Law, Society, Identity, and the Making of the Jim Crow South: Travel and Segregation on Tennessee Railroads, 1875-1905

Abstract

This article reexamines the well-known debate over the origins and timing of the advent of de jure segregation in the American South that began in 1955 with the publication of C. Vann Woodward's The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Arguing that the terms of the debate overWoodward's thesis implicate familiar but outmoded ways of looking at sociolegal change and Southern society, the article proposes a reorientation of this debate using theoretical perspectives taken from recent work by legal historians, critical race theorists, and historians of race, class and gender. This article examines the advent of railroad segregation in Tennessee (the state that enacted the nation's first railroad segregation statute) in order to sketch out these themes, arguing that de jure segregation was brought about by a dialectic between legal, social and identity-based phenomena. This dialectic did not die out with the coming of de jure segregation, but rather continued into the modern era.On September 15, 1883, a young Ida B. Wells boarded a train from Memphis, Tennessee to the nearby town of Woodstock, where she taught school, and entered an ongoing debate over law, society and identity in late nineteenth-century Tennessee. Wells, the future civil rights crusader, was concerned about railroad companies' recent attempts to segregate passengers by race, and about drinking and smoking on the train. Taking her seat in the nonsmoking rear coach which, according to the railroad, was reserved for "white ladies and gentlemen," she refused the conductor's request that she move to another car. The conductor, aided by two other men, physically ejected her from the car, in the process tearing her dress but suffering a serious bite wound inflicted by Wells in return. Ida Wells later sued the railroad for this incident and a subsequent ejection, ultimately losing in the state supreme court and incurring several hundred dollars in court costs in the process. 1 (Chesapeake, O. & Sw. R.R. v. Wells 1885a, 1885b& 1887Duster 1970) Disappointed with the outcome of her suit, Wells confided to her diary that "I have firmly believed all along that the law was on our side and would, when we appealed to it, give us justice." (DeCosta-Willis 1995, 141) Wells' views of the importance of the law in settling questions of identity, place and race mirrored those of her fellow Tennesseans. By the 1 The sometimes-cited date of Wells' ride, May 4, 1884, is incorrect. Wells was ejected twice and brought two lawsuits, the second of which was for the May 1884 ejection. The source of this confusion is Wells' autobiography, written over forty years later, where she fails to make clear that she was ejected twice and brought two lawsuits. In addition, the state supreme court opinion in her case, for reasons that are unclear, only references the lawsuit growing out of the 1884 ejection. (Duster 1970; Chesapeake, O. & Sw. R.R. v. Wells 1887) This article will only reference the first lawsuit, except where it is necessary to distinguish between Wells' suits. 2 1870s a...