many states it has succeeded in imposing this order.
The question now is whether it can be sustained.
It can, but only if business acquiesces. The battle between Disney and Florida is the canary in this coal mine. It’s an effort by politicians and right-wing religious leaders to intimidate technology and biochemistry into accepting the new Jim Crow.
But that is unacceptable to 21st century enterprise. While many tech leaders like the idea of charter schools, they know enforced ignorance won’t bring them the trained minds they need to make the future. The same with biochemistry. We can’t go back to importing great minds. Not enough will come here.
Business pressure seldom makes headlines, as in the case of Disney. It’s more subtle. It is exercised in quiet meetings in hallways, in decisions made in boardrooms and announced without fanfare.
The resistance will be quiet. But it will be persistent, it will be patient, and it will only grow once the costs of Jim Crow are seen. It will grow at the pace of business, which today is the pace of this medium.
Jim Crow is doomed.