Major Problems In The History Of The South Chapter 1 Summary

In southern society, in the Southern United States of America, from the period of the late 19th century to through a considerable amount of the 20th century, the structure of society had been held up like a sturdy Roman bath house. The “three pillars” that can be attributed to the strong foundations of the society in the Southern U.S.A includes: racial segregation, a cotton economy, and Democratic Party control. And in fact, these crucial pillars had been the source of a strong Southern society. But as always, time can break down even the most solid structure.
In reference to the book, “Major Problems in the History of the American South,” the impacts of racial segregation in Sothern culture can be very subjective to the time period that is

The reason why this number is relevant to racial segregation in the South is because it entails that in comparison to the amount of white people that had been lynched in that state, your chances of getting lynched if African American had been over 11 times greater in comparison. Yet, what had caused the difference in these rates and the divide? According to Ida B. Wells, “No Negro Domination” (Major Problems, 171) had become a mentality in the South. This means that people would do whatever they had to, by any means possible, to oppress African Americans. In fact, this same mentality is what had lead to the rise of hate groups such as the KKK. The KKK had been attributed to racial segregation in their own was as well. In general, the KKK had a few scare tactics that they had practiced, that being, “fraud, violence, intimidation, and murder” (Major Problems, 171) and had used those very same tactics to segregate African Americans from the rest of the population by a

This economy had laid both the ground work for racial segregation and had contributed to the booming economy of the American South during this period as well. More specifically, the time that will be discussed is post 1865 because that’s when the Emancipation Proclamation had been put into law by Abraham Lincoln. This event declared that the African Americans had no longer had to serve their masters, although in some ways slavery continued into later years. Post slavery, most recently freed African Americans had been relatively poor and unable to provide for themselves so to survive into the harsh world that they had been thrown into they had gotten into a form of slaver that had been known as “sharecropping.” In this type of farming, a person, in this case an African American, would be assigned a plot of land. With this land they would be responsible for a series of tasks. The tasks that they had been assigned generally had been written out in the form of a contract, and an example of this would be the document “William Grimes Writes a Sharecropping Contract, 1882” and involved, “30 to 35” (Major Problems, 65) acre land plots that had to be maintained down to the tee. Some of the specifics had gone down to the crops that the sharecropper had to grow and even what manure they could use, at the sharecropper’s expense of course. And it’s this very form of tight control on sharecropping that allowed