This volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture presented distinctive planning challenges. Race is a topic that the other 23 volumes in the series treat, some more centrally than others, but it simply cannot be ignored in considerations of the American South. The topics related to race in other volumes provide an ongoing web that connects each volume to a larger southern cultural whole. Each volume has been planned, however, to stand alone in treating a major topic in southern culture, so a separate volume on race was essential. The editors made the decision to include here some articles related to race that have appeared in other volumes. We could not imagine having a volume claiming to treat race in the South without including the excellent article on “Etiquette of Race Relations in the Jim Crow South” that had appeared in the Myth, Manners, and Memory volume, or the article on “Criminal Justice” that had appeared in the Law and Politics volume. “Southern Politics and Race” similarly addressed concerns of this volume, although it originally appeared in an earlier volume.
Beyond that choice, editors commissioned new entries to reflect the Race volume’s concern with the South as a multiracial society. The origin of this volume is the Black Life section of the original Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (1989), which focused on African American history and culture within a primarily biracial context. Since then, scholars have produced an exciting new literature that positions the South as a society that tried to impose rigid racial boundaries, but one that transcended those attempts, resulting in a dynamic, diverse, and fluid society, all of which is reflected in the articles herein. The authors of these entries take as a given that race is a socially constructed category, and they go on to examine ideas about racial differences within a multiracial context, providing new ways of looking at the South’s racial past and future. As the overview suggests, racial diversity has nurtured the South’s cultural heritage.
Much attention remains focused on African American life, given the demographic and cultural impact of blacks on the South, but the articles collectively show that the black experience looks different at different times and places in the region’s history. Articles on black life range from those on black landowners to advertising stereotypes to African influences. Enduring issues of segregation and desegregation are explored through articles on education, sports, and religion. This volume’s shape came out of interpretive priorities that stressed ethnic interactions, as in entries on “Asians, Mexicans, Interracialism, and Racial Ambiguities,” “Jews, Race, and Southernness,” and “Native Americans and African Americans.” As seen, article titles are sometimes more complex than many encyclopedia descriptors, but they reflect the volume’s picture of a complex, multiracial South. The volume also reflects the recent spatial turn in Southern Studies. The South’s relationship to Europe and Africa, to the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Caribbean, all provide spatial grounding to understanding race and the South’s cultural development. Writers on the South have long posited a particular southern sense of place, but this volume’s focus on race led to a particular appreciation not so much of place but of movement, with articles on black migration, Latino migration, and white migration.
Work has been another broad interpretive theme in this volume, as labor has long been central to efforts at racial categorization, as seen in articles on “Agriculture, Race, and Transnational Labor,” “Slavery and Emancipation,” “Postbellum Labor,” and the “Evolution of the Southern Economy.” Creative expression is a familiar theme in The New Encyclopedia, and authors here treat it with new articles on literature and musical recordings, through entries on the importance of race to musical genres identified with the South, and through a lean and selective list of biographies of creative southerners who addressed racial issues.
The first volume in The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture was Religion, surely one of the most important abiding aspects of southern life, and the editors chose to close the series with this volume on Race, another of the most important aspects to evaluate in charting southern cultural life. In both cases, as throughout the entire encyclopedia series, the editors offer articles that reflect contemporary concerns of a South in the midst of continual change, ever trying to understand the relationship of the region’s past to its future.