Scott Ainslie's BluesNotes
First in a series of articles relating to the Blues
Setting the Stage
The Blues came to broad public awareness first through the work of W.C. Handy, who said that he heard a Delta player on a railway platform in Mississippi in 1902. But it is likely that Handy heard a player who came from a mature local music tradition, making it reasonable that the music was around from the late 1880's onward in that region.
What was happening during that time?
The first generation born out of slavery was coming of age and lynching reached its zenith in the fifty years between 1880 and 1930. Check out my notes from Philip Dray's new book from Random House, "At The Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America."
"Between 1880 and 1930 the number of black men, women and children who died in ten Southern states "at the hands of persons unknown" (the phrase universally employed, Philip Dray tells us, by complicitous coroners) almost certainly exceeded 2,500, to which another three hundred whites must be added for a total regional lynching of slightly under three thousand.
"During that half century, a black person was murdered by a white mob nearly every week in every year. According to Dray and Madison, research at Tuskeegee Institute estimated that the total number of all Americans deprived of life without due process after 1880 was approximately 3,400 blacks and 1,300 whites by the close of World War II.
"The re-establishment of white supremacy in the South after 1877 ("redemption," as it was called) proceeded somewhat cautiously in imposing naked racial repression until the South's leaders could be confident about the North's disengagement. The political situation remained fluid for a time after Reconstruction as the protection afforded under the amended Federal Constitution and by the Civil Rights Act of 1875 had yet to be fully pared away and nullified. Mississippi's constitutional convention would point the way in 1890; in the years that followed barely a trace of a once robust black Southern franchise remained.
"By 1900, with the work of the southern constitutional conventions substantially completed, Louisiana would have fewer than 6,000 registered black voters, where before there had been more than 130,000; Alabama would list 3,000 after 1900 of a previous registered total of some 181,000. Without the legalistic machinations of the Supreme Court of the United States, however the Southern colonels and merchants would have been harder pressed to complete the new order.
"Compiling a record of stunning judicial opacity in its civil rights deliberations, the high court moved from the Slaughterhouse cases of 1873 to Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, invalidating the 1875 Civil Rights Act along with the first Enforcement Act and systematically stripping away the citizenship guarantees under the new Fifteenth Amendment.
"The Court's verdicts along the road to Plessy v. Ferguson occasioned festivals of lynching whose purpose, as Dray suggests, was to disabuse people of color of all political hope under the Constitution.
"As if to celebrate the nation's all-but-final leave-taking from involvement in racial affairs below the Mason-Dixon Line, 161 black people were killed in 1892, a peak figure in a decade of un-relievedly high lynching figures. Three years later, speaking at the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition, Booker T. Washington renounced the ballot in what became known as the Atlanta Compromise, postponing equality as a goal on the misguided assumption that a compromise of ideals would yield humble, steady, material progress for his people.
"By 1910, Jim Crow had triumphed. "