Chip Taylor

Segregation as an economic development policy

I've been reading The Selling of the South: The Southern Crusade for Industrial Development, 1936-1990, by UGA historian James Cobb. In it he recounts the spread of modern industrial location policy (i.e. "smokestack chasing") from depression-era Mississippi throughout the rest of the South, eventually influencing economic development policy throughout the country. Fascinating stuff.

So I was interested to run across (HT: Always Right) a recent Atlanta Journal-Constitution op-ed by Prof. Cobb that discusses the influence of economic development concerns in encouraging post-Reconstruction segregation in the South:

Far from a capitulation to the past, in the New South of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, segregation was the wave of the future. It was less the invention of self-styled champions of the rural white masses like Mississippi's infamous race-baiter James K. Vardaman (who generally preached that any education or public access for black people was a waste of time and money) than of the urban-oriented apostles of New South progress such as Atlanta's Henry W. Grady. More than a decade before the Plessy verdict, Grady had called for "equal accommodations for the two races, but separate" in Southern schools, transportation, theaters and elsewhere.

As they sought Northern industrial capital, Grady and his New South cohort insisted that restoring the racial and political supremacy of Southern whites by rolling back the civil rights initiatives of Reconstruction would stabilize the South's investment climate and assure its rapid return to prominence in the national economy. Segregation was vital to the success of the New South movement because a stable racial climate was essential to a stable "labor climate," which, in the euphemistic rhetoric of Southern industrial promoters, really meant an abundance of cheap, dependable and docile workers.

Disenfranchisement was justified on similar grounds:

Proponents of disenfranchisement made a starkly cynical pitch: White competition for black votes was fueling the violence and fraud that made Southern politics so chaotic. So, they asserted, taking the vote away from black citizens would actually restore honesty and rationality to the system. University of Virginia President Edwin A. Alderma hailed disenfranchisement as one of the "most constructive acts of Southern history."

So, they needed de jure disenfranchisement so they could stop the cheating involved in de facto disenfranchisement.

Ugh.

Another reminder that not everything that is "good for business" is good for the country -- or the people in it.