The Origins of Jim Crow
35:36 Share

Hey, Ryan, that was a fast trip. It was like you teleported. Yeah, just got in. I'll get all my expenses logged, I promise. Oh, no, you're okay. SAP Concur uses advanced AI, so your expense report will practically write itself. Quite the breakthrough. It's like we've been teleported into the future. All right. So, just curious, would you give us written permission to convert your matter into energy patterns and reassemble you at, say, random travel destinations? Margaret, are you building a teleporter? No.

No. Yes. SAP Concur helps your business move forward faster. Learn more at Concur.com. Your old or broken phone can let you down when you need it most. Perfect. But at Verizon, trade in any old phone from our top brands and get the most for it. Up to $2,000 in value for an amazing new iPhone 16 Pro with Apple Intelligence and a new line on MyPlan. And iPad and Apple Watch Series 10.

That's like a three for one. And you can get it on any plan. At Verizon, trade in your old phone for a brand new iPhone 16 Pro, iPad, and Apple Watch. The other guys won't give you that. Visit Verizon.com today. Additional terms apply. Service plan required for Apple Watch and iPad. Up to $2,000 value based on iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch.

Oh.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. In 1939, a paper in Alabama wrote, This newspaper believes in white supremacy and it believes that the poll tax is one of the essentials for the preservation of white supremacy. Eleven southern states in the USA...

required citizens to pay a poll tax before they could vote. They might be one or two dollars a year.

But citizens could still get the right to vote. They could still get on the electoral roll if their grandfathers had been voters. This was all a clever way of stripping the vote from black Americans. In 1877, Georgia implemented a poll tax that saw black voter turnout go down by 50%. And it was just one of the tools.

by which segregation was enforced in the southern states at the end of the 19th and through to the early 20th centuries. There were also literacy tests in which prospective voters would be examined on their literacy. The voting clerks, who were pretty much always white, could pass or fail a person at their discretion, and they usually did so based on race.

And if those clerks came across white people who were functionally illiterate, well, don't forget, they could claim the vote by that grandfather clause. Former slaves or the sons of slaves could not, of course, invoke that clause because their enslaved forebears had obviously not had the right to vote. This was all part of a system known as Jim Crow.

The beginning of Jim Crow stretched back to the 1830s when a struggling white actor, Thomas Dartmouth Rice, put on blackface and would perform an exaggerated, highly stereotypical black character. But by the middle of the 19th century, Jim Crow was just a collective racial slur for African Americans. And by the end of the century, it was used to describe the set of laws and customs and behaviours that oppressed black Americans.

In the South, African Americans were denied the right to vote, to access education. They had to use different bathroom facilities. They had to swear on different Bibles in courthouses. They had to use different parks and libraries and transportation.

marriages between white and black Americans were made illegal. And this, of course, all springs from the aftermath of the Civil War. A civil war during which President Lincoln had emancipated enslaved people in the South. A civil war which had been followed by amendments to the US Constitution, the 13th, 14th and 15th, which were supposed to abolish slavery.

to establish equal protection for all citizens and establish access to the vote. How did Jim Crow come into being? How did those southern states build a de facto and then a de jure apartheid state? To help me answer these questions, I've got Aaron Sheehan-Dean.

He is the Frederick C. Fry Professor of Southern Studies at Louisiana State University. He's the Chairman of the History Department. He specialises in the Civil War and Reconstruction and the history, obviously, of the American South. He's a fantastic guest and he's going to talk me through it. This topic was a listener request from Steve Ring, so thank you very much for Steve for reaching out. We'll be following this one up with an episode on Jim Crow in the 20th century and the emergence of the civil rights movement that brought it to an end. But for now, this is a story of democratic backsliding.

and the birth of Jim Crow. Aaron, thank you very much for coming on the podcast.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me. I guess if we're going to talk about Jim Crow, and that's a huge story, but just set the scene about the demographics, the racial and social mix of the Southern states up to and including the Civil War. What does it look like in those Southern states?

