Enforcing the Colour Line at Home and Abroad

By the turn of the century, this rejection of Reconstruction's egalitarian promise portended consequences for America's foreign rivals and colonial subjects. The United States' emergence as a global power, a narrative too often disconnected from domestic struggles over race and citizenship, had profound implications for patterns of racial violence at home and abroad.

Prescient observers like W. E. B. Du Bois, the pre-eminent black intellectual of his generation, recognised this critical continuity. Three years before his 1903 pronouncement that ‘the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the colour line', Du Bois declared in his presidential address to the American Negro Academy that ‘the colour line belts the world'.^{^[139]} Thanks to its recent triumph over Spain, the United States controlled a swath of territorial spoils that stretched halfway around the globe. Prior patterns of racial violence informed American attempts to subdue their far-flung acquisitions. Imperialists and anti-imperialists alike drew parallels between the violent subjugation of Native Americans and the attempts to subdue Filipinos, Cubans and Puerto Ricans. In the Philippines, the campaign to quash a nationalist rebellion against American occupation reflected the global reach of American racial violence. Yet while Americans drew the colour line in blood, the ‘race war' in the Philippines was not simply an ‘export' of white supremacy campaigns, Indian Wars and anti-Chinese purges back home. ‘While race helped organize and justify U.S. colonial violence', historian Paul Kramer contends, ‘imperial processes also remade U.S. racial formations.' As Americans racialised Filipinos, they rationalised race war. Interpreting Filipino guerrilla tactics as proof of ‘savagery', and drawing on the lessons of ‘Injun warfare', the American military tortured prisoners, launched scorched-earth campaigns, and implemented ‘reconcentration' policies that led to tens of thousands of civilian deaths.

American troops, many of whom initially disparaged Filipino insurgents as ‘niggers', soon embraced a novel epithet for a new racial adversary - the gu-gu.^{^[140]}

As the United States extended the colour line to its new territorial possessions, white supremacists in the South codified segregation and disfranchisement one state at a time. Racial violence fuelled this campaign, and followed in its wake. Following the lead of the delegates to Mississippi's 1890 constitutional convention, who adopted poll taxes, literacy tests and the ‘understanding clause' as barriers to black voting, state legislatures across the South adopted a dizzying array of disfranchisement laws. A resurgent wave of race riots and mob killings facilitated this process. In North Carolina, a ‘Fusion' movement of black Republicans and white Populists stood in the way of white supremacist Democrats' Jim Crow agenda. In order to wrest power back from this interracial coalition, the Democrats launched a campaign of racial propaganda and organised terror that peaked with an 1898 massacre in the port city of Wilmington. Over the next two years, North Carolina legislators followed Mississippi's lead in adopting disfranchisement schemes that they hoped, as one architect of the white supremacy campaign put it, ‘had settled the Negro question for all times'. In 1906, white mobs rampaged through the black neighbourhoods of Atlanta. As in North Carolina, a racially charged political climate and press reports of black attacks on white women portended a final barrage of white supremacist legislation.

With its 1908 adoption of the literacy test, Georgia capped off a two-decade campaign to force black southerners out of civic life.^{^[141]}

As in the earlier campaign to overthrow Reconstruction and the push for Chinese exclusion, the architects of the turn-of-the-century white supremacy campaigns utilised violence for political ends and argued that their political solutions would mitigate future bloodshed.

Yet, just as the most notorious attacks on Chinese communities occurred after the passage of the Exclusion Act, southern mob violence persisted in the wake of the late nineteenth-century white supremacy campaigns. With the rise of Jim Crow, lynching became the most persistent and virulent weapon for white supremacists intent on quashing any perceived threat to the racial status quo. While this peculiarly American tradition of mob violence traced its roots to the Revolutionary era and vigilante notions of ‘frontier justice', lynching had become an increasingly regional and racial phenomenon by the end of the nineteenth century. After 1885, the last year where white victims outnumbered black in the Tuskegee Institute's pioneering lynching database, the overwhelming majority of killings occurred at the hands of white mobs in the American South. In 1892 alone, Tuskegee recorded over 160 lynchings of black Americans. In 1895, the Mississippi-born journalist Ida B. Wells documented in graphic detail the surge in anti-black killings over the previous three years. In addition to coupling the rise of Jim Crow to the surge in lynchings, Wells documented and challenged the sexually charged fears stoked by the white supremacy campaigns that lived on in the mobs that tortured, castrated, burned and executed victims with impunity.^{^[142]}

Southern lynchings frequently took the form of public spectacle, with hundreds and even thousands gathering to watch the killings. As many as 10,000 onlookers converged on Paris, Texas, 1893 to watch relatives of a murdered white girl torture her alleged killer with hot irons. Mob leaders then soaked the execution platform - emblazoned with the word ‘Justice' - with oil and set it ablaze. Onlookers later sifted through the ashes for body parts and scraps of wood to sell as souvenirs. As with dozens of similar spectacle lynchings that occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, photographs of the lynching circulated as mementos. The highly

ritualistic nature of Jim Crow era lynchings captured the imagination of contemporary observers, who argued that the South's distinct mix of fundamentalist Christianity and a ‘Lost Cause' ideology rooted in the bloody soil of Reconstruction had birthed a distinctively American form of racial violence. ‘After the trauma of Appomattox', sociologist Orlando Patterson argues, ‘the Southern community had to be restored in the most extreme compact of blood, and its God propitiated in the most extreme form of sacrifice known to man.' The recurring themes of sacrifice, crucifixion and redemption - a word that bore a specific and evocative meaning for white southerners who lived through Reconstruction - persisted in the pronouncements of lynching's staunchest advocates and most ardent foes.¹¹

<< | >>

↑

Source: Edwards Louise, Penn Nigel, Winter Jay (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 4: 1800 to the Present. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 676 p.. 2020

Enforcing the Colour Line at Home and Abroad

More on the topic Enforcing the Colour Line at Home and Abroad: