The general editors have chosen a passage from Absalom, Absalom! for the epigraph to introduce these volumes on southern culture, suggesting thereby that our enduring image of the American South is best captured in the fiction of William Faulkner. Faulkner portrays a place, as C. Vann Woodward once suggested, long haunted by a very un-American memory of defeat, a sense of social failure, a lost innocence. Enveloping his tales is the fear that the South’s best days are in the past, a past that yet haunts and constrains the present, a past that’s “not even past.” The South’s story, then, cannot be simply told; it must be unraveled, strand-by-strand. Indeed, the very rhythm of Faulkner’s storytelling evokes at times an image one often finds in the popular imaginary: the South is an insular, bounded space, a world closed and relatively homogeneous.
In reality, however, Faulkner’s mythic South is a far more nuanced and complex world than its conventional image, with a complicated racial landscape that a simple black and white palette cannot capture. At the center of Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! saga, of course, are the relations between its black and white inhabitants, with the sins of slavery laying heavily on southern white consciences, not because of its brutality and exploitation of labor—which continued under new forms of labor control well into the 20th century—but because of the shame and confusion of the “miscegenated” bodies and cultures left in its wake. At the story’s margins, however, are the descendants of Native Americans, some of them forcibly relocated along a Trail of Tears from the Southeast. Their blood flows in the veins of his black and white characters alike, and their dispossession forms a half-remembered episode in the region’s guilty past. Faulkner’s South also has links to the Caribbean, prefiguring in fiction the flow of people and ideas in real life that would challenge the region’s ostensibly strict social separation of black and white. Upon second sight, then, Faulkner’s South is not closed and insular but open, not bounded and homogeneous but overlapping and diverse. Viewed from that perspective, the region’s racial past and future look very different.
More than a quarter century ago, historian Ira Berlin warned that our understanding of African American life and history was unduly limited by “a static and singular vision” of its dynamics and complexity, when in fact the black experience evolved divergently in different times and spaces. His argument for a revised perspective on black life, one attentive to its spatially and temporally “specific social circumstances and cultural traditions,” applies with equal force to studies of the South as a whole and to its racial dynamics in particular. The essays in this volume underscore Berlin’s charge that we must take serious account of time and space in our efforts to comprehend how ideas about racial difference have shaped the region’s past and present. They make clear that the South is not simply biracial but multiracial, and has been so since the 17th and 18th centuries, when European settlers first deployed captive African labor to exploit confiscated Native American land. They show how a rich, ever-expanding racial diversity has nourished the social and material roots of the South’s proud cultural heritage—of story and song, of architecture and art, of manners and cuisines. They suggest that the region’s political, social, and economic history cannot be fully comprehended without taking account of this past and this present.
Susan O’Donovan elaborates how slavery—the institutional foundation of southern life and culture and of their racial scaffolding—evolved differently in the various subregions of the South and at different historical moments. The South’s racial and labor relations varied over time and space, reflecting the historically specific demographic configurations of its black, white, and red inhabitants, as well as the diversity of the southern economy that evolved. The South and its race relations must be understood in this broader, more dynamic context: that from the beginning the region has been defined by and formed in relation to other slave regimes in the Americas and around the bell curve of the Atlantic slave trade that peaked in the late 18th century; by trade relations with European nations and their Caribbean colonies, both before and after slave emancipation; and by the specific geopolitical interests that all these relationships produced. The South was not and could never be, as the popular imagination would have it, an undifferentiated place, frozen in time.
Focusing on New Orleans as a simultaneously unique and exemplary case, Shannon Dawdy and Zada Johnson reveal how an ostensibly insular southern world had in fact long been open to influences from the larger Atlantic World. Indeed, as their entry and other entries in this volume will show, from the beginning the region was shaped and reshaped by crosscurrents of peoples, ideas, and institutions. Slavery and the slave trade dictated the course of those crosscurrents over the South’s first two and a half centuries, during which black bondage was the core institution around which much of the region’s law, labor, polity, and social life revolved. It was slavery that initially knit the South into the international economic and cultural complex formed by other slave societies in the southern hemisphere, especially in the Caribbean. Sharing similarities in climate, economy, and cultural development, New World slave societies developed similar interests, confronted similar political forces, and evolved similar ideologies of rule and social order. Thus, while “peculiar” in comparison to its northern and middle Atlantic compatriots, the South was not exceptional among its neighbors in the southern Atlantic. It is not surprising, then, that southerners looked to annex Cuba when their farther westward continental expansion seemed thwarted, or that defeated Confederates immigrated to Mexico and Brazil after the Civil War.
Fed by the Atlantic slave trade for all but 50 years of its first two and a half centuries, the South’s population mix and cultural life—for blacks and whites alike—was in constant flux as new Africans poured in and their new owners remade the southern physical and social landscape in order to exploit their labor power. Given that overseas trade was essential to the plantation economy, moreover, southern ports—dotting a coastline stretching from Baltimore to Galveston, the longest in the continental United States—were openings to the world. Through these openings poured goods, people, and, occasionally, revolutionary ideas. Notwithstanding determined efforts to suppress challenges to the racial regime, therefore, the antislavery pamphlets of David Walker or the republican ideas of Haitian and Cuban refugees found their way through those openings.
For all these reasons, British colonies in the lower South manifested from the start a demographic profile and a legal and economic character more typical of the Caribbean and Latin American slave societies than the Chesapeake or northern colonies; and this produced similarities in their political cultures and social arrangements, not least of which was the relative acceptance and allocation of social space to a mixed-race population (as Faulkner shows so graphically in Absalom, Absalom!). The long and porous sea border on the southern Atlantic opened the South to repeated waves of diverse political and economic refugees from the Caribbean basin and, on occasion, invited southern planters to dream of expansion into the Caribbean. All in all, the region knew a dynamism and openness thoroughly at odds with its more conventional image of timelessness and homogeneity.
Moon-Ho Jung’s essay alerts us to the South’s historic links to the Pacific World as well as to the Atlantic, despite the absence of a port on America’s western coast. Like most New World planters, white southerners looked to Asian laborers to replace their former slaves in the early years following the Civil War and slavery’s destruction. The indentured laborers they brought from southern China never satisfied the planters’ fantasies of docile “guest workers” who would stake no claims to economic justice or citizenship, however. Like black freedpeople, Asians came to call the South “home.” They formed families and communities, and some of them mixed socially and biologically with southern blacks, whites, Creoles, and Native Americans. Southern census takers and neighbors were never quite certain how to classify these families racially, so they were all identified simply as “Chinese” until Jim Crow laws forced them onto one or the other side of the biracial spectrum.
This 19th-century Asian beachhead was relatively small and inconsequential to the broader development of the southern economy and society at the time, but it prefigured the pattern of the South’s 20th-century engagement with the Pacific World and a future immigration and settlement pattern that would eventually transform the South’s cultural and racial makeup. From Japan to Vietnam, 20th-century wars in the Pacific drew the United States into intense and continuing involvements with Asian nations and peoples, some of whom made their way to the southern states. Several of the places of wartime incarceration of Japanese American citizens were located in the South—namely, in Arkansas, Texas, and Louisiana—from which many of the menfolk were inducted into segregated military units. Three decades later, American military interventions in Southeast Asia resulted in thousands of displaced persons seeking refuge in southern states. New communities sprang up in Louisiana and Texas, where climate, occupational opportunities, and a welcoming Catholic Church encouraged Vietnamese refugees to settle. As a result, the Gulf Coast is now home to more than 200,000 Southeast Asians (Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian) alone, and there were a total of at least 2.3 million Asians scattered across the South by the beginning of the new millennium in 2000. By the early 21st century, peoples of Asian origin had become a ubiquitous presence in southern interior cities and towns—running hotels, restaurants, and other small businesses and building churches, suburban enclaves, and shopping centers—and, in a throwback to the 19th century, sometimes working for manufacturers intent on disrupting union solidarity by employing a presumably docile, non-English-speaking labor force.