So the overwhelming number of black people in the United States live in the South, and that lasts all the way until really the end of the 19th century. So at the time of the Civil War in 1860, there are 9 million Southerners, 4 million of those are black Southerners.

So nearly half the population, 4 million enslaved. Actually, there are another probably 400,000 or 500,000 free people of color living in the antebellum South. The Northern population is 22 million. So more than double the whole population of the South. Very few Black people in the Northern states, except in cities like Boston and Philadelphia and New York.

Okay, so we've got all of these people of colour in the South. The Civil War happens. Everyone has heard about this, but Abraham Lincoln, all these people of colour now are free US citizens. And there's a period called Reconstruction. How does this period of Reconstruction, where there's an attempt to put that icing on the judicial cake, you know, on the legal cake, which is turn all of these people into equal citizens of the American Republic. How does that Reconstruction period and this Jim Crow period, how do they interact with each other? Help me understand that.

So it's probably too bold to claim that all northerners believe that African-American, black southerners should become full citizens. But certainly you're right. The 13th Amendment and slavery, the 14th Amendment establishes equal citizenship. And so there is an attempt in the South to build a biracial democracy. And this is really the first time that southern states have ever had

anything like that or tried it. And so the experiment runs, typically we date this for 12 years or so and from 1865 until 1877, though in many places it actually ends earlier than that. And it's important to think of reconstruction really as a period in which there is great possibility and there are meaningful measures that

non-political as well as political ones in terms of the progress that Black Southerners make in terms of land ownership and access to education and access to the courts and the ability to marry and protect their children. All those things do happen.

And yet by the end, what we see that is by 1875, 77 certainly, is the resurgence of what people called at the time home rule, meaning white conservatives in charge of Southern states. That's by the middle of the 1870s. And that really curtails a lot of the serious experiments to bring Black people into the body politic in particular.

And those advances in the civil and political rights of black people, were they enforced, if you like, at the barrel of a gun? Did it depend on the Union Army, the United States Army being in those places and protecting those people?

The army does stay in the South, though it winnows dramatically. The army at the end is well over a million men. That is 1865 at the end of the Civil War, and it winnows dramatically to really a skeleton crew. What's important is federal law. And so most importantly, it is the 14th Amendment. And then in 1866, there's a Civil Rights Act passed, the first one creating a category of rights protected at the federal level, not at the state level. And this is part of the challenge of

particularly probably for UK listeners or European listeners who are used to a much more unified, centralized system.

that the American system of federalism in which the state and federal government share authority means that historically the federal government has not played a big role in the kind of everyday maintenance of the rights that we think of as central to citizenship, owning property, being able to move freely, attending an educational institution. These sorts of rights were solely dependent on the states. So the first effort at

Creating a legal structure for emancipation in southern states is what are called the Black Codes, passed in 1865. And these really only protect the right of Black people to marry. And out of that, you get some degree of protection over your children as legally yours. The right to sue and be sued in court, which may not seem like a great asset, but in fact is essential to having loans or to doing any kind of business. And the right to own property. And that's the kind of sum total.

The federal government then works to kind of build and expand these. And so there is a huge tug of war as well between the federal and state governments over what, that is, how these will be created. So I wouldn't say necessarily at the barrel of a gun. There are Freedmen's Bureau agents who are in the South, but 900 across a space larger than continental Europe. So it's not a very big footprint, I would argue. Wow. Okay. And in this, well, throughout this bit of Reconstruction,

there are attempts to derail this sort of things going on on the ground to try and exclude Black people from political, economic, and social life? Yes. And those happen immediately. The Ku Klux Klan is organized in 1866 as an attempt to forestall exactly what you just described, the entry of Black people into political and social and economic life.

