Jim Crow as Friend and Foe: The Spatial Politics of Race, Gender, Sex, Business, and Ecology

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

The “Jim Crow as Friend and Foe” panel will examine how spatial politics shaped Jim Crow legislation and consequently the social, political, economic, ecological, and business experiences of African Americans. By understanding Jim Crow segregation within intersectional frameworks, the panel offers nuanced analyses of how spatial politics mattered greatly in shaping various aspects of black lives. Ingrid Banks illustrates the relationship between race, gender, and constructions of black sexuality with regard to business history generally, and the economic detour specifically by examining blacks in the hairdressing profession during Jim Crow. Owen James Hyman examines the activism of the New Orleans Citizens’ Committee in the context of the emerging industrial economy and changing landscape of southeast Louisiana’s piney woods. Between the 1870s and 1890s, lumber extraction and railroad construction brought significant environmental and demographic changes to the region, engulfing its forests in racially-charged struggles over property ownership, employment, and land use. Though the New Orleans Citizens’ Committee is best known for its role in Plessy v Ferguson (1896), the group had broader goals by waging a concurrent battle against black dispossession in the region, deeming the problem “more subversive of law and order” than lynching. Terrance Wooten engages Rock ‘n’ Roll sensation Chuck Berry’s arrest for violating the White Slave Traffic Act, also known as the Mann Act. The Act was passed in 1910 amidst a growing set of moral panics propagating the myth that white women and girls were at risk of being forced into prostitution. These myths circulated between 1890 and 1917, coinciding with the beginning of the First Great Migration. The Act’s codification at the onset of a major exodus of black people from the Jim Crow South to the North and Midwest is not by happenstance; Jim Crow was built into the architecture of the moral panics.

Sub Unit

• 103rd Meeting and Conference of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History

Chair

• Ingrid Banks, University of California, Santa Barbara

Individual Presentations

• “No Particular Place to Go”: Spatializing Sex, Segregation, and the Mann Act - Terrance Wooten, University of California, Santa Barbara

• Separate but Together: Negotiating Race, Sexual Politics, and Bodily Proximity within the Hairdressing Profession under Jim Crow Segregation - Ingrid Banks, University of California, Santa Barbara

• Place in Plessy: The New Orleans Citizens’ Committee’s Fight against Black Dispossession, 1891-1896 - Owen James Hyman, Mississippi State University and UC Santa Barbara

Commentator

• Noliwe Rooks, Cornell University