The growth of the South’s Asian population is impressive, but the expansion and dispersion of the Latino population is undoubtedly the driving force in the region’s late 20th-century racial transformation. Between 1980 and 2000, the South’s Latino population increased from 4.3 million to 11 million. By the second decade of the new century, their numbers had swelled to 16.4 million. Equally impressive was their far-greater dispersion across the region. Instead of 9 out of 10 being concentrated in Florida and Texas, as had been the case in 1980, Latinos were scattered throughout the southern states in urban and rural areas and occupations.
Although the growing presence of Latinos in many areas of the Old South is new, Spanish-speaking peoples and territories have shaped southern history from the beginning. Imperial Spain’s presence in Florida, along the Gulf Coast, and in Louisiana profoundly influenced the nation’s and the region’s colonial and early national history. The refuge that Native Americans and escaped African and African American slaves found in Spanish territories left deep impressions on each of those peoples’ cultures, including the cultural interactions and alliances between them that contact promoted. The Latino imprint would grow broader and deeper after the Mexican War of 1846 and the annexation of Texas, both of which were promoted by southern expansionists seeking to build a more impregnable slave empire. Not only did territorial expansion forever blur the regional boundary between South and West; it also provided a rehearsal of a multiracial South, as black labor and brown labor were marshaled to tame the new frontier. With the development of large-scale agriculture in south Texas after World War I, southern plantation–style relations between growers and laborers took on new forms in the context of cross-border migrations by Mexican laborers, which were alternately facilitated and shut down by an expanding border patrol. Like African Americans in states to Texas’s east, people of Mexican origin in south Texas were confronted by the threat of racial violence in addition to segregation. Though lacking the legal mandate for Jim Crow generally inscribed in the constitutions of the southeastern states, the segregation of Mexican Americans in Texas was just as thorough.
The 21st-century legacy of the South’s westward expansion is a far more complex racial situation than the conventional biracial paradigm can account for. The ostensibly “solid” political South now cloaks a social, cultural, and political diversity and complexity that is almost certain to find expression eventually in a new southern political regime. The recent hostility to Mexican immigrants in the southern interior is but a harbinger of that very different political future, since Latino population growth will inevitably change not only the South’s political calculus but its racial discourse as well. It is possible, however, that the South’s rapidly evolving racial demography will also produce more complex political alliances—ones in which black may ally with brown, or brown with white, or even black with white. The 2007 election in Louisiana of a governor and a congressman of Asian descent and conservative politics suggests something of the uncertain trajectory that a reframed political landscape in a multiracial South might take.
With the question “Where did the Asian sit on the segregated bus?” Leslie Bow frames an intriguing perspective on how demographic transformations have challenged, changed, and reinforced southern racial hierarchies. At times, Asians were bystanders to a humiliation directed solely at blacks; at other times they were its victims; and at yet others their status was indeterminate. It was not the first nor the last time that a racial regime built to justify the subordination of black labor had trouble assimilating a nonwhite people of a different origin and history. Mexican Americans, armed with treaty rights and legally classified as white, presented similar problems early on. Similarly, southern Jews, as Allison Schottenstein shows, often had trouble finding their place within the southern racial classification system, the nature of their inclusion or exclusion from whiteness varying sharply from one era to the next.
The problem of finding a place to sit or stand in the racial order has been no less difficult for the racialized victims of that order. At various times, Mexican Americans and Asian Americans have benefited from their legal designation as “white,” notwithstanding their racial denigration more generally. Yet struggles by different groups in the civil rights era to secure the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of equal protection under the law further illuminate the racial complexity of the South. Guadalupe San Miguel informs us that Mexican Americans in Houston, influenced by the Chicano Movement, declared that they were “Brown, not White,” after the school district in 1970 responded to a court desegregation order by placing whites in one school and African Americans and Mexican Americans—still classified as white—in another. Meanwhile, southern labor struggles have sometimes led African American workers to object to the competition from rapidly growing Latino and immigrant Southeast Asian, Caribbean, and Central American workforces in many southern manufacturing and food-processing plants. And, thus far, the success of politicians of Asian descent has been more likely than not to come at the expense of African American or Latino citizens. All of this suggests that racial lines may as easily be hardened as softened in a multiracial South. Far from auguring an inevitable break with the South’s racist legacy, therefore, the rupture of the biracial paradigm could simply presage new lines of color and newly separate communities. It remains, then, an open question whether the racial geography of this latest New South will look more like the formerly all-black neighborhood in east New Orleans that is now an amicably mixed community of African Americans and Vietnamese or more like the separate enclaves developing in other southern cities.
The ongoing demographic transformation of the 21st-century South suggests an ironic twist on Faulkner’s trenchant observation: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Much like the region itself, southern race relations were never as static, bounded, and monochrome as typically represented. From the start, a growing mixed-race population challenged fixed black-white boundaries, in law as well as in social relations. In southern households, slave masters, unable to master their own desires, produced claimants to their property and white privilege, fostering in the process a far more complex and contested racial landscape. In southern courtrooms, white-skinned slaves sued for their freedom, making hash of the notion that “race” was indelibly marked on the bodies or in the behavior of human beings. These claimants were not the last to make manifest the fact that race was something performed as well as seen. Julia Schiavone Camacho’s entry shows that the racial masquerades white-skinned slaves used to escape bondage were echoed in the hilarious send-up Chinese workers deployed to cross the U.S.-Mexican border in the early 20th century. Donning ponchos and sombreros and mumbling a few words of Spanish or singing traditional ballads, Chinese men passed themselves off as Indian or Mexican.
On the Mexican side of the border, these same Chinese created an even more complex racial identity, taking Mexican wives and fathering mixed-race children. As merchants and skilled tradesmen, they helped build their adopted nation’s economy, only to be victimized once again by anti-Chinese riots and pogroms during and following the Mexican Revolution. Consequently, they found themselves once again attempting to cross the border, but this time it was U.S. border officials who misrepresented their families’ racial identities—classifying them all as simply “Chinese” and sending them “back” to China.
Whether by disguise or misrecognition, therefore, race has been repeatedly revealed as ambiguous, with uncertain boundaries, constructed and reconstructed within the borderlands and contested spaces produced by the South’s social-historical transformation. Perversely, perhaps, the very ambiguity of race may be a source of its enduring power—for both those who impose and those who accept any given racial identity. Similarly, the blurring of the South’s geographic and demographic boundaries may mirror the blurring of its cultural origins. Its music, its cuisine, its architecture, all betray these diverse elements, all are deposits of this complex history. All this makes for a rich and complex past—and future.
