If poor white people had less contact with their Black neighbors, they would be far more likely to defer to white elites. It was not a coincidence that these legal efforts occurred against the backdrop of the rise of Populism.įollowing Reconstruction, white Southern politicians aimed to eliminate spaces where white and Black people could congregate and develop a sense of both community and solidarity. They pay the same high rent for gulled and impoverished land.”Īs Watson drafted these words, states across the South were implementing Jim Crow laws, which determined where Black people could eat, drink, sleep, and use the bathroom, as well as how they could travel and which beaches and parks they could visit. “Their living is confined to bare necessities. White and Black tenants lived in “adjoining” residences, and “their houses are almost equally destitute of comforts,” Watson wrote in 1892. But Watson’s case was also based on the communal experience he had observed in farmers’ homes. He sought to appeal to the farmers’ material interests, arguing that together, as a united class, they could overcome Southern structures of debt bondage and economic oppression. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Tom Watson, a white congressman from Georgia, worked diligently to organize white and Black farmers into the Populist Party. Aziz Rana ▪ Fall 2022Ī suburban development in Chapel Hill, North Carolina (Robert Nickelsberg/Liaison/ Getty Images) The consequences are significant for left political organizing aimed at building a multiracial working-class majority. Throughout the United States, racial separation remains a common feature of collective life.
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