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Racial attitudes and social mores in the south: 1900-1950


These such rulings encouraged the defiant white Southerners to continue in their supremacist ways. The Jim Crow laws even seemed to legalize the black's inferiority in the minds of many of the southern whites.
             Not all of the whites in the South believed that Blacks should be treated badly, but most of them did believe that blacks were inferior. This belief is sometimes realized in the act of Paternalism, or a field of thought where the white society feels that it is their duty to help the black people raise themselves up out of barbarism and lead a happy life of servitude. Sometimes paternalism is somewhat necessary, as in the case of the Harmon Foundation during the Harlem Renaissance. (Harlem Renaissance Video) Without the Harmon Foundation, many black artists would not have gotten a chance to express themselves, and the public might not have been exposed to black art. Even though that the general public did not except black artist unless they portrayed their black characters as the comical portrait that they have come to think of as the actual black man. But there is a problem with paternalism, and that is that it still treats blacks as inferiors. The whites that did partake in paternalism felt that black people should be helped but .
             Russell, 3.
             only to a certain degree. This is where the school of thought that the "white man's floor is the black man's ceiling" comes from. (Class discussion) .
             There was a small majority of whites however, that did not follow the predominating views of the south during this time period. These whites held blacks in the same respect as they held other whites, doing their best to treat the blacks as equals in a society that made it clear that they were not. These whites were often persecuted against just as much as the blacks themselves, a few times even resulting in the lynching of the so called "nigger lover". These cases of white against white often frightened many other whites that could have potentially been advocates for civil rights to cower behind the blanket of protection of conforming to the views of the so-called Southern Tradition.


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