THOMAS C. HOLT
University of Chicago
LAURIE B. GREEN
University of Texas at Austin
Fran Ansley and Jon Shefner, eds., Global Connections, Local Receptions: New Latino Immigration to the Southeastern United States (2009); Mark Bauman, ed., Dixie Diaspora: An Anthology of Southern Jewish Life (2006); Ira Berlin, American Historical Review (February 1980), Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (1998); Leslie Bow, “Partly Colored”: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South (2010); Jonathan Brennan, ed., When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote: African–Native American Literature (2003); James F. Brooks, ed., Confounding the Color Line: The Indian-Black Experience in North America (2002); W. Fitzhugh Brundage, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (2008); James C. Cobb and William Stueck, eds., Globalization and the American South (2005); Lucy M. Cohen, Chinese in the Post–Civil War South: A People without a History (1984); Stephanie Cole and Alison M. Parker, eds., Beyond Black and White: Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in the U.S. South and Southwest (2004); Stephanie Cole and Natalie Ring, The Folly of Jim Crow: Rethinking the Segregated South (2012); Pete Daniel, Breaking the Land: The Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Culture since 1880, Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s (2000); Allison Davis, Burleigh B. Gardner, and Mary R. Gardner, Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class (1941); Jean Van Delinder, Struggles before Brown: Early Civil Rights Protests and Their Significance Today (2008); W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903); William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (1936); Marcie Cohen Ferris and Mark Greenberg, eds., Jewish Roots in Southern Soil: A New History (2006); William Ferris, Give My Poor Heart Ease (2009); Barbara J. Fields, in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James McPherson (1982); Neil Foley, Quest for Equality: The Failed Promise of Black-Brown Solidarity (2010), The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (1999); Jack D. Forbes, Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples (1993); Laurie B. Green, Battling the Plantation Mentality: Memphis and the Black Freedom Struggle (2007); Michael D. Green, Politics of Indian Removal: Creek Government and Society in Crisis (1982); Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century (2006); Ariela Julie Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America (2008); James R. 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McMillen, Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow (1989); Tara McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in an Imagined South (2003); Jeffrey Melnick, Black-Jewish Relations on Trial: Leo Frank and Jim Conley in the New South (2000); Tiya Miles, Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (2005); Karl Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop in the Age of Jim Crow (2010); David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (1987); Mary E. Odem and Elaine Lacy, eds., Latino Immigrants and the Transformation of the U.S. South (2009); Susan Eva O’Donovan, Becoming Free in the Cotton South (2007); Theda Perdue, Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540–1866 (1979); Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green, The Cherokee Removal: A Brief History with Documents (2005); Kenneth W. Porter, The Black Seminoles: History of a Freedom-Seeking People (1996); Hortense Powdermaker, After Freedom: A Cultural Study of the Deep South (1939); Albert J. Raboteau, Canaan Land: A Religious History of African Americans (1999); Susan Reverby, Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy (2009); James L. Roark, Masters without Slaves: Southern Planters in the Civil War and Reconstruction (1977); Joshua D. Rothman, Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787–1861 (2003); Tony Russell, Blacks, Whites, and Blues (1970); Guadalupe San Miguel, Brown Not White: School Integration and the Chicano Movement in Houston (2005); Claudio Saunt, Black, White, and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family (2005); Rebecca J. Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (2005); Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hebrard, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (2012); Jim Sidbury, Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic (2007); Ronald T. Takaki, A Pro-slavery Crusade: The Agitation to Reopen the African Slave Trade (1971); Keith Wailoo, Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health (2000); Clive Webb, Fight against Fear: Southern Jews and Black Civil Rights (2003); C. Vann Woodward, The Burden of Southern History (1993), The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1974).
At the 1893 Columbian Exhibition, at which Ida B. Wells protested African American exclusion, Aunt Jemima drew a warm welcome. A woman named Nancy Green, an ex-slave working as a domestic for a wealthy Chicago family, played the role. Outside a gigantic flour-barrel-shaped exhibition hall constructed by the milling company that had invented the pancake mix, Green’s Aunt Jemima served and sold pancakes to the fair’s overwhelmingly white visitors. Making the cakes might have been easy, but Green’s performance was complicated. Her character portrayed an advertising image that mimicked minstrel show performances inspired by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s character Aunt Chloe, and yet it also drew from contemporary white southerners’ sentimental images of black antebellum “mammies.” Green was born into slavery, but Aunt Jemima was at least a copy of a copy (minstrel show “aunts”) of a copy (Aunt Chloe) of a white fantasy (the black mammy)—her connection to any real black woman lost in multiple layers of commercialized popular culture. Emancipation may have freed African American bodies, but popular culture made a great deal of profit selling black images. The tremendous popularity of Aunt Jemima in the late 19th century made clear the deep racial foundations of the increasingly national consumer market.
Advertising emerged as a national enterprise in the late 19th century in the midst of a minstrel show revival—the “coon song” craze—and white southerners’ sentimental Lost Cause fantasies of happy slaves. Most consumers were familiar with the standard minstrel characters: the uncles, aunties, and mammies; the “pickaninny,” or comic black child; the absurd black politician; the African “savage”; and the black figure trying and failing to live in the modern world.
Minstrelsy, a form of popular theater in which white men blacked up and cross-dressed to play black characters, originated in the antebellum Northeast in white working-class fantasies of black life in the South. In the postemancipation period, minstrelsy became extremely popular across the South, with its blacked-up characters acting out white southern fears and dreams of black life. As technological advances made the production of visual imagery increasingly affordable in the 1870s and 1880s, posters and playbills for minstrel acts papered small towns and cities and advertisements for minstrel shows and the sheet music for coon songs filled newspapers. Businesses quickly put these stylized images of black “types” to work selling other commodities. These racial representations, in turn, helped generate a new understanding of consumers as buyers detached from specific localities and from regional, ethnic, religious, and even, at times, gender and class identities—as buyers linked, in effect, to a larger, more abstract category through their whiteness: the national market.
The first advertisements to make extensive use of minstrel characters were trade cards, a new genre of advertising developed in the late 1870s and 1880s, which featured images and pitches for products on small pieces of card stock. Circulated by manufacturers, country stores, and urban shopkeepers, trade or ad cards appropriated demeaning images of not only African Americans but also American Indians and Asian Americans for the promotion of branded products and stores. Many early cards made no pretense of connecting the product and pitch to the visual imagery used to catch the attention of potential consumers. Often businesses chose cheaper stock images available from lithographers and printers. “Pluto,” a young black child wearing a hood and staring out of a background of flame with enlarged, whitened eyes, promoted both the Pomeroy Coal Company and McFerren, Shallcross, and Company Meats. Two black children tickling an old black man to sleep on a cotton bale appeared on cards for Trumby and Rehn furniture makers and for a photographer named Rabineau. Other images attempted to be more comic than sentimental. A Union Pacific Tea card used a minstrel show version of a black child’s face, ears, and lips, exaggerated and with eyes whitened, to illustrate four different emotional expressions.
The most popular racial images used on trade cards pictured black adults trying and failing to mimic their white “superiors.” Mismatched patterns and awkward clothes pairings suggested that blacks could never achieve that crucial marker of middle-class status, respectable attire. Often these outrageously dressed figures participated in elite leisure activities. On a card for Sunny South cigarettes in a scene labeled “Cape May,” a young black woman wearing clashingly striped clothes tries to play croquet. Her exaggerated mouth gapes in surprise and pain as she holds up her hurt foot. She has missed the ball and hit herself with the mallet instead. The ad invites middle-class and elite white consumers from across the nation to laugh at the black figure’s absurd attempt to enjoy the pastimes of a fashionable resort. A grinning, walleyed black man awkwardly rides a grinning, equally walleyed horse using a stiff saddle on a card for Vacuum harness oil. “People,” the pitch announces, “cannot exist without it,” effectively excluding this figure too ignorant to oil his tack from the category of humanity. In an explicit play upon whites’ fears of confusing appearances, a trade card for Tansill’s Punch, “America’s Finest Five Cent Cigar,” depicts a rear view of “Beauty on the Street.” Attired in respectable clothing, well corseted, and topped with a tasteful hat, the woman lifts her skirt and holds her parasol in one hand and her purse and a dog’s leash in the other. Flipping over the card reveals the joke. Beauty’s “Front View” reveals the woman’s face as black, coarse, and masculine. A whole category of cards made fun of wildly dressed black characters trying to use the telephone.
As advertising became more sophisticated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, cards appeared that specifically linked stylized black images to the ad copy. On a card for the St. Louis company Purina Mills, an “African” boy stands before a background of spindly palms and naked men. He wears the Purina breakfast box like a suit, and with a western spoon and dish in hand proclaims, “I Like the Best!” Purina almost makes him civilized. Other companies chose brand names that suggested blackness and allowed for an easy use of racial images in product pitches. “Nigger head” and “Niggerhead” became common product names for tobacco, canned fruits and vegetables, stove polish, teas, and oysters from around 1900 through the 1920s. Nigger-Hair Chewing Tobacco claimed to be as thick as black people’s hair. Trade cards promoted Korn Kinks cereal with pictures and stories of the adventures of the curly-headed little Kornelia Kinks. Still other companies chose brand names—Bixby’s Blacking, Bluing, and Ink and Diamond Dyes’ Fast Stocking Black—or wrote pitches that depended on the most visible marker of racial difference, skin color. On a card for Coates Black Thread, a white woman says to her servant, “Come in, Topsey, out of the rain. You’ll get wet.” “Oh!,” the servant replies, “it won’t hurt me, Missy. I’m like Coates Black Thread. Da Color won’t come off by wetting.”
In the late 19th century, black-figured items became profitable commodities themselves. Mammy and the “pickaninny” dolls, jolly-nigger banks, big-lipped and black-faced cookie jars and spoon rests, and other similar products flooded the market. An Aunt Jemima rag doll cost one trademark from the mix’s packaging plus five cents. The company bragged in its advertisements that “literally every city child owned one.” Not all white children could have a black servant, but all but the poorest could have their very own pancake mammies.
