An Overview of the Post-Reconstruction Era (1878-1900)

During the Reconstruction Era, progressively stricter legislative regulations attempted to prohibit the intermarriage of African Americans and Anglos. Nevertheless, most Anglos continued to fear that intermingling between the two people groups would become rampant. John Mitchell Jr., an African American editor of a Richmond, Virginia newspaper named The Planet, did little to calm their nerves. In the August 25, 1888 edition of his paper, Mitchell foresaw a day in which Anglos would “have no visible existence.”[1] Sixteen years later, in the February 7, 1903 edition, Mitchell explained that Anglos themselves were responsible for their potential extinction:

Every sensible colored man in this section is in favor of keeping the races separate, even if he has to invoke the aid of the shot-gun to do it. Let us have a law, making it a felony for a colored person to carnally know a white one or a white person to carnally know a colored one and then we will see who will get the worst of the bargain. No colored man need to go after a white female for we have white Negroes, brown Negroes, yellow Negroes and black Negroes and any individual who is not satisfied with this assortment that God and the white folks have given us should be made to get off the face of the earth.[2]

Mitchell’s observation was that while Anglos loved to speak about keeping the races separate, in reality their actions suggested otherwise. By and large, Anglo men were responsible for the births of innumerable mixed-race children.

Since 1850, the United States Census had included the category of mulatto for people with African American and Anglo ancestry. In 1890, the census included two more racial groupings for individuals who were less than 50 percent African American. Mixed race people now could indicate that they were quadroons (one-fourth African American) or octoroons (one-eighth African American),[3] presumably to root out anyone with nominal traces of non-Anglo blood. That same year, confederate veteran Colonel Frank G. Ruffin, a Virginia state auditor, wrote a work entitled, White or Mongrel? A Pamphlet on the Deportation of Negroes from Virginia to Africa. The premise of his short tract was that the only way to maintain Anglo racial purity was to send all people of African descent, whether they were “pure” or “mixed,” back to the continent of Africa.[4] In Ruffin,’s estimation, only the forced separation of the races would ensure that the Anglo-Saxon lineage remained free from any “corruption.”

            The satirist Mark Twain laughed at these efforts and decided to write a novel in which common notions of race were turned on their head. In his 1894 book entitled Pudd’nhead Wilson (set in Antebellum Missouri along the Mississippi River in 1830), Twain included a female character named Roxy who appeared White, but was a slave who was one-sixteenth Black. Her son had blue eyes and blond hair, and was one-thirty-second African American, yet was also a slave.[5] In a moment of desperation as she worried that her baby would “be sold down the river,” Roxy switched her infant son with her master’s infant son, and no one was the wiser.[6] This plot became one of the major themes of Twain’s novel, and he used the theme to question American society’s arbitrary manner by which one’s race was determined.

            In spite of Twain’s biting commentary, he failed to convince his fellow Americans of the validity of his points. Two years later, in 1896, the Supreme Court case that reinforced—and essentially strengthened—anti-miscegenistic laws was Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). In 1892, Louisiana resident Homer Plessy, an octoroon who was indistinguishable from full-blooded Anglos,[7] had purchased a train ticket in New Orleans for a railroad car the East Louisiana Railroad had reserved exclusively for Anglos. Upon taking his seat, authorities who were aware of his heritage promptly arrested him because he had violated segregation laws. At his state trial, Judge John Ferguson ruled Louisiana was well within its rights to separate railroad cars according to ethnicity. Plessy contested the ruling, and the case ultimately appeared before the Supreme Court.

In a 7-1 decision, the justices upheld Judge Ferguson’s original ruling. The court argued prior federal legislation, such as the Fourteenth Amendment, did not prohibit segregation:

The object of the [fourteenth] amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but in the nature of things, it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social as distinguished from political, equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to each other.[8]

This ruling had ramifications for multiethnic marriages because it reinforced the states’ ability to implement anti-miscegenistic laws,[9] as well as the United States’ justness in forging “racial certainty . . . from a landscape of indeterminacy.”[10]

In a speech he delivered in Montgomery, Alabama in 1956, Martin Luther King Jr. identified the Plessy v. Ferguson case as one of the major influences that reinforced and strengthened Jim Crow segregation laws:

