Labor and Race
in the New South

With the end of Reconstruction in 1877, the southern states returned to what whites called “home rule”: the law of white supremacy. Democratic governments regained control in every southern state, and whites solidified their social, political, and economic power. By the early twentieth century, every southern state had passed Jim Crow laws that segregated and disfranchised blacks despite the promises of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

Yet some southern whites proclaimed that the South had in fact changed. They argued that a “New South,” characterized by a modernizing, industrializing economy, would come to dominate the nation and the world. They praised the end of slavery and promised a new era of racial cooperation—on whites’ terms. Some changes did indeed occur, although not on the scale that New South boosters claimed. The South remained primarily agricultural. And African Americans found themselves subjugated as tenant farmers and sharecroppers, although they still valued their freedom and protested their discriminatory treatment.

The following documents reveal the cleavages over labor and race in the New South. As you read, consider exactly how “new” this New South was.