As magazine advertising expanded and incorporated visual imagery, it too made use of the minstrel-influenced images popular on trade cards. An 1895 Onyx Black Hosiery ad in the Ladies Home Journal depicted a crowd of pickaninnies with the caption “Onyx Blacks—We never change color.” Soap advertisements in particular used minstrel images and white racial fantasies to explain how their products worked rather than to simply attract attention. In the late 19th century, Kirkman’s Wonder Soap featured a mammy and two small boys to advertise its product. The mammy wears a head rag and stands over a washtub. One of her hands helps a naked black boy into the water on the right while her other hand holds a bar of white soap above a naked white boy getting out on the left. The copy describes “two little nigger boys” who hate to bathe. Only Kirkman’s soap was strong enough to perform miracles: “Sweet and clean her sons became—It’s true, as I’m a workman—And both are now completely white. Washed by this soap of Kirkman.”
As advertising became more sophisticated in the early 20th century, “spokes-servant” ads became increasingly popular. These ads used and extended the theme of black racialized subservience, as branded characters like Aunt Jemima worked for the company and the company’s products worked for the consumer. In this way, these ads elided the service of the product with the service of the black figures promoting it. Aunt Jemima Pancake Mix magazine advertisements used this strategy and featured the mammy figure cooking her southern specialties, including pancakes, and serving up “Old South” hospitality everywhere she went. “I’se in town, honey,” she usually said, ready to serve white folks everywhere. The Gold Dust Twins, two pickaninny characters who promoted Gold Dust All Purpose Washing Powder and who were almost as famous as Aunt Jemima, appeared on a 1910 billboard. Foot-high letters announced: “Roosevelt Scoured Africa. The Gold Dust Twins Scour America.” The light within the image focused the consumer’s eye first on the towering and golden figure of Teddy Roosevelt, toward which an equally large and glowing figure of Uncle Sam in the left foreground reaches out a hand in honor. The smaller twins follow Roosevelt, carrying his bags, his gun, and a huge tiger carcass and playing the roles of housecleaning black servants and African porters. Gold Dust, through the twins, could do the work at home that Roosevelt had performed overseas.
In the 20th century, advertising perpetuated and extended the reach of minstrelsy’s black images, even as the traditional black-faced theatrical form increasingly survived as a form of popular theater. Aided by popular entertainment forms—vaudeville, radio, and later television—that it supported, advertising helped lodge minstrelsy’s racist fantasies deep within American popular culture.
GRACE ELIZABETH HALE
University of Virginia
Kenneth Goings, Mammy and Uncle Mose: Black Collectables and American Stereotyping (1994); Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (1999); Tara McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in an Imagined South (2003); Juliann Sivulka, Stronger Than Dirt: A Cultural History of Advertising Personal Hygiene in America, 1875–1940 (2001); Patricia A. Turner, Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies: Black Images and Their Influence on Culture (1994).
Landownership gave African Americans a measure of economic security and greater independence from white control. Farm owners were their own bosses. They set their hours, controlled labor within their families, selected and marketed their own crops, and exerted a great deal of control over the education of their own children. Additionally, on their farms they were somewhat insulated from the humiliations of Jim Crow culture. Accordingly, from emancipation until the Great Migration, landownership was the goal most black families sought in order to fashion for themselves a meaningful freedom. After the federal government failed to supply Reconstruction-era blacks with the promised “40 acres and a mule,” they made significant progress on their own, despite widespread white hostility and prolonged agricultural depressions. By 1870, only 5 percent of all black families had achieved this goal; by 1910, a quarter of black southern families had done so.
Some African Americans became free and began purchasing land soon after they first arrived in North America as slaves in the early 1600s. But as the transatlantic slave trade brought increasing numbers of Africans into bondage, whites passed restrictive new laws to maintain them in a dependent position. As a result, the numbers of black farm owners grew very slowly. By the 19th century, two subregional patterns had evolved. Before the Civil War, few African Americans had obtained their freedom in the Deep South, but those who did frequently amassed property. While few in number, they constituted three-fourths of the South’s affluent free people of color (those who had more than $2,000 worth of property). They tended to be the descendants of whites, often receiving land and education through these family ties. They saw themselves as a separate “mulatto elite” and tended to identify with whites more than with blacks. This pattern was especially marked in Louisiana, where Spanish and French customs of interracial marriage and concubinage held sway.
Conversely, most free people of color lived in the Upper South, but few of these owned land before 1830. They had gained their freedom in a general wave of manumission that swept the region in the decades following the American Revolution. Most had not been related to their previous masters and did not derive long-term advantages from kinship ties with whites. Relatively few were literate or employed in skilled occupations. Those who did acquire land held only small parcels. Unlike African American landowners in the Deep South, those in the Upper South did not conceive of themselves as a separate “brown” society. Instead, they maintained social ties and intermarried with poorer blacks and slaves. Only 1 in 14 became slave owners, whereas fully a quarter of free people of color in the Deep South did so.
In the 1830s, regional patterns began to reverse. African American landowners in the Deep South lost ground, or at best merely held on as a group. At the same time, by their second generation after manumission, free people of color in the Upper South began to work their way into the skilled trades and professions and began to purchase land, matching the total property owned in the Deep South by 1860. When general emancipation came, they accelerated this trend. Although their holdings were usually modest in size, they made extraordinary progress.
African American farm ownership peaked from 1910 to 1920 at one-quarter of black farm families. This achievement was far from evenly distributed, as 44 percent of farmers in the Upper South came to own land, whereas only 19 percent did so in the Deep South. Generally, the sparser African American population was in a state, the easier a path black farmers found to landownership. In Georgia, only 13 percent of black farmers owned their own land; in Alabama and Mississippi, 15 percent; in Louisiana, 19 percent; in South Carolina, 21 percent; in Arkansas, 23 percent; in Tennessee, 28 percent; in Texas, 30 percent; in North Carolina, 32 percent; in Florida, 50 percent; in Kentucky, 51 percent; and in Virginia, 67 percent.
Many of these black farm owners were scattered and isolated among white farmers. But in many places, such as Texas and Mississippi, they settled in freedom colonies—all-black communities that provided most of the basic needs of their members. In these settlements, they frequently had their own churches, schools, lodges, and businesses. Although they did not farm on a large scale, with aid from black county extension agents they raised enough of their own food to avoid debt. Their relative economic independence gave them greater control over their lives than that enjoyed by black tenants. For example, when civil rights workers registered rural African Americans to vote during the 1960s, they frequently stayed in the homes of black farm owners.
Black farm owners have declined in number continuously from the 1920s to the present. Many lost their land owing to the general difficulties afflicting small farmers: the boll weevil and the lower prices and higher costs brought by an industrializing, globalizing economy. Other families sold their land when their young people began to identify farming with the exploitation of slavery and sharecropping and turned increasingly away from their parents’ farms and toward urban occupations. Still others lost their farms because of the liabilities of racism, in particular, difficulty in gaining equitable aid from banks and government agencies. For many decades, local administrators of USDA farm loan agencies denied loans to African American farmers, while giving them to comparable white farmers. In other cases, these agencies extended loans that were too small or too late to be useful. To seek compensation for this pattern of discrimination, thousands of black farmers brought a class-action lawsuit against the USDA, in Pigford v. Glickman. In 1999, a Washington, D.C., district court found for the plaintiffs and called for damages to be paid, which have amounted to nearly 1 billion dollars, the largest class-action civil rights settlement in U.S. history. Suit brought by an additional 60,000 late filers may bring the full settlement to over 2 billion dollars.
