1. Chapter 17
A New South: Economic Progress and Social
Tradition (1877–1900)

2.  What characterized continuity and change between
the Old South and the New South?
 What were the origins and nature of southern
populism?
 What were women’s role in the South?
 How and why did segregation and disfranchisement
change race relations in the South?

3. ◦ Birmingham, Alabama epitomized the one aspect of the
New South as iron and steel mills emerged in the city.
◦ The southern textile industry also grew, especially in the
Piedmont.
◦ The tobacco and soft drink industries also became
important economic aspects of the South.
◦ Southern railroad construction boomed in the 1880s,
tying the section together and stimulating the rise of
interior cities.

4. MAP 17–1 Railroads in
the South, 1859 and
1899 A postwar railroad
construction boom
promoted commercial
agriculture and industry
in the South. Unlike the
railroads of the prewar
South, uniform gauges
and connections to
major trunk lines in the
North linked
southerners to the rest
of the nation. Northern
interests, however,
owned the major
southern railroads in
1899, and most of the
products flowing
northward were raw
materials to be
processed by northern
industry or shipped
elsewhere by northern
merchants.

5.  Grady was the young, dynamic editor of the South's leading
newspaper, the Atlanta Constitution, still one of the great
papers of the nation. Through his editorials, through speeches,
through writings, Grady tried to advertise to the rest of the
nation, and to the world at large, a South that was no longer
the South of the old plantation days, of the sleepy towns, of the
magnolia blossoms, but a South that was dynamic, alive, ready
to receive economic investment, ready to grow and prosper.

6. – Southern urban and industrial growth was rapid but
barely kept pace with the northern boom.
– A weak agricultural economy and high rural birthrate kept
wages in the South low and undermined the southern
economy. Consumer demand was low limiting the
market for southern manufacturing goods. Low wages
also had other negative effects, including keeping
immigrants away.
– The South remained a section apart. The Civil War had
wiped out its capital resources, making it a colony of the
North. Investment seemed riskier making the South
dependent on numerous small investors.

7. By the 1890s, textile mills were a common sight in towns throughout the South.
The mills provided employment for impoverished rural families, especially women
and children.

8. ◦ The cash-poor economy meant credit dominated.
Cotton was the only commodity easily converted into
cash and so became the only one accepted for credit.
◦ The web of credit extended from farmers to local
merchants to city merchants.

9. ◦ Declining conditions led farmers to fight for
improvements. They supported lower interest rates,
easier credit, regulation of railroad freight rates, and
lower commodity prices.
◦ By 1875, nearly 250,000 southern farmers had joined
the Patrons of Husbandry, often called the Grange.
The leaders were large farmers.
◦ The most powerful farm reform organization was the
Southern Farmers’ Alliance that originated in Texas. It
became a surrogate government and church for many
small farmers. It developed into the People’s Party.

10. The Purposes of the Grange: Gift for the Grangers, done in 1873, not
surprisingly makes a sturdy farmer its focus. The scenes around the border
picture rural life as farmers wished it to be rather than as it really was
(Library of Congress)

11. ◦ Facing growing financial pressures in the 1880s and
early 1890s combined with the failure of major political
parties to address their concerns, northern and
southern farmers joined the Alliance and supported the
People’s Party.
◦ The People’s Party supported the direct election of U.
S. senators, an income tax, government ownership of
railroads, woman suffrage, and other credit easing
proposals.
◦ Southern populists were ambivalent about African
Americans but populists in Texas and Georgia openly
appealed for black votes.
◦ In the 1892 election, Populists made inroads in some
southern state legislators.

12.  Church work and preserving memories
◦ Church work provided an avenue for southern women to
enter the public arena. They founded home missions to
promote industrial education among the poor and help
working-class women become self-sufficient. They also
established settlement houses.
◦ Religion led southern white women to join the Women’s
Christian Temperance Union.
- Alcohol prohibition, smoking, Coca-Cola
◦ The reform movement among middle-class southern white
women was conservative in nature.
-Supported segregation and defended white supremacy

13. The economic advance
of African Americans in
the South during the
decades after the Civil
War against
great odds provided one
of the more inspiring
success stories of the
era. But it was precisely
this success, as
depicted here at Dr.
McDougald’s Drug
Store in Georgia, in
1900, that infuriated
whites who believed
that the African
American’s place in the
South resided in menial
and subservient
occupations.

14.  The white backlash
◦ As young African Americans demanded full
participation in American society, white Southerners of
the same generation resented the changed status of
African Americans.
◦ The South’s deteriorating rural economy and the
volatile politics of the late 1880s and early 1890s
heightened tensions between the races. Racial rhetoric
and violence escalated.
◦ Whites who were raised on the myth of the “Lost
Cause” saw blacks as replacing the “Yankees” as the
enemy.

