Slavery remade: Jim Crow narratives of slavery

Abstract This chapter argues that Black Codes, white violence, and the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson ruling eroded the civil rights that the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments conferred for Black people, and diminished their optimism about enjoying full citizenship rights. It highlights how Black people built institutions and used activism and cultural production, such as speeches and essays, to resist the effects that second-class citizenship intended for them. It contrasts Booker T. Washington’s accommodationist philosophy and Tuskegee model with W. E. B. Du Bois’s critiques of Washington and those who adopted similar philosophies to reveal debates within Black communities about the best strategies to secure civil and political rights at the turn of the twentieth century. Furthermore, it examines Ida B. Wells’s anti-lynching crusade to illustrate systemic violence and organized resistance against it. Finally, the chapter demonstrates how Jim Crow narratives of slavery reveal slavery’s enduring legacies, and how Black people continued to work to blunt their effects.