MARK SCHULTZ
Lewis University
W. E. B. Du Bois, U.S. Department of Labor Bulletin (July 1901); Melvin Patrick Ely, Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s through the Civil War (2005); Peggy G. Hargis and Mark R. Schultz, Agricultural History (Spring 1998); Leo McGee and Robert Boone, The Black Rural Landowner: Endangered Species (1979); Gary B. Mills, The Forgotten People: Cane River’s Creoles of Color (1977); Debra Reid, Reaping a Greater Harvest: African Americans, the Extension Service, and Rural Reform in Jim Crow Texas (2007); Debra Reid and Evan Bennett, eds., Beyond Forty Acres and a Mule: African American Farmers since Reconstruction (2012); Loren Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South, 1790–1915 (1990); Thad Sitton and James H. Conrad, Freedom Colonies: Independent Black Texans in the Time of Jim Crow (2005).
In 1935, Melville J. Herskovits asked in the pages of the New Republic, “What has Africa given America?” In his answer, a radical response for the time, he briefly mentioned the influence of blacks on American music, language, manners, and foodways. He found most of his examples, however, in the South. Eighty years later, the answer to this question could be longer, perhaps less radical, but still surprising to many. Much of what people of African descent brought to the United States since 1619 has become so familiar to the general population, particularly in the South, that the black origins of specific customs and forms of expression have become blurred or forgotten altogether.
Consider, for example, the banjo. Not only is the instrument itself of African origin but so is its name. Although the banjo is encountered today chiefly in bluegrass ensembles, where it is considered an instrument of the Appalachians, it was first played by slaves on Tidewater plantations in the 17th and 18th centuries. It was only taken up into the Piedmont and the mountains during the 19th century by blacks working on railroad gangs. Although the contemporary banjo is physically quite different from its Afro-American folk antecedent, it nonetheless retains the unique sounds of its ringing high drone string and its drum head. These are the acoustic reminders of the instrument’s African origins.
Linguists have noted that southern speech carries a remarkable load of African vocabulary. This assertion is all the more remarkable when we recall that white southerners have often claimed to have little interaction with blacks. Some regional words have murky origins, but there is no controversy for such terms as boogie, gumbo, tote, benne, goober, cooter, okra, jazz, mumbo-jumbo, hoodoo, mojo, cush, and the affirmative and negative expressions “uh-huh” and “unh-uh.” All are traceable to African languages and usages. The term “guinea” is used as an adjective for a number of plants and animals that were imported long ago from Africa. Guinea hens, guinea worms, guinea grass, and guinea corn, now found throughout the South, are rarely thought of as exceptional, even though their names directly indicate their exotic African origins.
Beyond basic words, blacks have created works of oral literature that have become favorite elements of southern folklore. Within the whole cycle of folktales with animal tricksters—those put into written form by Joel Chandler Harris and others—some may be indigenous to American Indians and some may have European analogies, but most appear to have entered the United States from Africa and the West Indies. The warnings they provide concerning the need for clever judgment and social solidarity are lessons taken to heart by both whites and blacks. The legacy of artful language in Afro-American culture is manifested further in other types of performance such as the sermon, the toast, and contests of ritual insult. For people who are denied social and economic power, verbal power provides important compensation. This is why men of words in the black community—the good talkers—are highly esteemed. The southern oratorical style has generally been noted as distinctive because of its pacing, imagery, and the demeanor of the speaker. Some of these traits, heard in speeches and sermons, are owed to black men of words who of necessity refined much of what is today accepted as standard southern “speechifying” into a very dramatic practice.
In the area of material culture, blacks were long assumed to have made few contributions to southern life, but such an assessment is certainly in error. There have, over the last four centuries, existed distinctive traditions for Afro-American basketry, pottery, quilting, blacksmithing, boatbuilding, woodcarving, carpentry, and graveyard decoration. These achievements have gone unrecognized and unacknowledged. Take, for example, the shotgun house. Several million of these structures can be found all across the South, and some are now lived in by whites, although shotgun houses are generally associated with black neighborhoods. The first of these distinctive houses with their narrow shapes and gable entrances were built in New Orleans at the beginning of the 19th century by free people of color who were escaping the political revolution in Haiti. In the Caribbean, such houses are used in both towns and the countryside; they were once used as slave quarters. Given its history, the design of the shotgun house should be understood as somewhat determined by African architectural concepts as well as Caribbean Indian and French colonial influences. Contemporary southern shotgun houses represent the last phase of an architectural evolution initiated in Africa and modified in the West Indies and now in many southern locales dominating the cultural landscape.
The cultural expressions of the southern black population are integral to the regional experience. Although the South could still exist without banjos, Brer Rabbit, goobers, and shotgun houses, it would certainly be less interesting. The black elements of southern culture make the region more distinctive.
JOHN MICHAEL VLACH
George Washington University
J. L. Dillard, Black English (1972); Dena J. Epstein, Ethnomusicology (September 1975); Melville J. Herskovits, New Republic, 4 September 1935; Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (1983); John Michael Vlach, The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts (1978), Pioneer America (January 1976).
The plantation economy that dominated the American South through the colonial and early national periods sharply defined labor and race relations in the region. Millions of African and African American slaves toiled in the tobacco, cotton, sugar, and rice fields, fueling a highly profitable cash crop economy dependent on the subjugation of their labor. The powerful labor system upon which the plantation economy was built collapsed with the advent of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery under the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. Soon after, southern planters, hoping to rebuild their political and financial power, complained about the unreliability and inefficiency of newly freed black labor. Despite planters’ efforts to stabilize and immobilize black farmworkers through a system of farm tenancy, many African Americans searched for better opportunities through migration.
As the southern agricultural economy transformed in the late 19th century, the concern over a steady labor supply became more serious. America’s Industrial Revolution fostered new urban markets with growing populations requiring food and factories demanding raw materials. The development of refrigerated railway cars and the application of new machinery to agricultural production further incentivized the expansion of large-scale, capitalized farms in the South. With increasing numbers of African Americans leaving in search of better economic opportunities and social conditions, planters were left to search for alternatives to meet their growing labor needs. The Great Migration resulted in an exodus of about 500,000 black southerners between 1910 and 1920 alone. To meet these needs, planters relied increasingly on seasonal migrants, who could provide flexible and inexpensive labor.
Texas had long depended on the transnational migration of Mexican farmworkers, who after 1910 (the start of the Mexican Revolution) began arriving in greater numbers. During the same decade that black southerners left the countryside at growing rates, more than 185,000 Mexicans entered the United States in search of work. The availability of Mexican laborers facilitated Texas’s transformation from a plantation and ranching economy into commercial agribusiness. Between 1900 and 1920, the number of cultivated acres on Texas farms grew from 15 million to 25 million. By this time, central Texas was the nation’s leading cotton-producing region and south Texas was dominant in the truck farming of vegetables and citrus fruit. The system of agribusiness based on inexpensive, migrant, and mostly noncitizen labor that existed in Texas by World War I would soon spread across the South, pushing the region to follow a new model of farm labor relations.
While the presence of a large transnational labor force distinguished Texas from the rest of the American South in the early 20th century, other regions experimented with the use of immigrant labor following the Civil War. Several states sought to use immigration to revive agribusiness and resolve enduring political tensions. A study of South Carolina during Reconstruction shows that there was much discussion on the question of transnational labor. According to historian R. H. Woody, state leaders believed that “the West had been made powerful and prosperous through immigration, and this same factor would increase the wealth and property values of South Carolina.” Labor recruiters were sent to Germany and the Scandinavian countries to lure workers to the New South. Some South Carolinians warned that “a day laborer could not compete with the Negro in the service of the former slave-owner, or in the cultivation of southern staples.” To a large extent, such skeptics were right. Most of the immigrants who came to the region during the late 19th century complained about the poor climate, disorderly society, and lack of real economic opportunities.
Louisiana had more success employing immigrant farmworkers at the turn of the century. At this time, most of the sugar cultivated in the continental United States grew in the southeast and south-central areas of Louisiana. After the 1880s, Italian immigrants were recruited as replacements for low-wage, mostly unskilled black labor. The seasonal influx of Italian workers ranged from 30,000 to 80,000. Most came from established enclaves in New Orleans that worked around the citrus fruit trade, while others migrated from Chicago and New York. Like most states seeking an immigrant workforce, Louisiana established immigration and homestead associations to encourage Italian immigration. Soon after, a successful transnational system was in place, with workers arriving directly to the cane fields at grinding time and returning to Italy immediately after. This cyclical pattern allowed Louisiana’s sugar parishes to thrive. It was not until economic depression hit the sugar industry in the early 1900s that Italians left the sugar fields searching for better wages. During World War I and shortly after, restrictive federal immigration policies also served to limit Italian immigration.
