C. Vann Woodward's The Strange Career of Jim Crow has eliminated my prior notion that the North was a land of equality and freedom for all races, where runaway slaves ran to for a safe haven, and has consequently changed my view dramatically. Not only is Woodward's account on race relations enlightening, it is also unsettling, for it also reveals that the blacks in America were nothing more than political and public relations 'pawns' used by the mainly white-dominated Democrats, Republicans, and Populists. After manipulating blacks to vote for their parties, Southern and Northern whites eventually opted for reconciliation at the expense of the Negroes.

Even before the Civil War broke out, the North was already a highly prejudiced society, where the Jim Crow "system was born . . . and reached an advanced age before moving south in force" (pg, 17). Although most Northerners abolished slavery before emancipation, they merely replaced it with the Jim Crow system "in place of the Peculiar Institution" (pg, 25). Moreover, the "Northern Negro was made painfully and constantly aware that he lived in a society dedicated to the doctrine of white supremacy and Negro inferiority" (pg, 18). Northern politicians, whether pro or anti-slavery, competed with one another "in their devotion to this [white supremacy] doctrine, thus making sure "in numerous ways that the Negro understood his 'place' and that he was severely confined to it (pg, 18).

After the Civil War, when Northern Reconstructionists claimed to liberate the black slaves, the North did just the opposite, continuing its own set of segregation and political persecution laws, which was eventually adopted by the South. Political and civil rights were rarely given to the blacks in the North, for the "Negroes' rights were curtailed in the courts as well at the polls, [where] by custom or by law Negroes were excluded from jury service throughout the North" (pg, 19). In fact, in 1874, whites of South Boston boasted that "not a single colored family' lived among them. Consequently, the North had its own segregated neighbourhoods, with some dubbed "Nigger Hill," "New Guinea" and "Little Africa" (pg, 19). Thus, the Negro had no choice but to endure constant oppression, for everywhere he went prejudice reared its ugly head; in fact, the "farther the Negro went in the free states the harsher he found proscription and segregation" (pg, 19). Furthermore, Northern "Negroes found themselves systematically separated from whites [and] were either excluded from railway cars, omnibuses, stagecoaches, and steamboats or assigned to special 'Jim Crow' sections" (pg, 19).

In fact, the Negro was treated better in the Southern states before Reconstruction than anywhere else. The French writer Alex de Tocqueville noted that prejudice "appears to be stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those states where servitude has never been known" (pg, 20). Even after Reconstruction failed in the South, "until 1900, the Negro sat where he pleased and among the white passengers on perhaps a majority of the state's railroads [and] even though there were exceptions . . . they became fewer and fewer" (pg, 33).

In 1885, T. McCants Steward, a Negro newspaperman for the New York Freeman, reported in his article, that "I had found travelling more pleasant . . . than in some parts of New England," adding, "I think the whites of the South are really less afraid to have contact with colored people than the whites of the North" (pg, 39). In essence, the North was 'equally' contemptuous towards blacks as the South, before and after the Civil War.

Thus, this reinforces the notion that the 1861 Civil War's outcome of emancipation was nothing more an unforseen accident in which its original purpose was to weaken the Southern confederate stance and ameliorate its demise. Although most North politician often endorsed themselves as advocates of containing slavery in the South from spreading, most believed in Negro inferiority. Even Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, who formulated the Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery in 1865, reassured his white audience in 1858 that he was "not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people . . . [and] while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race" (pg, 21).

Thus, these proponents of equality, the Northern-dominated Republicans, were more about rhetoric than substance. In fact, when the Southern whites felt threatened by a black insurrection, Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson immediately appeased them when he adopted the "notorious black codes" in 1865 as part of his Presidential Reconstruction program, some of which were "intended to establish systems of peonage or apprenticeship resembling slavery" (pg, 23). His Presidential Reconstruction plan never launched, but Johnson's actions is another example that there were Republicans who cared little for the Negroes' equality. Furthermore, when "segregation appeared early and widely, they were sanctioned by Reconstruction authorities," people who were supposed to collaborate with the Negroes for more equality (pg, 26). In fact, "all of the practices, legal or extra-legal, had the consent or at least the acquiescence of the Reconstruction governments" (pg, 25).