Then came 1896. It was in this year that the Supreme Court of this nation, through the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, established the doctrine of separate-but-equal as the law of the land. Through this decision segregation gained legal and moral sanction. The end result of the Plessy doctrine was that it led to a strict enforcement of the “separate,” with hardly the slightest attempt to abide by the “equal.” So the Plessy doctrine ended up making for the tragic inequalities and ungodly exploitation.[11]

This bellwether case demonstrated once and for all that the North was not committed to the practical ramifications of Reconstruction ideology.[12] It also perpetuated the belief that while African Americans and Anglos possessed the same intrinsic value under the Constitution, this equality did not require interethnic contact or even civility on the part of Anglos toward African Americans.[13]

            Now that Jim Crow segregation[14] was at the height of its power, at least two fundamental shifts occurred. First, the years immediately prior to the twentieth century “saw the rise to prominence of a new form of scientific racism based in genetics.”[15] While in previous centuries proponents of anti-miscegenation often presented social arguments against the practice of intermingling, they now couched such sentiments in scientific jargon. Furthermore, scientists described Anglos, African-Americans, and other people groups as wholly distinct from one another. Accordingly, race, a term that often described different classifications of animals,[16] became a technical descriptor for human beings.

            Second, in 1900, the terms mulatto, quadroon, and octoroon disappeared from the United States Census. Henceforth for data collection purposes, people either were Caucasians or African Americans as White and non-White categories prevailed.[17] From this point onward, people with Anglo and African American ancestry were subsumed under the category of Black. In short, Jim Crow killed the classification of mulatto, as well as the notion of mixed race people, in the United States.[18]

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[1] Ann S. Holder, “What’s Sex God to Do with It? Race, Power, Citizenship, and ‘Intermediate Identities’ in the Post-Emancipation United States,” Journal of African American History 93.2 (Spring 2008): 162.

[2] John Mitchell Jr., The Planet, February 7, 1903, http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/ lccn/sn84025841/1903-02-07/ed-1/seq-4/ (accessed October 30, 2017).

[3] Jennifer Lee, Frank D. Bean, and Kathy Sloane. “Beyond Black and White: Remaking Race in America,” Contexts 2.3 (Summer 2003): 28-29.

[4] Holder, “What’s Sex Got to Do with It?” 166-67.

[5] Mark Twain, The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson, in Five Novels (San Diego, Canterbury Classics, 2009), 631-32.

[6] Ibid., 634-37.

[7] Because of prodigious ethnic comingling in the state, countless octoroons resided in Louisiana.

[8]Plessy v. Ferguson 163 U.S. 537 (1896), http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/ scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=163&invol=537 (accessed October 30, 2017).

[9]Michael A. Elliott, “Telling the Difference: Nineteenth-Century Legal Narratives of Racial Taxonomy,” in Mixed Race America and the Law: A Reader, ed. Kevin R. Johnson (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 116.

[10] Holder, “What’s Sex Got to Do with It?” 154.

[11] James M. Washington, ed., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1986), 136-37.

[12] David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 327.

[13] Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name, 110-11.

[14] Jim Crow segregation began to take hold in the 1880s, but the term is actually decades older. For a history of the phrase, see Stanley J. Folmsbee, “The Origin of the First ‘Jim Crow’ Law,” Journal of Southern History 15.2 (May 1949): 235-47; “Hugh H. Smythe, “The Concept ‘Jim Crow,’” Social Forces 27.1 (October 1948-May 1949): 45-48; “The Origins of the Black Minstrel Show, Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 42 (Winter 2003-2004): 45

[15]Novkov, “Racial Constructions,” 273.

[16]Paul Lawrence Farber, Mixing Races: From Scientific Racism to Modern Evolutionary Ideas, in Johns Hopkins Introductory Studies in the History of Science, ed. Mott. T. Greene and Sharon Kingsland (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, (2011), 26.

[17] Richard Lewis Jr. and Joanne Ford-Robertson, “Understanding the Occurrence of

Interracial Marriage in the United States Through Differential Assimilation,” Journal of Black Studies 41.2 (November 2010): 412.

[18] Hochschild and Weaver, “No One as Irish as Barack O’Bama,” 742.