The Reconstruction period also saw the arrival of Chinese labor to the Mississippi Delta. In 1869, southern growers organized the Arkansas River Valley Emigration Company, whose purpose it was to attract large numbers of Chinese laborers for the cultivation of cotton. According to historian John Thornell, labor recruiters were sent to Hong Kong in search of willing migrants, and eventually two ships arrived in New Orleans in 1870 with about 400 Chinese workers. Members of this group arrived in the Delta to work specifically in agriculture. Like their Italian counterparts, they considered themselves sojourners, expecting to return to their homeland once they had secured enough money to support their families. While their expectations were hopeful, their experiences as farmworkers were mostly unsuccessful. Exploitative labor conditions on cotton farms, which included terribly low wages for extremely physically demanding work, encouraged most Chinese migrants to reconsider their arrangements. Those that did not return to China walked off the farms to find better opportunities. Many became small business owners and opened grocery stores that catered to black farmworkers. The Chinese immigrant community could have flourished had it not been for the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882.
Mexican migrants began arriving in the Mississippi Delta shortly after growers experimented with hiring Chinese workers. As historian Julie Weise explains, Mexicans were working in the state’s lumber industry as early as 1908 as replacements for black workers who left for cities in the North and West as part of the Great Migration. During the period from 1917 to 1921, a federal guest-worker program attracted some 51,000 Mexicans to help meet World War I labor demands, mainly in agriculture. Most of the migrants who arrived in Mississippi came from north-central Mexico and were recruited at the Texas border by labor agents working for southern cotton growers. By the mid-1920s, Mexican workers realized that they could earn more picking cotton in the American South than elsewhere in the country, including Texas and California. In 1925, a peak period in the migratory flow, some 500,000 Mexicans could be found picking cotton throughout the region. Not all of the Mexican workers were transnational migrants, however. A 1930 census figure taken in the Delta’s Bolivar County revealed that one in every six Mexican farmworkers had actually been born in Texas. Few Mexican farmworkers stayed in the Delta after December, when the cotton-picking season ended. Most chose to follow the migratory route back to Texas, up north, or to Mexico.
The impermanent character of the transnational labor that came to the South after the Civil War allowed southerners to avoid altering the racial division of labor that existed in the region. Southern planters simply tried to replace African American slaves (or newly empowered black workers) with an alternative source of exploited labor to sustain productivity on their farms. In the 1930s, for example, the use of Mexican labor in the Delta would serve to undermine the solidarity black workers were building through the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union. In this way, the use of transnational labor was not just a response to black out-migration but also a means to undermine domestic workers’ coalitions.
Despite their diverse origins, the Italian, Chinese, Mexican, and even German immigrants that first came to the South as farmworkers were inserted (often uncomfortably) into the existing black-white racial dyad. Their labor status alongside low-wage African American workers—at times also cohabitating, intermarrying, and organizing with blacks—tainted these migrants racially in the eyes of white society. Those that actively sought acceptance as whites by attending white schools and churches, challenging segregation in court, or elevating their class status, encountered significant barriers in transgressing the color line. For Mexican migrants, according to Weise, it was the actions of the Mexican Consulate that eventually helped them gain some of the privileges of whiteness.
The influx of immigrant labor to the South slowed during much of the mid-1920s and 1930s as the nation experienced a severe economic depression that fueled nativist sentiment and policies. It was not until the 1940s, with mounting World War II labor demands, that growers again clamored for a transnational farmworker program. The Bracero program consisted of a series of bilateral agreements between the U.S. and Mexican governments that lasted from 1942 to 1964. Over the duration of the program, more than 4.5 million Mexican farmworkers were contracted (often more than once) to work in the United States. In negotiations over the stipulations of the agreement, the Mexican government addressed the problem of racial discrimination many of its nationals experienced as U.S. workers. Several states, including Texas, Arkansas, and Mississippi, were blacklisted from participating in the program until they could guarantee better labor and living conditions, including an end to the racial prejudice Mexicans encountered.
The British West Indies Labor Program was modeled after the Mexican agreement to meet farm labor demands on the East Coast. Approximately 66,000 workers, mostly from Jamaica and the Bahamas, participated in the program from 1943 to 1947. According to historian Cindy Hahamovitch, the secretary of state for the British colonies attempted, much like Mexican officials, to regulate the discriminatory conditions workers encountered by discouraging migrants from working south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Even so, Florida growers were determined to secure guest workers and ultimately received some of the largest numbers.
The cycles of migration created by such guest-worker programs had a long-lasting affect in establishing a more permanent and visible presence of migrants in the South. Since the 1960s, particularly as African Americans gained access to industrial and service-sector jobs, the regional workforce has undergone what many describe as a “steady process of Latinization.” Caribbean guest workers continue to migrate under the H-2A temporary worker program, but the rate of employment among Latino farmworkers far outnumbers any other group. Unlike past migrations, Mexican (and to a lesser extent Central American) immigrants have been arriving in the South and then settling. Since 1990, eight out of the top ten “states with fastest growing nonmetro Hispanic populations,” according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, are located in the American South.
As Latino immigrants settle in the South, local communities are faced with the challenge of integrating them beyond their roles as migratory workers. This adjustment has led to anti-immigrant hostility and the escalation of racial tension. Recently, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina passed anti-immigrant legislation under the guise of protecting Americans’ jobs. A notable concern among nativists has also been the dilution of southern culture and values, resembling the immigration debates that occurred shortly after the Civil War. Growers generally do not support such legislation, knowing that it will undermine the current system, which provides them with cheap and vulnerable workers. Immigrant farmworkers are organizing in remarkable ways to contest the structural violence and exploitative conditions that too closely resemble the postbellum era. For example, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, an organization of mainly Latino, Mayan Indian, and Haitian immigrants, offers a source of promise that the existing system of agribusiness can be reformed for the better. Over time, transnational workers have disrupted the traditional structure of labor and race relations, forging a new American South.
VERÓNICA MARTÍNEZ MATSUDA
Cornell University
Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (1997); Cindy Hahamovitch, The Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870–1945 (1997); William Kandel and John Cromartie, New Patterns of Hispanic Settlement in Rural America (2004); James W. Loewen, The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White (1971); Mary E. Odem and Elaine Lacy, eds., Latino Immigrants and the Transformation of the U.S. South (2009); Vincenza Scarpaci, Italian Immigrants in Louisiana’s Sugar Parishes: Recruitment, Labor Conditions, and Community Relations, 1880–1910 (1980); John Thornell, Chinese America: History and Perspectives (2003); Julie M. Weise, American Quarterly (September 2008); R. H. Woody, Mississippi Valley Historical Review (September 1931).
How did Jim Crow culture view Asian Americans, those who did not fit into a system predicated on the distinction between “colored” and white? Asian American narratives about racial segregation in the South reveal more than one answer to the question where did the Asian sit on the segregated bus? In doing so, they offer important insights into the ways in which racial hierarchies were enforced in southern culture.
Interned with other Japanese Americans in Arkansas during World War II, Mary Tsukamoto recounts that her first trip out of camp, a bus ride to Jackson, Miss., in 1943, offered a shocking view of racial discrimination: “We could not believe the bus driver’s tone of voice as he ordered black passengers to stand at the back of the bus.” In contrast, the white driver gestured her to the front. “We were relieved but had strange feelings,” she writes. “Apparently we were not ‘colored.’”
Tsukamoto’s dilemma—front or back?—goes largely unnoticed in depictions of segregation-era history. The fact that Mary is designated “not ‘colored’” here belies the fact that she is also a victim of racial discrimination: she is a prisoner of war on temporary furlough from the “segregation” of a concentration camp. The story reveals complex issues surrounding the indeterminate racial status of Asian Americans between black and white. In 1930, sociologist Max Handman noted that American society had “no social technique for handling partly colored races.” As a metaphor, the “color line” does not allow for a middle space. One Chinese American woman living in Mississippi stated, “Delta whites think there are only two races in the world and do not know what to do with the Chinese.” Similarly, the Korean protagonist of Susan Choi’s novel The Foreign Student, set in Sewanee, Tenn., in the 1950s, reflects upon the locals’ reaction to him: “They don’t know what to make me.” The Asian’s racial status became subject to interpretation.
