It makes sense about white golfers in mid 20th century Georgia but why the insistence on black caddies? Caddies are generally respected in the golf world and for an exclusive club whose members are the time included people like Dwight D. Eisenhower it seems like white caddies would have been desirable.
Comments
Welcome to /r/AskHistorians. Please Read Our Rules before you comment in this community. Understand that rule breaking comments get removed.
Please consider Clicking Here for RemindMeBot as it takes time for an answer to be written. Additionally, for weekly content summaries, Click Here to Subscribe to our Weekly Roundup.
We thank you for your interest in this question, and your patience in waiting for an in-depth and comprehensive answer to show up. In addition to the Weekly Roundup and RemindMeBot, consider using our Browser Extension. In the meantime our Bluesky, and Sunday Digest feature excellent content that has already been written!
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
An old but relevant saying, attested in one form or another in several sources around the segregation era and race relations:
>In the South, people don’t care how close black people get as long as they don’t get too high. In the North, it’s just the opposite.
Despite its name, segregation as a system in the Southeast United States between the end of Reconstruction and the Civil Rights era was really very different than something like South African apartheid in the sense of physical proximity. A considerable amount of day-to-day contact between white and black southerners was allowed, expected, and considered desirable, provided it never violated some very specific rules. Indeed, the system didn’t really make any sense if it relied on complete separation, as there’s not much room for hierarchy and superiority if you never actually see the people you’re trying to dominate.
Isabel Wilkerson emphasizes a point that I don’t think has gotten enough attention: Prior to the Civil War, while there was clearly a strong and ingrained belief across white America that black people were inferior, there was nonetheless a great deal of very close relations inherent to slavery as a system. The language of inferiority was often deeply patronizing more so than hateful, describing slaves as child-like and emphasizing a sort of paternal duty. (Whether this really corresponded to often brutal treatment in practice is beside the point–the ideology was there.) Enslaved house servants had particularly thorough and intimate involvement with their owners. Wilkerson even describes departing Confederate soldiers tenderly entrusting the care of their wives and daughters to male slaves. Yet their descendants a generation later were speaking of black men as animalistic and uncontrollably prone to raping white women. The shift in thinking was surprisingly rapid and reflects a serious step back in American race relations that would strongly influence advocates of lynching.
This sort of tension was a key underpinning of the ideology behind Jim Crow. The racial hierarchy inherent in slavery would be upheld in terms of unequal servitude, in a way that protected women from this supposed threat and maintained white power. So, the compromise was the peculiar situation where schools, restaurants, stores, and bathrooms might be separate, and yet white families would still have black servants they interacted with routinely (using a different entrance.) White children were often partly or largely raised by black women; in a particularly odd contradiction, white babies might even be breastfed by a black wet nurse. (These could be pretty significant relationships, too. One of the pioneers of R&B radio, “Hoss” Allen of Nashville’s WLAC, was a blue-blooded white man from Tennessee who so strongly identified the black woman who primarily raised him as his true mother that he grew up to seriously embrace black music, and even in substantial part reject white society. Many listeners assumed from his speech patterns he was black, and the station did little to say otherwise.) The inequality was enforced both loudly and subtly. If even minor norms were violated, the response could be harsh and swift.
So in this context, the idea of a close but unequal relationship fits. Caddies are indeed respected, but they are still the worker carrying the bags, not the rich man of leisure playing the game. Consider that high-end restaurants and luxury train cars might well have black waiters–skilled yes, respected to a degree yes, but still clearly in a serving role. The relationship would likely be quite overtly amicable, so long as the less-powerful party strictly toed the line (which included being amicable.)
Meanwhile, while opportunities were clearly better further north, it was true then, and remains true to this day, that residential segregation was starkest in larger industrialized cities in the Northeast and Midwest. Black families arriving in the Great Migration were effectively funneled into specific neighborhoods, and later systematically barred from moving out to the suburbs when white flight began in earnest.
As for Eisenhower, the record on his views suggests that while he was neither a die-hard segregationist nor a particularly enthusiastic racist, he was still more comfortable in segregated settings, having grown up in a primarily white town and spent his education and career in a segregated military. He wouldn’t have batted an eye at telling racist jokes and generally took a relatively hands-off approach to civil rights. In the saying above, he would lean towards “not too close.”