Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [197]
The restrictions imposed on the freedmen never approximated the thoroughness with which southern legislatures and communities segregated the races in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The racial distinctions that characterized the immediate post-emancipation years were almost always understood rather than stated. But to the blacks themselves, the differences might have seemed minimal and the risks incurred in flaunting deeply rooted social customs were no less pronounced than those which would later inhibit a successful challenge to Jim Crow laws. What whites aspired to in both instances was a separation of the races, and the post-emancipation restrictions were by no means limited to public transportation. If admitted at all to public places, such as theaters and churches, blacks sat in separate and inferior sections, usually the rear seats or the balcony. Few if any public inns or restaurants accommodated them, except for those which catered exclusively to blacks. (The Union Hotel in Augusta, Georgia, for example, advertised itself as a first-class hotel “for the special accommodation of the Citizen and Travelling Public of Color.”)86 Not knowing what to expect, some hotels and public inns had considered reclassifying themselves as private houses in order to exclude black patrons. Knowing what to expect, most blacks avoided such places rather than be insulted and ejected. The ludicrous extent to which legislatures segregated the races later in the century was clearly anticipated in the instructions given black people in Natchez in 1866 that henceforth the promenades along the river and the bluff to the right of Main Street would be reserved “for the use of the whites, for ladies and children and nurses—the central Bluff between Main Street and State for bachelors and the colored population, and the lower promenade for the whites.” Not far behind, Georgia decreed that black and white patients in the “Lunatic Asylum” be kept separate—a decision justified as “in the wisest sanitary policy”—and in Richmond, Virginia, blacks and whites applied for “destitute rations” at separate places.87
The determination of whites to maintain a color line in public places and conveyances conflicted with the desire of many ex-slaves to utilize facilities from which they had been barred and to achieve a public equality that seemed justified by their new status. To press their demands for equal access, blacks questioned the logic that underlay segregationist and exclusionist practices. Why, for example, did black men and women traveling by themselves in public conveyances pose a danger, whereas black maids, nurses, and servants accompanying a white mistress or white children did not? “If the idea is so dreadful,” a black newspaper in Georgia asked, “why should poor little children be forced to draw sustenance from black breasts, be kissed by black lips, and hugged by black arms?” Apparently, another black editor suggested, colored people in the act of nursing white children were noncontagious. Some decades would elapse before the wet nurse herself became suspect. “We gave our infants to the black wenches to suckle,” an elderly South Carolinian reflected in 1885, “and thus poisoned the blood of our children, and made them cowards … it will take 500 years, if not longer, by the infusion of new blood to eradicate the hereditary vices imbibed with the blood (milk is blood) of black wet nurses.”88
By choosing to make an issue of racial separation in public places, black men and women in the aftermath of Union occupation provoked a prolonged and often heated controversy that sometimes spilled out into the streets of southern communities. By 1867, on the eve of Radical Reconstruction, blacks in such cities as Mobile,