And it's the reluctance of white Southerners to acknowledge the fact of emancipation and any willingness to endorse a vision of a biracial democracy that really catalyzes public opinion in the North. Most of the Republicans who are occupying the Congress, who are taking seats up in Congress, are really moderates, and they envision a fast and inexpensive Reconstruction.

But the kind of truculence and the anger of white Southerners eventually will push them to a much more radical position so that they pass in 1867 what are called the Reconstruction Acts. And these actually temporarily dissolve state boundaries so that we end up with five Reconstruction districts in the South, which encompass the 10 states that are reconstructed. Tennessee, Tennessee.

for obscure reasons, sort of skips Reconstruction. So there are 10 states. Temporarily, those state boundaries dissolve. There are military districts headed by military governors who are almost always Union generals.

Those under the terms of the Reconstruction Acts, those states are required to rewrite their constitutions to provide black manhood suffrage, to provide equality under the law. So the threat there, again, is not military, but it is that Southerners will not have representation in the federal Congress until they change their state law. And that's a pretty serious incentive there.

because it denies them any access to appropriations and to kind of helping shape policy for the post-war United States. So there is great pressure to basically do what the Reconstruction Acts compel, and those acts then change and provide a framework for greater inclusion. So what we see are Black people mobilizing politically, being a part of the Republican Party, and helping in some places, Louisiana, South Carolina, actually rewrite the law

It's important to note that there are very few at the end of the day, very few black Republicans who serve in Congress. I think 14 over the full dozen years. But at the state and local level, there are a lot of black men now moving into positions that would have been unimaginable in the pre-war South. Tax assessor, local judges, things like that.

But are they facing threats to their life and well-being? Certainly. Increasingly after 1867, they are. So the Klan and then what are called militias or rifle clubs in some places. In Louisiana, we get a group called the Knights of the White Camellia. And

And these are all basically terrorist groups that are using violence and it's violence directed explicitly at the leaders of the black community. These might be political figures, they might be business leaders, they might be ministers or teachers.

And the violence is personal. It usually happens at night, where what are called night riders will come to a home, drag someone out, beat them, maybe set them on fire, maybe just murder them, set fire to the house. And the violence is intended to drive those people either out of the community or into a position where they are not asserting their claims to full civic life.

So things are bad enough during Reconstruction, as we might say, but then Reconstruction comes to an end, famously the great compromise, the devil's bargain of 1876 or 1877, when after the presidential election, the Republican, Rutherford B. Hayes, narrowly wins, but he's allowed to, he's really kind of allowed to be president, if you like, by the Democrats in return for him promising to end that Reconstruction period. So what happens next? Is this when we get the expression Jim Crow?

So, I mean, Jim Crow as a phrase actually goes back even earlier to the 1840s. It's coined by a white musician, Thomas Rice, out of a song that he claims to hear a Black man sing. So the term itself has been sort of floating. Jim Crow as a set of laws restricting the rights of Black people within the South, access to education, access to businesses, that really begins in the 1880s, the middle of the 1880s, and even beyond in some places. Disfranchisement

as an effort to restrict and prevent black men from being able to vote only happens beginning in 1890 in Mississippi and really in 1900 to 1903 in the other Southern states. And I think really what's important is to recognize that these are not inevitable processes. The Jim Crow does not flow out of the Civil War.

Jim Crow is not even necessarily a response to Reconstruction so much as it is a response to the successes, meager though they are, of Black Americans as a result of Reconstruction. So the first place we see Jim Crow statutes is actually in railroads, and we could talk in more detail about this. But this is because there are Black travelers and businessmen who are successful enough to buy railroad tickets in the first-class car and present this new

dilemma in a kind of modern space, that is the railroads. And that wouldn't have happened if there hadn't been a reconstruction that enabled Black people to begin owning land, to begin owning their own businesses, and to basically position themselves as part of the Southern social order.