The Compromise of 1877, which had essentially revoked the Fifteenth Amendment,

revealed the North's reluctance to rehash old wounds with the Southerners and willingness to sacrifice the Negroes' civil rights. In fact, the Compromise "merely left the freedman to the custody of the conservative Redeemers upon their pledge that they would protect him in his constitutional rights" (pg, 70). Northerners, such as the liberals and former abolitionists who had once rooted for racial equality, went as far as "mouthing the shibboleths of white supremacy regarding the Negro's innate inferiority, shiftlessness, and hopeless unfitness for full participation in the white man's civilization" (pg, 70). Of course, the Northerners primary strategy was to reconcile with the South, and "at the expense of the Negro" (pg, 70).

When the Redeemers finally retained the South, there was "no sign of a revival of Northern resistance to Southern race policy" (pg, 113). In fact, Thomas P. Bailey argued in his Race Orthodoxy in the South that the "North has surrendered" and that "they are going to let us alone; we'll fix things to suit ourselves" (pg, 113). In fact, in the post World War II era, the Southern way of Jim Crowism had spread to the North. As a result, "Negroes were pushed out of the more desirable jobs in industries that they had succeeded in invading during the manpower shortage of the war years [and] were squeezed out of federal employment" (pg, 115). In short, the Negroes were being persecuted in the South and in the North.

After the First World War, racism in America in the North was further heightened when Negroes felt that they were owed racial equality after their contribution in fighting for American. For the first time, Blacks had a "new hope for restoration of their rights and a new militancy in demanding first-class citizenship, [for] temporary prosperity gave them new hopes and desires that needed fulfillment" (pg, 114). Violent suppression to the race riots was the whites' reaction to the Negroes plead for democracy, and the result was "the greatest period of interracial strife the nation had ever witnessed" (pg, 114). Moreover, it is disconcerting that "many of them occurred in the North and the worst of all in Chicago," where more than "seventy Negroes were lynched, several of them veterans still in uniform (pg, 114).

Perhaps the most unsettling and disturbing theme in Woodward's publication is the exploitation of the Negroes' political contributions. After, the passing of the Fourteenth Amendment, which virtually allowed all adult Negro males the right to vote, politicians immediately sprang to the defence of Negro rights, all in the name of winning votes. The Republicans were the first to entice the blacks, whose main importance to the Northern Republicans was to increase their influence in the South, where they were "conscious of their minority status and their desperate need for black support" (pg, 28). However, after this feeble attempt to court black ballots for its Parties causes failed and the Redeemers seized the South, the Republicans abandoned the Negroes, forcing some to bolt to the Populists.

These Southern radicals, comprised of agrarian Readjusters, Independents, and Greenbackers, and later the 'Populists,' courted the Negro votes, although "they rarely approached him directly and did not seek to convert him personally to their cause" (pg, 60). Rather, they approached the blacks through the Republican leaders and attempted to "integrate them thoroughly with the party, and give them a sense of belonging and tangible evidence that they did belong" (pg, 60). However, this scheme was not limited to these weaker parties, for even the radical Republicans and the conservative Democrats took to patronizing the blacks maintaining "themselves as the keepers of the liberal conscience and the Negro as the ward of the nation" (pg, 60). The Southern Populist leader Tom Watson even advocated "sympathy, and friendship, and generosity, and patriotism" to the blacks, and "these measures he took were sometimes drastic, and for the times, even heroic" (pg, 62).