Asian Americans have often been positioned in American culture as vehicles for affirming racial progress; they are continually represented as the “model minority,” as proof that systemic racial barriers do not exist. Yet segregation affected Asians in the South as well as African Americans; while neither white nor black, they were not immune to the racial hierarchies enforced in southern culture. Asian American novels, ethnographies, oral histories, and memoirs about the South provide intriguing accounts of the ways in which interstitial individuals became written into the region’s prevailing racial codes. These narratives reveal what it means to inhabit an in-between space, what it means to be, in Handman’s words, “partly colored.” While this emerging body of letters contributes to a reevaluation of the transnational aspects of southern literature by highlighting global migration to the South, Asian American literature here, like African American literature, also testifies to the effects of white supremacy, offering a powerful—if at times ambiguous—critique of social injustice.
Some accounts of Asian American experiences with segregation and its legacy simultaneously document unjust racial treatment and, curiously, deny unjust treatment. Reflecting on his fieldwork in Georgia and Tennessee in the 1960s, Korean anthropologist Choong Soon Kim poses the question “Had a proverbial ‘southern hospitality’ been extended to Asians?” Throughout his ethnographic writing, Kim affirms that it has. In An Asian Anthropologist in the South: Field Experiences with Blacks, Indians, and Whites, he assures his readers that despite witnessing racial discrimination against African Americans, he himself does not experience it while living in the South. Yet he also confesses that white people have, upon occasion, refused to shake his hand. Kim writes, “These incidents should not be interpreted in terms of racial discrimination. Such curiosities in relation to foreigners are rather natural.” Kim’s analysis of his own treatment points to the unreliability of autobiographical narratives: He has been snubbed because of his race but dismisses the discourtesy and its implications. His contradictory testimony unveils the ways in which individuals rationalize a loss of social status, highlighting the psychic violence that is part of segregation’s legacy. The Asian American’s depiction of racial hierarchy requires reading in-between the lines of the narrative.
Segregation-era oral histories and memoirs reveal that individuals will resist the implication that they are inferior because of their race or skin color. For example, Ved Mehta’s account of his 1950s residence at a school for the blind in Arkansas reveals very little about what it means to be South Asian in a “whites only” institution. Rather, his memoir, Sound-Shadows of the New World (1985), asks us to consider another form of integration—the mobility of the blind in a sighted world. In spite of the fact that Mehta has deliberately downplayed his Indian cultural difference at school, he is moved out of the boys’ dormitory and into a converted broom closet. The move is represented as an administrative concession to Ved, a privilege granted to him alone. As the white director suggests, “You want a place where you can shut the door and be by yourself, keep on with your typing and reading, listen to Indian music and think of home. Am I right?” Whether he understands this separation to be anything other than voluntary goes unremarked. Why is Mehta singled out for “special” treatment? Does the separation represent a concession to time and place, one whose motive remains veiled even to the author?
An Asian in the South, Mehta is, in Handman’s terms, only “partly colored”: The move within the white school away from white boys may be interpreted either as a privilege or in deference to segregation. As in contradictory anecdotal evidence of Asians traveling in the South, he is not quite white. What is telling is that Mehta refuses to allow southern norms to impact his own self-conception, preferring to see himself as simply a brown-skinned human being whose worth remains intact. In his eyes, he is not a “darky,” not a “Negro.” Asian American literature nevertheless reveals that the entrenched customs of the South implicate these migrants, Kim and Mehta, even as they themselves are only partially aware of it. If these memoirs refuse to document the effects of racism in overt ways, they nevertheless contribute to an understanding of southern race relations by testifying to the individual’s attempts to resist racism’s dehumanizing effects.
As in the most popular depiction of Asians in the South, Mira Nair’s 1991 film, Mississippi Masala, Asian American literature denormalizes racial separation in the United States through global parallels. For example, Susan Choi’s novel The Foreign Student (1998) offers a meditation on the artificiality of divisions in its dual settings: Korea and Tennessee in the 1950s. The demilitarized zone at the 38th parallel, the imaginary line that divided the Korean peninsula into north and south as a result of civil war, finds its analog in the Mason-Dixon Line. The novel’s Korean protagonist, Chang, comes to occupy a racial DMZ, finding himself “foreign” to American racial politics at the University of the South.
The novel thus highlights a dynamic reflected in anecdotal accounts of Asian experiences with segregation: the Asian American becomes an object of intense local scrutiny and interpretation, particularly as Chang begins a relationship with a white woman. Choi describes reaction to the interracial couple as “unremitting scrutiny, disguised as politeness,” and as the “tension of careful indifference . . . and steady observation.” There is no communally agreed-upon response to the Asian’s unwitting crossing of the color line’s sexual taboo—because he is not black, their outings avoid overt hostility and confrontation, but because he is not white, surveillance is uncensored and undisguised. The novel establishes a tone of impending menace reflective of author David Mura’s speculation about Japanese Americans interned in Arkansas: “There was an unspoken message all about them in the camps, especially in the South: Things are bad now, but they could be worse. We aren’t lynching your kind. Yet.” The gray zone of Jim Crow culture that the Asian inhabits is depicted as both similar to and distinct from that experienced by African Americans; the novel intimates that suspended evaluation and punitive action are contingent upon unspoken rules.
Abraham Verghese’s My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story of a Town and Its People in the Age of AIDS also represents an Asian American’s search for home in the South. Like Choi’s work, it calls upon the condition of postcolonial exile to comment on segregation—here based not only on racial division but also on lines drawn between illness and health. An immigrant of South Asian ancestry, Verghese is an infectious disease specialist who was treating individuals infected with HIV in rural Tennessee in the mid-1980s. In defiance of southern stereotyping, the doctor was readily embraced by the white population as a fellow “good ole boy.” Yet as his practice with AIDS patients grows and he encounters increasing ostracism in the community, Verghese experiences his pariah status as racial alienation: “Was there some place in this country where I could walk around anonymously, where I could blend in completely with a community, be undistinguished by appearance, accent or speech?” The doctor’s own difference becomes “outed” via proximity to the presumed medical and sexual deviances of those he treats, linking the memoir’s representation of race to sexuality.
My Own Country’s significance to southern literature lies in its highlighting alternative forms of caste making in ways that complicate community division based on race. In doing so, it also refigures lines of connection away from the identity categories that have traditionally configured southern communities. The Asian American finds a contingent home in the South by forging meaningful connections with other “migrants,” in this case, white gay men who have returned home to Tennessee. The literature shows that being an outsider can provoke new forms of community.
The addition of Asian American writing to the southern canon does not simply contribute uncritically to notions of a multicultural New South. It can expand the global reach of regionalism by provoking questions about citizenship, diaspora, migration, acculturation, and transnationalism. But as significant, these narratives offer a potentially reorienting perspective on the dynamics at the heart of southern literature: racial politics between black and white. In this sense, authors such as H. T. Tsiang, V. S. Naipaul, Cynthia Kadohata, Lan Cao, Elena Tajima Creef, Patsy Rekdal, Abraham Verghese, Ved Mehta, Patti Duncan, Ha Jin, Susan Choi, Choong Soon Kim, and M. Evelina Galang who set prose narratives in the region are not “foreign” to southern letters. They too offer a critique of American racial politics, forcing a reconsideration of what it means to be “at home” in the South. The impact of white supremacy on Asian Americans might lack the immediacy of James Baldwin’s recognition that, as a black man, he is “among a people whose culture controls me, has even, in a sense, created me.” Nevertheless, southern Asian American literature offers insight into the complexities of social power, belonging, and denial.
Asian American narratives ask us to consider the arbitrary division between blacks and whites from the perspective of those whose place across the color line was indeterminate and often fluid. These postsegregation-era texts establish the interstitial as a site of cultural discipline, but they also give it an alternative political valence. The anomaly of the Asian in the South might be reconceived as a useful site of alienation from entrenched race relations, an estrangement that provides the space for questioning norms of racial etiquette, habit, and expectation. In this sense, the racial in-between pushes us to think beyond the lines drawn by color that constitute segregation’s ongoing legacy.
