The Nationalization of Jim Crow: Racialized Statebuilding in Congress, 1890-1946

• In Event: Racialized Violence

Abstract

Jim Crow is often depicted as a subnational process wherein Southern states created racially segregated facilities. Existing scholarship relies on this core definition, and the zeitgeist continues this subnational conceptualization, but was Jim Crow really an exclusively subnational process? To the extent that anyone addresses the national underpinnings of this form of government created social organization, Plessy v. Ferguson serves as an example of how national institutions—here the Supreme Court—aided the separate-but-equal cause through legal authorization for segregation. However, this paper argues there is sufficient evidence to document that Congress consequentially contributed to the Jim Crow paradigm, beginning with the Second Morrill Land Grant Act of 1890, which created racially segregated Agriculture and Mechanics (A&M) state universities and smaller liberal arts colleges, which have collectively become known as Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). This important step in delivering public benefits to the neglected African American community came at the cost of conforming to and nationalizing the costs of Jim Crow. While social provision through racial separation appears distasteful to a modern sensibility, adhering to this form of social organization through mandated parity spending by group was the cost to achieving any national benefits to marginalized Southern Blacks. The idealistic universalistic or needs-based alternative approaches were either a) not supported by the GOP that had been withdrawing from civil rights or b) were too easily misdirected to provide only funding to white schools and nothing to Black schools. Moreover, we see this national Jim Crow legislative arrangement continuing well into the 1940s, as evidenced by Congress passing the National School Lunch Act of 1946, which maintained a dedicated separate-but-equal parity funding clause at the behest of both Southern segregationists such as Allen Ellender and Northern liberals such Adam Clayton Powell. In this way, the bipartisan nationalization of Jim Crow through education policy from at least 1890 to 1946 created a superstructure for a racialized form of American statebuilding. Overall, adhering to the separate-but-equal paradigm may have been the necessary cost to achieving any equitable social provision for African Americans given changing partisan commitments, Southern legislative and subnational vetoes, indifference in the executive branch, and a jurisprudential configuration that protected segregation.

Author

• Sean M Diament, Pomona College