Wow. Okay. Well, tell me about these railroad regulations, these new rules. So the railroads are the new technology that is the main both economic driver of development in the post-war United States, as well as the conveyance that most people start wanting to use more commonly. I mean, they begin in the 1830s, but after the Civil War, there's huge efforts to

And most railroads have, by this point, figured out they can charge two classes. There's a first-class car, which is kind of luxuriously appointed. It almost looks like someone's living room. It'll have fabric upholstery on chairs. It will have curtains on the windows. It's clean.

And that car is at the end. And that's because all the other cars are rough wooden benches and wooden floors. They're behind the engine. So all the smoke is kind of pouring into these cars. And those cars tend to fill with people who can barely afford to get on the railroad, which means there are

a lot of men, there's a lot of drinking, there's gambling, there's a floor covered in sort of tobacco juice, knife fights, kind of the whole thing. And so if you can at all avoid it, you buy a ticket on the first class car and you don't have to face any of that. And the problem in the 1880s is that there are black men who begin buying tickets on the first class cars. And so they are now riding in this

sort of refined, exclusive, almost private space. It's obviously a public conveyance, but on the other hand, the cultural feeling of it is very intimate.

And there are great concerns, particularly about the interactions that are happening in these spaces between Black men and white women, particularly maybe younger women who are being sent to go visit an aunt or a grandma, and they're sort of unescorted, and they are in this kind of private space. So the response from white travelers is often to demand that the Black passengers be thrown out of the first-class cars, and often they are physically ejected because they refuse because they have a first-class ticket.

And predictably, these men file lawsuits. And with a surprising degree of adherence to the law, Southern courts say very plainly to the railroad, if you sell a ticket to the first class car, the person has a right to sit there. So they find damages on behalf of the victim here. And the railroad and often the people who eject them are forced to pay the black person who has ejected compensation.

And it's this that then compels active state intervention in many cases to try to resolve these problems, because railroads are faced with the choice of figuring out basically who's a white customer, who's a black customer. Should they be thrown off? Are we going to face a lawsuit as a result of this action? You listen to Dan Snow's history. Don't go anywhere. There's more to come.

Your old or broken phone can let you down when you need it most. Perfect. But at Verizon, trade in any old phone from our top brands and get the most for it. Up to $2,000 in value for an amazing new iPhone 16 Pro with Apple Intelligence and a new line on MyPlan. And iPad and Apple Watch Series 10. That's like a three for one. And you can get it on any plan. At Verizon, trade in your old phone for a brand new iPhone 16 Pro, iPad, and Apple Watch. The other guys won't give you that. Visit Verizon.com today.

To make switching to the new Boost Mobile risk-free, we're offering a 30-day money-back guarantee. So why wouldn't you switch from Verizon or T-Mobile? Because you have nothing to lose. Boost Mobile is offering a 30-day money-back guarantee. No, I asked why wouldn't you switch from Verizon or T-Mobile. Oh. Wouldn't. Uh, because you love wasting money as a way to punish yourself because your mother never showed you enough love as a child? Whoa, easy there. Yeah.

applies to online activations, requires port in and auto pay. Customers activating in stores may be charged non-refundable activation fees. The last thing you want to hear when you need your auto insurance most is a robot with countless irrelevant menu options, which is why with USA Auto Insurance, you'll get great service that is easy and reliable all at the touch of a button. Get a quote today. Restrictions apply. USA!

Tell Congress to guard your card.

because Americans lose when politicians choose. Learn more at guardyourcard.com. Fascinating stuff. And quite quickly, is it the success or the enacting of these laws that then encourage elsewhere? You start to get this set of what become known as the Jim Crow laws? It is. So that what happens is state legislatures start requiring railroads to have two first-class cars.

That's their solution. That is, we will separate the races in this refined space, in sort of steerage or coach where, you know, most of us fly today. Everybody's all in there together. But the first class cars, they're actually requiring an extra investment by the railroad companies, which are often reluctant because the first class cars are, of course, more expensive to build. They sell fewer tickets on them because there's less physical space. The whole idea is you have more privacy.