However, the Populists' pledge for equal status to blacks was a scheme to win more votes. Consequently, when the Democrats lost to William McKinley's Republicans, the Populists, too, betrayed the blacks. Shortly after their lost, the Populists and the Democrats abandoned the blacks' cause, and the Republicans and Democrats reverted back to its old ways and did little to advance blacks' equality. Most disturbing was Tom Watson's quick change of policies regarding black equality after his Populist party's defeat in the 1896 elections. In 1895, when he was still a proponent on equal status to blacks, he attacked South Carolina's disfranchisement campaign as "wrong" and that "old fashioned democracy taught that a man who fought the battles of his country, and paid the taxes of his government, should have a vote" (pg, 89). However, by 1906, realizing that the Populists' movement was hindered by the Negroes, Watson turned his back on them and argued that the "white men would have to unite before they could divide" (pg, 90). In fact, Watson's offer to "swing the Populist vote to any progressive Democratic candidate for governor who would run pledged to a platform of Populist reforms and Negro disfranchisement" all but "wrote off Populism as a noble experiment , and launched its leader as one of the outstanding exploiters of endemic Negrophobia" (pg, 90). Watson's swift change in philosophy conveys that there were few, if any, true white proponents of racial equality in the United States during and after Reconstruction. What is most unsettling is that the black was used as the bate to lure more votes; consequently, after their usefulness for votes had vanished, so had their supporters.

Disturbingly, after Reconstruction proved to be a failure in 1877, the Negroes were not only left to fend for themselves, but were also punished politically. During Reconstruction, Negroes were politically active and in the " 'seventies, 'eighties, and 'nineties the Negroes voted in large numbers," for whites in the South actually encouraged them and "earnestly solicited their votes" (pg, 105). However, Negroes ceased to vote after the disfranchisement measures were eventually adopted throughout America. After Reconstruction fell to the Redeemers,

gradually "qualified and acknowledged leaders of white opinion said that it was unthinkable that they should ever be permitted to vote" (pg,106). In fact, one month before the presidential elections took place, one of Woodrow Wilson's cabinet members published an editorial in his North Carolina paper arguing that the "South would never feel secure until the North and the West had adopted the whole Southern policy of political proscription and social segregation of the Negro" (pg, 93). Lamentably, as the Negro "gained his emancipation and new rights through a falling out between white men" he lost his freedom again as a result of their reconciliation (pg, 70).

Reconciliation between the Northerners and Southerners did not just limit itself to politics; it also played a role in the law courts. In fact, the Fourteenth Amendment is prime example of this armistice among the courts which wanted "reconciliation between federal and state jurisdiction, as well as between North and South, reconciliation also achieved at the Negro's expense" (pg, 71). In 1883, the courts basically turned a blind eye to racism, for it "held that the Fourteenth Amendment gave Congress power to restrain states but not individuals from acts of racial discrimination and segregation" (pg, 71). In a series of other decisions, the courts stripped the blacks of their civil rights. By 1898, the Williams v. Mississippi case all but "complete the opening of the legal road to proscription, segregation, and disfranchisement by approving the Mississippi plan for depriving Negroes of the franchise" (pg, 71).

Additionally, when the blacks' civil rights issue was exposed to outsiders in the international arena, the American government scrambled to recuperate its image as a "staunch supporter of freedom, justice, and democracy" (pg, 132). For example, when the United Nations first opened its headquarters in the U.S., it "suddenly threw open to the outside world a large window on American race practices [and] to many of these people the Jim Crow code came as a complete shock" (pg, 132). Deceptively, the United States endeavoured in covering its "genuine and practical embarrassment" by having appointments "of a number of Negroes to posts in the Foreign Service of the Department" (pg, 133).

In summary, Woodward's The Strange Career of Jim Crow has undoubtedly shed new light on the issue of race relations in the United States. Consequently, it has also revealed that the North's great prejudice towards blacks was in many ways paralleled to that of the South. However, it is also unsettling in learning that blacks in America were frequently used as political pawns used by the mainly white dominated politicians to win more votes. Most disconcerting was that it was not until the 'Second Reconstruction,' starting in 1946, that some politicians such as President Harry Truman anchored the first concrete steps for racial desegregation. Unfortunately, it took well over seventy years since the Compromise of 1877 that the civil rights issue was brought back into the limelight of politics.

Bibliography

Woodward, C. Vann, The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Oxford University Press: New York, 1974.