The Changing Status of the Negro

Surely the most curious paradox in recent U.S. history is the breakdown of caste relations between the races. It is curious because it is occurring under official auspices—under the sponsorship of a government not noted, at least in recent years, for bold and imaginative social innovation. It is paradoxical because it is occurring at a time when reaction has the initiative in all other political spheres.

Whatever one’s interpretation of this paradox, no one can doubt that a revolutionary transformation is taking place. We are witnessing the disintegration of a caste system which for seventy-five years has controlled the pattern of social intercourse between Negro and white. To appreciate fully what is being un-done, it may be relevant to recall what was done in the first place, during those momentous years when the Negro was emancipated, but not set free.

The Genesis of Caste

Even before slavery was abolished, a new fabric of race relations was being woven to replace it. Caste relations, as distinct from the direct property-bond between master and slave, date from the earliest existence of a free colored population. Long before Emancipation, nominally free colored citizens were subjected to segregation in housing and travel, discrimination in employment, and exclusion from places of public accommodation. Although incipient caste relations existed under slavery, the American caste system did not crystallize until the post-Reconstruction era, when a wave of repression followed the withdrawal of Federal troops from the South.

Emancipation caused an economic and social revolution in the Old South. At one stroke it wrecked the plantation economy, severed the master-slave relationship between the races, and threw the former bondsman into the wage-market as a legal equal. During the Reconstruction Period which followed, the freedman attempted, under the protection of the Federal government, to consolidate his new status against the inevitable reaction which was to come. By 1876 the Republican Party grew “tired” of being revolutionary (it has never regretted the decision) and abandoned the Negro to the tender mercies of the white South.

The result was the post-Reconstruction repression. It was a period in which the Negro was systematically stripped of his civil rights in order to assure the restoration of white supremacy. The old plantation economy was revived, based now on share-cropping and tenant-farming, peonage and convict-lease. Disfranchisement followed inevitably as a means of preventing legal redress for renewed economic exploitation. By 1900, Mississippi, Louisiana, and the Carolinas had disfranchised the Negro with “Grandfather Clause,” poll tax, and terror. Where legal methods failed, the Klan and the lynch-mob took over. As a Negro novelist of the period observed, “Lynching was instituted to crush the manhood of the enfranc...