Violence and Jim Crow Law
The cost of a slave prevented most Black people from being killed during slavery. This explains why millions survived. Many were murdered, but buying another slave would cost a master over six-hundred dollars. It did not prevent torture or whipping. During the Jim Crow era, violence against Black people significantly increased. Violence increased even more after segregation became legal (Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896). Violence and Jim Crow law went hand in hand because ordinary white people enforced the rules of racial etiquette and kept Blacks and Whites apart. Not only was the law on the side of white racism but so were ordinary citizens who wandered around looking for Blacks to violate the rules of white supremacy. There are many levels in the house of white supremacy, and each dreadful yarn is connected to the overall imaginary calculus of white supremacy and the violence that it perpetuated. Violence and Jim Crow are connected at the hip.
The laws also encouraged whites to act as vigilantes, often labeled as “white law-abiding citizens,” in order to secure white privilege. When Jim Crow law was threatened, the typical response was violence. According to E.R. Bills (2015), “Texans burned an average of one person of color at the stake a year for three decades” from 1891 until 1922. Most of these murders, occurred in picnic-like settings with thousands of illegal white mobs participating. According to research, the burning at the stake of Black men was celebrated with photographs that were tuned into “lynching” postcards and described as fun-loving “barbecues” or “roasts.”
A lynching took place in Somerset, Texas, which is now in Bexar County, and is about 20 miles south of San Antonio. Alexander Washington was seized by vigilantes and hanged for what was the typical excuse for racial violence, the accusation of attacking a white woman, according to an 1886 article in the Fort Worth Daily Gazette mocking his hanging. Blacks would automatically be lynched for the mere accusation of assaulting a white woman. Others would be given long prison sentences, or whipped, using trumped up charges for simply having better clothes, a nice house, a car, not saying “yes boss,” not looking down when talking to a white person, or simply trying to be treated as a human being.
Segregation was accomplished by Jim Crow law or custom which separated Whites from Blacks in parks, theatres, restaurants, hospitals, cemeteries, and transportation. If one violated the rules of segregation violence would follow. Records of Jim Crow ordinances in San Antonio started as early as 1860, when Blacks had to be off San Antonio city streets by nine o’clock at night (San Antonio City Council minutes, 1860) or be whipped. These ordinances were the result of fears created by a Dallas newspaper editor, Charles Pryor, who claimed that slaves and abolitionists set fire to Dallas. Additionally, the San Antonio Ledger Newspaper (1851) reported from Eagle Pass that a Black Seminole named “Wild Cat” was active in freeing slaves in Texas (Lost Texas Roads Website). This prompted area slave owners to approach the Bexar County Commissioners Court and demand slave catcher patrols. One such violent slave catcher was Asa Mitchell, whose property held a slave cemetery and is now the Mitchell Lake on Pleasanton Road in San Antonio. Jim Crow segregation was enforced with violence. Since these laws cannot be legally enforced any longer, white supremacists now resort to police abuse, racial profiling, denial of teaching Black history, and the creation of a conservative political agenda aimed at going back to the days of Jim Crow.