And so that's the first time that state legislatures are actually requiring businesses to organize the way they interact with the public by race. And then out of this starts to come the separation of business facilities. And public facilities have, to some degree, already been separate. Things like cemeteries and hospitals. But that's then put into law. So de jure segregation. How interesting that it's this new technology, these new spaces that we humans created since the Industrial Revolution that actually have

We think of these inventions as deeply progressive, but they were, in this case, enormously regressive.

There's a kind of widespread misassumption, I think, among students and other people that modernity brings sort of enlightenment and progressive thought. The historian Edward Ayers has a great passage in one of his books from a memoir of a white Southerner who was at a county fair and put on a pair of headphones like we're wearing and listened to a record for the first time. This was in the 19-teens, probably, the recording industry sort of just beginning. And

At first, he can't figure out what he's listening to because he's hearing the shouts of people yelling and he's hearing voices. And then he realizes, because he hears shouts of string him up, that what he's listening to is a recording made of a lynching. And he sort of pales in color.

And the proprietor who's trying to sell this new technology pulls the earphones off and there's some passerby that says, what's wrong? And the proprietor says, oh, you know, young boys at fairs, he's probably got a sick stomach from lemonade. But the idea that this new technology that's going to revolutionize communication and open the world up is in fact used for this most regressive political end, reminds us that these technologies aren't benign or don't necessarily sort of yield enlightenment. Yeah.

Well, for some reason, I'm thinking to one Al Gore, who said in after losing the election, at least the internet's coming and it will be easier for everyone to get accurate information and we'll be able to deal with the sort of misinformed electorate. You would only have said that in 2001 or 2000, that an open channel of communication is going to lead to universal human betterment. And unfortunately, it has not so far. And yet it was all there in the 1880s, if people had chosen to look.

Tell me more then about how these laws spread. So the states are explicitly copying each other. Famously, Mississippi is the first state to impose full disfranchisement of black men as voters. So in 1890, they revised their state constitution to impose poll taxes to require a literacy or understanding test for voter registration.

And in doing this, they are deliberately trying to block access from the polls to black men. They will add a grandfather clause, which is even if you can't pass the literacy test, even if you can't pay the poll tax, if your grandfather was registered to vote, you are allowed to vote. And the grandfather is important because they have to go back before 1867 when the Reconstruction Acts compelled the rewriting of state constitutions.

And then other states watch this and they watch the federal reaction, which is generally to allow this and begin revising. So a whole host of Southern states in 1900, 1901, 1902 make the very same revisions to their state constitutions, effectively purging black men from the polls. In Louisiana in 1890, there was something like 102,000 registered black voters. And in 1905, there are something like 3,000.

So it purges literally 96% of the voters, of the Black voters, off the rolls. And there's a very deliberate mimicry here. And those 3,000 had passed. They had the money for the politics. They had managed to pass the

the literacy and the voter, the questionnaire. They must have been constitutional scholars, because I imagine the questions were pretty hard when men of color came and sat the exam. Well, arcane, and then of course, deliberately sort of not applied to white people who were testing at the same time. And so it really depends on whether, because there are Republican office holders who continue to occupy seats, particularly in the Upper South, places like Tennessee and Virginia and Kentucky, but even in some parts of the Lower South. And so if you got a kind of friendly registrar,

That is, a Republican registrar who's committed to protecting Black voters, you might have a parish, as we call them in Louisiana, or counties and other places where there is still Black voting. But on a statewide level, they really cease to have any impact. And the primary becomes the only method of voting, effectively. It's clever, isn't it? Because are they quite cautious not to bump up against voters?

