~ Foreward ~
I am delighted to publish this article by Mike Scruggs, historian, author, columnist for The Times Examiner out of Greenville, South Carolina. I have Mike’s 359 page illustrated book, The Un-Civil War, Shattering the Historical Myths, which promises to be outstanding. I look forward to reviewing it in the next few weeks.
Thomas D. Rice, the original Jim Crow, in costume.
This article contains much historical detail and makes it clear why Southern states, after the horrors of Reconstruction, felt an imperative to copy the Jim Crow laws of the Northern states. Before Reconstruction, the South was integrated, by necessity, according to C. Vann Woodward in The Strange Career of Jim Crow, which produced an intimacy between blacks and whites not found anywhere else in the country. That’s not to say that race relations were always great, but they were far better in the South than in the North and the West. Blacks and whites in the South did not recoil from each other as did the white Yankee women at the end of Gone with the Wind with the thought of Mammy touching their children. Scarlett O’Hara found that absurd. That is a good case of fiction perfectly illustrating reality.
The North and West were the opposite of the South. Blacks and whites were rigidly segregated, by custom, law, or both. ~ Gene Kizer, Jr. Continue reading →