Exploring the Modern South: Introduction to the Course (Law & Policy of the Jim Crow Era)
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The document explores the complexities of Southern identity and culture through various lenses, including politics, geography, food, and arts. It discusses the historical context of segregation and legal frameworks, particularly the impact of Jim Crow laws and local regulations on African-American mobility and access to resources. The narrative reflects on both the romantic and tumultuous aspects of Southern life, emphasizing how the region's diverse geography and historical experiences shape its contemporary identity.
Exploring the Modern South: Introduction to the Course (Law & Policy of the Jim Crow Era)
- 1. Exploring the Modern South JOSHUA LABOVE
- 2. “You learn to forgive (the South) for its narrow mind and growing pains because it has a huge heart. You forgive the stifling summers because the spring is lush and pastel sprinkled, because winter is merciful and brief, because corn bread and sweet tea and fried chicken are every bit as vital to a Sunday as getting dressed up for church, and because any southerner worth their salt says please and thank you. It's soft air and summer vines, pine woods and fat homegrown tomatoes. It's pulling the fruit right off a peach tree and letting the juice run down your chin. It's a closeted and profound appreciation for our neighbors in Alabama who bear the brunt of the Bubba jokes. The South gets in your blood and nose and skin bone- deep. I am less a part of the South than it is part of me. It's a romantic notion, being overcome by geography. But we are all a little starry-eyed down here. We're Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara and Rosa Parks all at once.” - Amanda Kyle Williams
- 3. Understanding the modern American South We will look at the South through a variety of lenses over the course. What does Southern identity mean today? Is it political? Cultural? Geographic? Democracy and Rights January 8 We begin by thinking about the state of the South in 1964 and the laws that made for an unequal and segregated region. Geography and Infrastructure January 15 The South is a loosely conceptualized geography, with great diversity—from Appalachian mountains to Carolina Lowcountry and the Florida Gulf Coast. Foodways January 29 Food—preparation, eating, and sharing—is a staple of the South. To speak of Southern foodways is to speak of the people and history of the region. Cities and Urbanization February 5 From the shadows of lush antebellum plantations, the South has rapidly urbanized—new cities that reflect the changing and globalizing role of the region and the United States writ large. Arts & Culture February 12 The region has long been a breeding ground for creative output—from the sounds of BB King to the pages of William Faulkner.
- 4. What do we mean when we say ‘The South’? Where, precisely, does the South begin or end? Is the South a political assemblage? Or does it represent something else?
- 5. v We will spend much more time discussing geography and some of the micro-regions that comprise the South, with particular attention to the way geography, topography, and agriculture have informed culture and identity throughout the South, but for now, it is helpful to keep this rough map in mind and remember that the region is at once expansive and eclectic. s c FL L A K Y South Carolina Florida Kentucky Louisiana A Diverse Region
- 6. Law & Geography: a Primer Law is inherently spatial—it works with/in a particular space. By making law, we are often engaging in making political space. For whom? To what end? How can law and policy make and change our relationship to space? Law and space are reflective of power relations between individuals, the state, material space, and institutions. Law makes space as space makes law through jurisdiction and scale. In the South, this means making fractious, ad-hoc spaces of segregation and disenfranchisement. Ad-hoc laws create a chaos dangerous for African-American, who find their mobility is limited and challenged by evolving legal understandings of what, where, and how segregation can occur. While some towns may have deployed poll taxes, others may have used law to limit access to public space, employment, or social services.
- 7. The State of the South in 1964 What was the regional discourse? How did laws, culture, and discussions locally connect or conflict with other geographic scales? What role does the South play in the US in the 1960s? Today?
- 8. How do (discriminatory) local laws make space? How does the creation and contestation of laws—both in their legislative creation and their juridical challenges—serve to define particular spaces, limit access to space, and challenge mobility? What kinds of power relationships are embedded in the enactment of such laws?
- 9. Local Laws and an Unequal South History texts often talk about ‘the South’ monolithically and the laws as uniformly exclusionary, but in reality exclusion and discrimination was crafted through a range of laws and polices at every level of government and public life. Jim Crow Laws A bit of a broad-’catch-all’ for exclusionary local policies 2 1 Limiting Access to Polls and Voting Poll taxes and exams sought to limit black voting 3 4 Exclusionary Amenities and Housing Practices Cities experiment with ways to keep African-Americans away ‘Dixiecrats’ and the Southern Manifesto Pulling from Plessy, Southern Democrats try to maintain separate but equal.
- 10. Case Studies in Exclusion How did a multiplicity of Jim Crow laws, exclusionary funding, and devolution from the federal government produce exclusionary geographies for African-Americans? By devolving education to the States, the federal government accepted that some states would maintain separate and distinct facilities. But were they equal in any measureable terms? Education State conventions throughout the South developed so-called “Black Codes” in the 1860s to prevent African-Americans from owning land, and thus, profiting from farming and agriculture. Farming & Agriculture Public Accommodations DemocracyHousing Jim Crow laws prevented access to the housing market, limitations on rent/ownership, and challenges to accessing financing. ‘Separate but equal’ began with a rail car and would fall under the pressure of lunch counters, rail cars, and motels. Municipalities and states tried to make workarounds to voting equality, through poll taxes and tests.
- 11. Squaring the South with the Nation How can we speak of the approaches through which legal change and equality was realized? What do the geographic differences between these approaches tell us about the South, the US, and federalism in the Civil Rights era? Fights for equality, access, mobility, and legal personhood were being lodged emergently—sit-ins, bus boycotts, and marches. Activists were fighting a complex assemblage of laws cropping up throughout the region, most very targeted and local. Regional Discourses Post-JFK National Discourse If the regional approaches were pragmatic and ad-hoc, the national conversation was deeply spiritual and philosophical. Legal conversations here surround watershed Supreme Court cases (Brown v. Board of Ed.) and pushing for big platform, omnibus legislation as the Civil Rights Act would come to be.
- 12. Vectors of the Movement Rather than speak of a wholesale change at the federal level (as is sometimes common in hindsight and history texts), we can see the evolution toward equality through three scales of governance. FEDERAL The emerging jurisprudence around ‘interstate commerce’ would allow the federal government to enter conversations previously reserved for the States. REGIONAL Approaches such as the “Southern Manifesto” and “Black Codes” attempted to build a regional coalition around exclusion. MUNICIPAL Tiny laws at the most local of scales were some of the most pernicious—from vagrancy laws, access to education, and home ownership.
- 13. Discussion Why does the ad-hoc legal geography of exclusion matter in the way we think about the South? How does this history give way to the South’s present? What can we take from the Civil Rights Era as instructive toward defining Southern culture and values?