Well, constitutional amendments or federal law, you know, by introducing things like this literacy test or this, remind me what it's called, the voter... Or a poll tax or an understanding clause. Yeah. By doing these things, you're able presumably to skate around and mask the fact that it's just a nakedly racist move. You are. I mean, so part of this is because the 15th Amendment, which was passed during Reconstruction and incorporated in the Constitution...

explain that the right to vote could not be abridged based on color, creed, or previous condition of servitude. So the 15th Amendment is actually silent on the question of whether a state could add additional measures to kind of narrow who's eligible for the vote. And the end of Reconstruction comes partly in 1877 because there are a sequence of rulings that really narrow the scope of interpretation of the 14th and eventually the 15th Amendments.

in the post-war years. And there were people at the time, I should say, that wanted a 15th Amendment that just categorically proclaimed the right to vote unabridged. And careful readers of that amendment recognize that they have the constitutional right with a friendly court of being willing to create these new tests, as they call it, but as you're saying, sort of deliberately skirt the federal law in a way that restricts the right to vote solely on the count of race, even though that's not what they are saying.

I see. And in the 1870s, there was a court that was broadly friendly to African-American voting. And later in that century, do you find courts that are more willing to abridge that right? Yeah. I mean, even by the 1870s, there's already a conservative Supreme Court. It's not staffed with a majority of Southerners, but there's really one important case, 1877, called Cruikshank.

And there's another sequence called Slaughterhouse, which happens, both of these are Louisiana-based cases. But in both cases, the Supreme Court narrows its interpretation of the 14th Amendment, which is supposed to be protecting the due process and the equal access to the law for all citizens, full stop. And instead, they read that amendment as only protecting the

from infringement by a state authority. So in the case of the Cruikshank decision, which responded to the most violent massacre of black citizens during Reconstruction, which happened in Colfax, Louisiana in 1873, nearly 100 black people were killed at this massacre.

And the argument eventually turned out the people who were initially convicted were released and never punished. And that's because they weren't acting as a part of the state. So it wasn't the state militia that killed them. It was a white mob. And the 14th Amendment, under the reading of the Supreme Court in Cruikshank, said that isn't what the 14th Amendment does. It only protects you from actions by the state. So the informal organization, in this case of a mob,

that violence has to be prosecuted at the state level. And by then, the state courts were unwilling to take a case like that. No grand jury would ever convict, nevermind even indict someone for that kind of action. And so the result is people go unpunished. And that's the beginning of what we see as a kind of conservative judiciary narrowing the scope of the Reconstruction laws in a way that leaves African Americans unprotected by the federal government for generations, really.

This is Dan Snow's History. There's more on this topic coming up. G'day America. It's Tony and Ryan from the Tony and Ryan podcast from Down Under. This episode is sponsored by Boost Mobile, the newest 5G network in the country. These guys are

guys are no longer the prepaid wireless company you might remember. They've invested billions into building their own 5G towers across America, transforming the carrier into America's fourth major network alongside the other big dogs. Yep, they're challenging the competitors by working harder and

and smarter like this amazing new network they've literally built they have a blazing fast 5g and plans for all the latest devices visit your nearest boost mobile store or find them online at boostmobile.com strap in you're in the race with f1 tv premium see what the race director sees with custom multi-view watch every jaw-dropping moment in live 4k uhd

across up to six screens uninterrupted. Experience ultimate live immersion with F1 TV Premium. Available on selected devices.

I'm very struck by listening to this, how it sounds like there wasn't one key moment. Often our basic perception, perhaps, of how history works, we look around at revolutions and uprisings, is that the government tries to rescind a constitutional provision or pass a law and the public just go out on the streets, go, this is it, this is the battle for our future.

