Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World. “A mere look, word, or motion,—a mistake, accident, or want of power,—are all matters for which a slave may be whipped at any time,” Frederick Douglass famously wrote.

(c) Oxford University Press USA, 2020. See also Howard N. Rabinowitz, “More Than the Woodward Thesis: Assessing The Strange Career of Jim Crow,” Journal of American History 75 (December 1988): 842–856. Yet at other times and in other stores, blacks were able to assert the dignity they felt not only as human beings who resisted the white supremacist habitus but also, more specifically, as consumers—paying customers—whose money ought to give them worth. ., Georgia, or Virginia. Between 1931 and 1932, Detroit’s thrift garden program provided food for about 20,000 people. If the “etiquette” of slavery that persisted from the 19th century far into the 20th is now gone in 21st-century America, whites’ expectations that blacks behave according to white-established norms are not. (64.) Ritterhouse, Growing Up Jim Crow, 34.

Jane Dailey, “Is Marriage a Civil Right? Despite widespread unemployment during the Depression years, the number of married women in the workforce actually increased. America was becoming an urban, industrial nation as the younger population increasingly left farms to settle in big cities. 2 (Summer 1992): 348.

Then he is getting high-minded, and should be taken down a button-hole lower. New York: New Press, 2001.Find this resource: Cobb, James C. The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity. Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property.

Before the 1920s, adults viewed children as smaller adults that should be working and not being educated. (33.) Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.Find this resource: Hunter, Tera W. To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War. (63.) As historian Mark Schultz explains in a valuable study of Hancock County, Georgia, a close look at rural southern society reveals a different picture than conventional views of the Jim Crow South that are based on urban areas. Work, Consumption, and Institution-Building. Families on government support were less stigmatized.The New Deal programs of President Franklin D. Roosevelt meant the expansion of government into people’s everyday lives after 1933. Nevertheless, just as middle- and upper-class white women in the urban South might praise their black cooks and laundresses “while still regarding them as quite outside the boundaries of friendship and familiarity,” the same was true of rural white women across the social scale.16 Even relatively poor white families could often afford to hire black women and girls to help with laundry and other household work, and they prided themselves on their superior status. Prior to the Great Depression, most Americans had negative views of government welfare programs and refused to go on welfare. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.Find this resource: Ayers, Edward L. The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction.

See disclaimer.

Workers at a button factory in New York, circa 1935. (49.) American history is indisputably colorful, but the 1920s stand out as one of the most exciting decades of the 20th century. (40.)

Life in the Early 1900's, as told by Marie Sturm.



“Segregation statutes passed in the aftermath of Reconstruction made few references to Indians,” observes historian Theda Purdue, and the same is true for other people of color who were neither “white” nor “Negro.” The purpose of such laws, after all, was “to protect whiteness and white power,” as Purdue writes.

They also relied on their neighbors, bartering with each other and with rural merchants in a highly personalized system of exchange that was “both derived from and reinforced complex networks of dependency, patronage, and obligation.”13 Daily life centered on work, following the seasonal rhythms of cotton and other crops.

To complete the pattern, whites policed their own conduct, not only withholding all forms of courtesy from slaves but also establishing unwritten rules against eating or drinking with any black person, slave or free, especially in any way that implied “social equality.” Bound up with notions of racial purity, this taboo against interracial dining mattered almost as much to most white Southerners as the taboo—and the longstanding laws—against interracial sex. Richard Wright, Black Boy (American Hunger): A Record of Childhood and Youth (New York: HarperPerennial, 1993), 218. Keywords: Jim Crow, South, segregation, racism, African Americans, daily life, racial etiquette, women, children, The “Etiquette” of Slavery and the Post-Emancipation Decades.

PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, AMERICAN HISTORY (oxfordre.com/americanhistory).