In the spring of 1885, Charles Dudley Warner, Mark Twain's friend, neighbor, and onetime collaborator from Hartford, Connecticut, visited the International Exposition at New Orleans. He was astonished to find that “white and colored people mingled freely, talking and looking at what was of common interest,” that Negroes “took their full share of the parade and the honors,” and that the two races associated “in unconscious equality of privileges.” During his visit he saw “a colored clergyman in his surplice seated in the chancel of the most important white Episcopal church in New Orleans, assisting in the service.”
It was a common occurrence in the i88o's for foreign travellers and northern visitors to comment, sometimes with distaste and always with surprise, on the freedom of association between white and colored people in the South. Yankees in particular were unprepared for what they found and sometimes estimated that conditions below the Potomac were better than those above. There was discrimination, to be sure, and Negroes were often excluded from first-class public accommodations—as they were in the North. But that was done on the responsibility of private owners or managers and not by requirement of law. According to the Supreme Court's decision in the Civil Rights Cases of 1883 the federal law gave no protection from such private acts.
Where discrimination existed it was often erratic and inconsistent. On trains the usual practice was to exclude Negroes from first-class or “ladies' ” cars but to permit them to mix with whites in second-class or “smoking” cars. In the old seaboard states of the South, however, Negroes were as free to ride first class as whites. In no state was segregation on trains complete, and in none was it enforced by law. The age of Jim Crow was still to come.
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