What strikes me so interesting about this period in the South is it's just a death by a thousand cuts over really a generation or two. It is. There's no point at which Black Southerners could just go, right, this is it. This is the moment because after this, we're never going to get these rights back. It makes a more dramatic story if there's that single moment. And this is partly why so much

in a lot of the literature, the historical literature has turned on, say, the outcome of the Civil War and the moment of Appomattox. In recent years, we've had a lot of historians kind of re-interrogating what it means for a war to end and how sharp a break that presents between the pre-war, the wartime, and the post-war period. And there is more continuity in many of these cases, as we imagine. And you're certainly right that the

process of both expanding rights and then contracting those rights happened over time. It happens largely in courts, often in federal courts that are not accessible to the public. So you have to be kind of reading very carefully and you have to be able to chart trend lines over a long time. These escalate. And one of the real inflection points is the Plessy v. Ferguson case in 1896, which the Supreme Court basically finds segregation constitutional.

That comes in 1896, and this is partly why in 1900, in the beginning of the 20th century, we see Southern states begin to really broaden the legal segregation framework that they had sort of hesitantly begun in the 1890s, because the Supreme Court seems to have offered tacit approval for any form of segregation by race. Let's talk about Plessy Ferguson. How did they come up with that interpretation?

So, I mean, the case is a fascinating one. Plessy himself, Homer Plessy, is a very well-established mixed-race member of the New Orleans community. He's seven-eighths white, so phenotypically, that is to say, his physical appearance would have looked, certainly to modern readers, my students look at him and think that he looks white. It's a test case, as many of these are, to determine whether the actions in Louisiana are, the actions of ejecting Black men from streetcars are legal or

And the Supreme Court's opinion is that the federal law does not protect this level of kind of social interaction, which is how they view it. In a way, the Supreme Court throws up its hands and says laws can't change attitudes, that the segregation that has evolved, that's generated by a natural condition. And this is an important way of kind of justifying laws that are in fact quite radical as claiming that they are natural laws.

And that in any event, the law would never work to undo prejudice. And so these are simply the way people behave. And that law sort of follows from that. That is state ways can't change folk ways is the sort of shorthand argument made here. And it's only in the dissent famously by the son of a slaveholder, somebody who grew up in a slaveholding household, John Marshall Harlan of Tennessee. He cast the dissenting vote in Plessy and he says,

The United States has a colorblind constitution, and this is a gross violation of that obligation under the federal law to protect people regardless of their color, to not recognize differences. Harlan's dissent is an important one for kind of anchoring a 20th century interpretation that will eventually throw out Plessy. But in the meantime, Plessy offered carte blanche to those Southern states to begin more actively creating segregation regimes.

It's such an interesting thing to hear US Supreme Court justice say, given that the whole idea of the rule of law, the whole American experiment is based on this idea of writing a set of laws down, writing a constitutional framework down that may run contrary to what people instinctively feel they want to do and think they want to do and...

That feels like the foundation of the Republican experiment. So it's a strange thing to say, well, laws can't really change people's attitudes. Yes. And as you point out, I mean, it's certainly in the American case, and that's a really interesting point that I don't think many historians actually make about the kind of centrality given that

The people who create the United States are coming from different places. They're sort of inventing the nation on the fly. And the only way to invent it is with this proclamation of we're now an independent nation that nobody's ever done before. There's never been a declaration. That is, the United States doesn't grow organically out of the way, say, France or Spain, we would regard as growing organically out of a language and a culture. America is invented. And you do this through the law itself.

And the Supreme Court in the Brown case, when they undo Plessy, says explicitly, we are doing this, that state ways can change folk ways. And of course, the government's running assumption since government began, however many thousand years ago, is that rules can shape behavior.

That if we tax certain things, it will encourage certain kinds of behavior. That if we reward certain things with lower taxes, people are more likely to do it. I mean, that's central. And this is why fights over appropriations in the tax code are really the only policy battles that matter, because that's where you get actual responses from people.

So we got Plessy versus Ferguson. These southern states have got now not just de facto autonomy to organize their societies in this fashion, but sort of legal cover.

They do. I mean, there are many components to segregation, and the legal structure is one of those components. There is a great deal of economic pressure that is applied selectively, explicitly in the case of something like redlining, where Black people aren't given loans to start businesses or to purchase homes in certain areas, but also a kind of silent kind of economic oppression in which civil rights activists or

leaders in the community can be denied jobs or denied insurance or denied housing. So it's a very effective, invisible way of suppressing people's rights to claim, more broadly, claim their rights.

