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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - VII. Social Inequality - 28. The Basis of Social Inequality - 3. The Beginning in Slavery - 4. The Jim Crow Laws
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578 An American Dilemma
master who owned his body and all his abilities, including his propensity
to procreate, stretched out over the most intimate phases of his life and
was absolute, personal and arbitrary. The stamp of social inferiority on the
Negro slave became strengthened by the race dogma, the functional impor-
tance of which we have studied in an earlier chapter.® This biological
rationalization and the logic of the slavery institution itself also isolated the
free Negroes and dragged them down into social inferiority.
In most relations a fairly complete social separation of the Negro
group was enforced as a matter of policy and routine in a slavery society.
The lives of the slaves were closely regimented in the interest of exploit-
ing their labor and hindering their escape. Under the influence of the rising
fear of slave revolts, the spread of abolitionism in the North, and the actual
escape of many Negro slaves along the ‘‘underground railroad,” the regi-
mentation became increasingly strict during the decades preceding the Civil
War. This regimentation of the slaves prevented, almost entirely, social
contacts between the slaves and the whites who had no slaves. On the
larger plantations the field slaves were usually constrained to the company
of each other. Their main white contact was the overseer and, occasionally,
the master and members of his family. On small holdings their contacts
with the master and his family were more frequent and intensive.^ Even
the household slaves, however, never shared in the whites’ life, except as
servants whose humble station was made evident by all available means,
including a ceremonial etiquette of obsequiousness which naturally devel-
oped between two groups of such different culture and such unequal status.
The slaves were provided with living quarters apart from the whites.
Their religious activities also were usually separate. When allowed to
attend religious services in the presence of white people, they had a segre-
gated place in the church. They received no regular schooling. It was even
forbidden by law to teach the slaves to read. They had their own amuse-
ments and recreations and never mixed in those of the whites. Their travel-
ing was closely restricted. Marriage between the two groups was, of course,
quite out of the question. There was a considerable amount of interracial
sex relations, but they were usually of an exploitative type and restricted
to those between white men and slave women. Most of these generaliza-
tions hold true also of the free Negroes in the South. They were forced into
social isolation. White people did not, and could not in a slave society, accept
them as equals.
4. The Jim Crow Laws
Emancipation loosened the bonds on Negro slaves and allowed them to
leave their masters. The majority of freedmen seems to have done some
* Set Chapttr 4*
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