The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron Read Online Free PDF

prisons. During the same period, similar laws were enacted in Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia (“White persons who marry a colored person shall be jailed up to one year, and fined up to $100. Those who perform such a marriage ceremony will be guilty of a misdemeanor and fined up to $200”), Maryland, Washington, Idaho, California (“Persons of Japanese descent in 1909 were added to the list of undesirable marriage partners of white Californians as noted in the earlier 1880 statute”), Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, North Dakota (literacy tests) and South Dakota (intermarriage or illicit cohabitation forbidden between blacks and whites, punishable by a fine up to one thousand dollars, or by imprisonment up to ten years, or both), Kansas, and Nebraska.
    In justifying separation of the races, the press served as an effective tool to incite fear among whites. It purported that blacks did not possess the social capacity to be treated with the same courtesies as whites, and that blacks were dangerous, uncivilized, a grave threat to the safety of the white women of Mobile. (In 1915, Alabama passed a statewide law prohibiting “White female nurses from caring for black male patients.”)
    The social order had been upset by the large influx of blacks who inhabited the city during the final decade of the 1800s. The Mobile Daily Item was the most actively hostile newspaper in the city toward blacks—its coverage only spurred growing insistence among whites for the return of segregation. During a ten-day period in October 1902, its coverage proved even more relentless:
    FURY OF A TEXAS MOB 5
    Finds satisfaction in lynching of negroes
    H EMPSTEAD , T EX ., O CTOBER 21—After being tried with legal form and procedure for criminal assault and murder and given the death penalty in each case, Jim Wesley and Reddick Barton, negroes, were, late this afternoon taken from the authorities and lynched in the public square by an infuriated mob
    NEGRO PEEPER 6
    Is discovered on the gallery of a
citizen residing on Espejo Street
    Mr. Charles Helmer, while on his way home Tuesday night last with his wife and a party of ladies saw a negro on the gallery of Mr. George McCary, on Espejo Street, near Government. The Negro was on the gallery peeping through the blinds and when one of the ladies discovered him, he jumped to the ground. Mr. Helmer chased the man across a pasture but was unable to capture him.
    The black response derived from the old paternalistic relationships with whites. The famous educator Booker T. Washington appealed to the white city elders across the South to confront the “criminal colored elements” but not to “punish the entire Negro race” with segregation ordinances. Washington’s disciples began echoing a similar theme in Mobile. Washington was already a national figure, and his presence in Mobile increased the influence of two black businessmen, Charles Allen and A. N. Johnson. Washington would vacation with Allen, often fishing at his home. Johnson owned a funeral home prominent in the black community and published his own newspaper, where he often broke with Washington’s doctrines of appeasement with whites. Washington appealed to whites to recall the positive relationships between the two races, a relationship that in large part favored whites. Johnson seemed to have a clearer notion of white intentions. Through his writing, he sought to challenge the existing structure. He understood that a single increase in restrictions would only lead to more.
    Johnson was right in his belief that a movement to undo current relationships between the races was afoot. Erwin Craighhead, the editor of the ostensibly moderate Register , endorsed in an editorial the necessity of segregation on streetcars. These sensational headlines and editorials only heightened racial tensions in the city, and any idea that Mobile would