There is the political disfranchisement that prevents Black men from being able to either vote or participate as elected officers in the government. There is, of course, the social segregation, the separation of races, and the inability then of people to actually come to know one another. And then there's the violence of lynching. You had mentioned that earlier. There was plenty of violence during Reconstruction generated by the Klan. Thousands of people murdered. That was very targeted political violence.

The violence of lynching in the 1880s and then the high years, the worst years for lynching are really the kind of mid 1890s to the maybe 1915 or so.

Those are years in which lynching becomes a public spectacle and that threat of horrific, grotesque public violence is used to kind of try to bound the system as well. And also sanctioned by state laws which refuse to prosecute people for committing lynchings. In the federal government, Congress is never able to pass an anti-lynching statute.

because Southern senators and congressmen have such a deep hold on Congress that they block that measure whenever it comes up for a vote. And that goes on for decades. And is the system called Jim Crow? Is it referred to as Jim Crow?

It is. That becomes a kind of colloquial shorthand to characterize all of these forms of segregation and exclusion that come to dominate Southern life. Because in the United States, there is still a quite tenacious myth of a laissez-faire past that existed at some point where the government played little role. But in fact, Jim Crow is in a way the most invasive state possible because it is micromanaging every aspect of Southern life and it's compelling businesses at great expense

to duplicate a lot of what they have. So restaurants have to have separate dining rooms for white and black customers, separate silverware. They're supposed to have separate washing stations in the rear because you wouldn't want to mix those. Courtrooms have a white Bible and a black Bible to swear people in on. The level of fastidiousness

that develops. And this is all quite novel. And that's another important point to make is that historically, white people and black people had lived very dense and intimate lives. That's how you end up with 500,000 mixed race people. But even slavery in its most classic form sort of brings whites and blacks into intimate relationship.

And it takes a huge amount of effort to untangle them and to kind of separate and segregate them. And these states invest very little in any other measure, right? They don't build schools. They're not actively promoting industrial development the way that northern and western states are. So they are quite parsimonious in terms of spending. And yet in other areas, they compel and require a huge amount of spending by private forces. Sounds like big government to me, Aaron. I mean, I thought that's what we didn't like.

Well, that's sort of the story that we tell ourselves. But the segregationists understood the power of the state. And I mean, they understood both the power of the individual states and also the power of the federal state, which is partly why they worked so hard to ensure that Congress was not going to interfere in this, that the Supreme Court had basically kind of authorized this. And then they put state governments to enormous interventionist purpose in people's lives in a way that

We haven't really sort of reconciled on this question of big government. That's fascinating stuff. Thank you, Aaron, for coming on. Thanks so much. Thank you. Really enjoyed the conversation. When you get the Planet Fitness Black Card, you can bring a friend anytime you work out.

And now through March 13th, get your first month free when you join. You heard that right. Conquer the stair climber with your partner in climb. Enjoy a post-workout recovery session in the hydro massage and do it all again with access to any of our 2,700 convenient locations.

So, you coming? Get your first month free and all the perks with the PF Black Card for just $1 down, $24.99 a month. Cancel anytime. Deal ends March 13th. See club for details. To make switching to the new Boost Mobile risk-free, we're offering a 30-day money-back guarantee. So, why wouldn't you switch from Verizon or T-Mobile? Because you have nothing to lose. Boost Mobile is offering a 30-day money-back guarantee. No, I asked why wouldn't you switch from Verizon or T-Mobile. Oh. Wouldn't. Uh,

Because you love wasting money as a way to punish yourself because your mother never showed you enough love as a child? Whoa, easy there. Yeah. Applies to online activations. Requires port in and auto pay. Customers activating in stores may be charged non-refundable activation fees.