15. Lynch law
 Between 1882 and 1903 white mobs lynched more than
2,000 black Southerners
 Lynching did not end until the 1940’s
 Most lynching were for imagined slights to white women,
but included many other alleged crimes where blacks
stepped above their “place”
 Lynch mobs usually tortured and killed their victims in a
circus-like atmosphere
• Memphis journalist Ida B. Wells launched an anti-lynching
crusade.
lynch video 1
Willie Lynch Video

16. Lynching became a public spectacle, a ritual designed to reinforce white supremacy.
Note the matter-of-fact satisfaction of the spectators at this gruesome murder of a black
man.

20. • Segregation by law
– Southern white lawmakers tried to bolster white
solidarity and guarantee African American
subservience in the 1890s by legalized segregation
and disfranchisement of black voters.
– In the 1870s, racial segregation in public places was
spreading in southern cities and ending in northern
urban areas.
– New segregation legislation focused on railroads
and providing “separate but equal” facilities.
– In 1896, the U. S. Supreme Court ruled that
separate but equal was constitutional in the
(Plessy v. Ferguson)
– Jim Crow laws extended racial segregation.

21. Segregation by law
accelerated after the
1896 Plessy v.
Ferguson decision,
but public
conveyances often
failed to abide by
the “equal” portion
of the separate-but-
equal ruling. African
Americans in the
South fought racial
separation and
exclusion
vigorously, as this
excerpt from a black
newspaper in
Cleveland attests.
July 14, 1900.

23.  Disfranchisement
◦ The movement to reduce or eliminate the black vote in
the South began in the 1880s.
◦ Disfranchisement included a variety of measures such
as complicating the registration and voting process as
well as instituting the secret ballot.
◦ The poll tax, literacy tests, and the grandfather
clauses also helped eliminate black voters.
◦ African Americans protested disfranchisement
vigorously but to no avail.

24. Is this separate but equal?
FIGURE 17–3 Disfranchisement and Educational Spending in the South,
1890–1910
By barring black people from the political process, franchise restrictions limited their
access to government services. Educational expenditures, which increased for white
people but decreased for black people following disfranchisement, provide one
measure of the result.

25.  A national consensus on race
◦ In the 1890s, apparently a majority of Americans
agreed that African Americans were inferior and
should be treated as second-class citizens.
◦ Popular culture stereotypes combined with intellectual
and political opinions in the North supported southern
policy.
◦ So-called “scientific racism” backed up this claim on
biological grounds
◦ In 1903 the New York Times stated “practically the
whole country supports the southern solution to the
race issue”

28.  Response of the black community
◦ By the 1880s, a new, black middle class had emerged in
the South. Centered in the city, business and professional
African Americans served a primarily black clientele.
◦ Black women played an increasingly active and prominent
role in African American communities. Black women’s clubs
developed to address the new era in race relations.
◦ Booker T. Washington advocated learning industrial skills
to help African Americans gain self-respect and economic
independence. He supported the Atlanta Compromise.
◦ W.E.B DuBois challenged Washington and supported self-
help, education, and black pride, helping found the NAACP.

29. Booker T. Washington (left) and W. E. B. Du Bois (right). The differences between these two
prominent black leaders reflected in part the differences between the North and the South in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The northern-born Du Bois challenged
segregation and pinned his hopes for improving the condition of African Americans on a
talented elite. The southern-born Washington counseled acquiescence to segregation,
maintaining that black people could ultimately gain the acceptance of white society through
self-improvement and hard work.

30. Howard University Law School Class These men would form what black leader, W.E.B.
Du Bois called “The Talented Tenth,” the new African-American leadership for the new
twentieth century. Note the pride and determination of these men.

31.  In 1900, the South was more like the rest of the nation
than at any other time since 1800.
 White Southerners promoted national reconciliation
but maintained the peculiarities of the region.
 The New South was both American and southern.

32. Ku Klux Klan
march, Houston,
Texas—publicity
during economic
summit

33. A “Keep the Flag Change the Governor” political sign is shown in a yard in Louisville,
Miss., Oct. 9, 2003. Two years after Mississippi voters decided to keep a Confederate
battle emblem on their state banner, the flag has again become an issue in the
governor’s race. in a television ad, Republican gubernatorial nominee Haley Barbour
said Democratic Gov. Ronnie Musgrove “attacked” the state flag when he insisted on
giving voters a chance to decide the banner’s design in 2001. Barbour’s
campaign office in Yazoo City, Miss., was also distributing “Keep the Flag. Change the
Governor” campaign materials.

34. NAACP members supporting the economic boycott of South Carolina over the
continuing presence of the Confederate flag on Statehouse grounds in Columbia,
demonstrate prior to a speech by Kweisi Mfume, the national president of the NAACP,
Friday, April 19, 2003, at a state welcome station near Fort Mill, S.C.