Evidence 1: “Forty cotton mills in a near radius weave infinite cloth that neighboring shops make into countless shirts. There are shoe factories, nail factories, shovel and pick factories, and carriage factories, to supply the other wants. And that country can now get up as nice a funeral, native and home-made, as you would wish to have."—Document 16.1: Henry Grady, The New South

Evidence 2: “I work in the cotton mills. They employ men, women and children—many children who are too small to work, they should be at school; the parents are more to blame than are the mill-owners. The hands in the mills in this section are doing very well, and if they only received their pay weekly in cash instead of “trade checks,” and store accounts, they would not complain if they were paid in cash and were allowed to buy for cash where they pleased, it would be much better."—Document 16.2: Testimony of North Carolina Industrial Workers

Evidence 3: “The marriage of a white person with a negro or mulatto, or person who shall have one-eighth or more of negro blood, shall be unlawful and void.”—Document 16.4: Mississippi Constitution

Evidence 4: “By the Fourteenth Amendment, all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are made citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside, and the States are forbidden from making or enforcing any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, or shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, or deny to any person within their jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”—Document 16.5: Justice Henry Billings Brown, Plessy v. Ferguson

Evidence 1: “On these two lines of action, political and social, the South has moved rapidly towards the solution of the race problem. If left alone, it can solve it. Interference simply irritates, and outside opinion simply misjudges. The negroes are prospering and are contented.”—Document 16.1: Henry Grady, The New South

Evidence 2: “The sale of every cropper’s part of the cotton to be made by me when and where I choose to sell, and after deducting all they may owe me and all sums that I may be responsible for on their accounts, to pay them their half of the net proceeds. Work of every description, particularly the work on fences and ditches, to be done to my satisfaction, and must be done over until I am satisfied that it is done as it should be.”—Document 16.3: Sharecropper’s Contract

Evidence 3: “On and after the first day of January, A.D., 1892, every elector shall, in addition to the foregoing qualifications, be able to read any section of the constitution of this State; or he shall be able to understand the same when read to him, or give a reasonable interpretation there of. A new registration shall be made before the next ensuing election after January the first, A.D., 1892.”—Document 16.4: Mississippi Constitution

Evidence 4: “A statute which implies merely a legal distinction between the white and colored races—a distinction which is founded in the color of the two races and which must always exist so long as white men are distinguished from the other race by color—has no tendency to destroy the legal equality of the two races, or reestablish a state of involuntary servitude. Indeed, we do not understand that the Thirteenth Amendment is strenuously relied upon by the plaintiff in error in this connection.”—Document 16.5: Justice Henry Billings Brown, Plessy v. Ferguson

Evidence 1: “[W]hites and blacks must walk in separate paths in the South. As near as may be, these paths should be made equal—but separate they must be now and always. This means separate schools, separate churches, separate accommodation everywhere—but equal accommodation where the same money is charged, or where the State provides for the citizen.”—Document 16.1: Henry Grady, The New South

Evidence 2: “Croppers are to have no part or interest in the cotton seed raised from the crop planted and worked by them. No vine crops of any description, that is no watermelons . . . squashes or anything of that kind . . . are to be planted in the cotton or corn. All must work under my direction. All plantation work to be done by the croppers.”—Document 16.3: Sharecropper’s Contract

Evidence 3: “The marriage of a white person with a negro or mulatto, or person who shall have one-eighth or more of negro blood, shall be unlawful and void.”—Document 16.4: Mississippi Constitution

Evidence 4: “Gauged by this standard, we cannot say that a law which authorizes or even requires the separation of the two races in public conveyances is unreasonable, or more obnoxious to the Fourteenth Amendment than the acts of Congress requiring separate schools for colored children in the District of Columbia, the constitutionality of which does not seem to have been questioned, or the corresponding acts of state legislatures.”—Document 16.5: Justice Henry Billings Brown, Plessy v. Ferguson