Learning How to Jim Crow: Jacksonville, Florida’s White Progressives, 1887–92

In the late nineteenth century, the city of Jacksonville, Florida embarked upon an aggressive program of urban development.  The most serious crisis the city faced was the ever-present threat of yellow fever, which had long limited their ability to attract tourism and investment.  In 1887, the city’s white progressives wrested control of the city from an older Bourbon elite and annexed the black suburbs, hoping to extend their control over what they saw as sites of urban disorder and disease.  Overnight, Jacksonville became a majority-black city, confronting these reformers with their second challenge: to maintain white supremacy while expanding the prerogatives of citizenship via urban development.  Even as they wanted the city to grow and develop, they feared any form of progress that would reopen up a path for black people to take power.  Nevertheless, black Jacksonville used its new-found majority status, allied itself with the Knights of Labor, and temporarily seized control of the city government.  When the fever returned to the city in 1888, the city’s deposed white elite explicitly linked the epidemic to a racialized understanding of urban disorder.  They then called on the state legislature to remove home rule from Jacksonville, replacing it with an all-white city commission appointed by the governor.  This seemed to secure the position of these white progressives; however, they soon found themselves frozen out of power by the governor who had broken with them over the question of populism.  Finally, in 1892, the city was paralyzed by a three day showdown between the state militia and an armed black community mobilized to prevent a lynching. Adeptly exploiting this crisis, the city’s white progressives successfully called for the restoration of home rule and – for a time – resolved the tensions between Jim Crow and urban development.