LESLIE BOW
University of Wisconsin at Madison
Brewton Berry, Almost White (1963); Edna Bonacich, American Sociological Review (October 1973); Leslie Bow, “Partly Colored”: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South (2010); Lan Cao, Monkey Bridge (1997); Susan Choi, The Foreign Student (1998); Lucy M. Cohen, Chinese in the Post–Civil War South: A People without a History (1984); Elena Tajima Creef, North Carolina Literary Review (2005); Max Sylvius Handman, American Journal of Sociology (1930); Cynthia Kadohata, kira-kira (2004); Choong Soon Kim, An Asian Anthropologist in the South: Field Experiences with Blacks, Indians, and Whites (1977), in Cultural Diversity in the U.S. South: Anthropological Contributions to a Region in Transition, ed. Carole E. Hill and Patricia D. Beaver (1998); James W. Loewen, The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White (1972); Ved Mehta, Sound-Shadows of the New World (1985); David Mura, in Under Western Eyes: Personal Essays from Asian America, ed. Garrett Hungo (1995); V. S. Naipaul, A Turn in the South (1989); Robert Seto Quan, Lotus among the Magnolias: The Mississippi Chinese (1982); Mary Tsukamoto and Elizabeth Pinkerton, We the People: A Story of Internment in America (1987); Abraham Verghese, My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story of a Town and Its People in the Age of AIDS (1994).
Although Chinese men first arrived in the Spanish borderlands during the 16th century, they began arriving in northern Mexico in greater numbers after formal exclusion from the United States in 1882. Owing to gender norms in China and gendered exclusionary policy in the United States, Chinese migrations to the Americas were overwhelmingly male. Some men, intent on crossing the northern border surreptitiously, simply passed through Mexico. Others found opportunities in the burgeoning border economy and settled in local communities. Becoming both laborers and businessmen, Chinese in the latter group in particular formed romantic unions with local women. Anti-Chinese campaigns that emerged during the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and peaked with the Great Depression targeted Mexican-Chinese unions as damaging to the Mexican race and nation. Ultimately, the northwestern states of Sonora and Sinaloa drove out the vast majority of Chinese. Whether by choice or by force, their Mexican-origin families often accompanied them out of Mexico. Some passed through U.S. territory as “refugees” before beginning their lives anew in Guangdong Province in southeastern China.
Chinese men often entered the United States by passing as members of diverse minority groups across the nation’s borderlands regions; in the U.S. Southwest, they disguised themselves as local indigenous peoples and Mexicans. Stories abound of Chinese men who entered the United States by posing as Mexicans, since the latter could cross the border freely through the early 20th century. Invoking the dominant racial images of Mexicans in the United States, coyotes instructed Chinese men to wear ponchos and sombreros, learn some phrases in Spanish, or even sing traditional ballads as they pretended to be part of groups of Mexican men who had been out drinking. Through such tactics, among others, the cross-border smuggling of Chinese became a profitable business enterprise by the turn of the 20th century. Mexican and American men, as well as some Chinese, profited from U.S. immigration policy as they took excluded men across the border or transported, housed, and fed those who awaited opportunities to enter the United States secretly.
Other Chinese stayed in Mexico. They fit into two broad socioeconomic categories. Agricultural laborers and unskilled employees, on the one hand, exhibited lower rates of assimilation. Skilled artisans and merchants, on the other hand, had more wealth and tended toward greater integration. As elsewhere in Mexico, the Chinese were crucial in the north as they fulfilled a number of key roles in local communities. They participated in the traditional, rural economy by becoming landowners or laboring on the haciendas, ranchos, and fields of Mexican as well as Chinese landowners. But the Chinese also helped northern states modernize by becoming the first petit bourgeois class. They established businesses either individually or in conjunction with other countrymen. They opened shops where they sold inexpensive household goods and foods. In addition to selling necessary items, they established laundries and provided vital domestic services to local people. Chinese businessmen at first enjoyed the protection of municipal authorities because they brought revenue and staples to local communities. Although some were large-scale operations, most Chinese enterprises were small and locally operated; these included street peddling. Chinese had more businesses, but less overall capital, than other immigrant groups. Rather than displacing Mexicans or other foreigners, they found new commercial openings. Chinese drew on transnational economic networks in a way that local residents or other foreigners could not. Brethren in China and other parts of the Americas contributed capital and low-cost merchandise to Chinese businesses. This helped them prosper and eventually establish a monopoly on low-end consumer goods. As the growing border economy pushed northern Mexico toward the commercial and the modern, and with a native petit bourgeoisie lacking, the Chinese found an important economic and social niche.
Chinese became incorporated into northern Mexican society because the Mexican government allowed them to immigrate, naturalize, and marry local women, at least at first. The Porfiriato (the reign of Porfirio Díaz, 1876–1911) encouraged Chinese to migrate to help “whiten” Mexico’s dark-skinned indigenous and mestizo population during the late 19th century, since attempts to recruit southern and eastern Europeans had failed. In a key difference with diasporic patterns in the United States, many Chinese became naturalized citizens, learned Spanish, adopted naming patterns and other local norms, and entered into civil unions with Mexican or indigenous women. Besides providing companionship and love, marriages to local women helped Chinese men integrate into the society. It facilitated drawing Mexican and indigenous clientele to their businesses. Unions with Chinese men, in turn, offered economic stability and prestige to local women and their families; some parents even arranged such marriages. Chinese were known for being frugal, good providers, and saving for their children’s futures. Along with the romantic feelings and love they felt for their partners, these were attractive qualities for women, and families, from the poor and working classes.
Anti-Chinese sentiment had existed in northern Mexico since the Chinese first arrived, but it was neither widespread nor organized until the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Changing notions of race, citizenship, and belonging made the ground fertile for the rise of a vicious anti-Chinese movement, which first emerged in the border state of Sonora in 1916 and eventually spread to other areas of the nation. Antichinistas (anti-Chinese activists) viewed Chinese men as a formidable threat to the race and nation; ejecting them from Mexico was their supreme goal. Crusaders vilified Mexican-Chinese unions, as well as cross-cultural relationships more generally. They derided as chineras and chineros those Mexicans who were friendly to or had formed ties with Chinese. A deep split came to characterize Sonora, as some worked vehemently against the Chinese while others maintained—in many cases their longtime—relationships. They did so in spite of social stigma and legal punishment as the movement gained momentum during the 1920s. Early in the decade, the state of Sonora passed a law prohibiting marriages and “illicit” unions between Chinese men and Mexican women, among other anti-Chinese measures.
The movement against Chinese culminated with forced removals during the Great Depression. Although anti-Chinese activists had by now formed campaigns in a number of Mexican states, only Sonora and Sinaloa carried out massive evictions of Chinese and many of their Mexican-origin families. It was no coincidence that these northern states took such drastic measures, as anti-Chinese hatred and exclusionary ideology had for decades circulated in the border region. Some local people had even linked the U.S. treatment of Mexicans with the future expulsion of Chinese. In 1926, Francisco Martínez wrote to Mexican president Plutarco Elías Calles from Nogales, Ariz., attaching a newspaper article entitled “Mexicans Will Be Kicked Out of California.” The piece reported that 75 percent of Mexicans in California had entered the United States illegally and that a campaign to return them to Mexico was to begin immediately. Although the United States would not conduct a massive “repatriation” of Mexicans until the Depression years, U.S. newspapers reported on the formation of smaller deportation operations in California during this time. “If the Americans can do this to a neighboring country, to Mexicans,” Martínez wrote, “why don’t we take advantage of this idea—using it against Chinese?” The Chinese “plague,” he argued, had “infested and threatened” Mexico. Displacing his frustrations onto the Chinese, the border town resident urged Mexico’s leaders to counter the humiliation of the U.S. deportations of Mexicans. Dwelling on the Arizona side of the boundary, Martínez may have been an official or a businessman, a Mexican immigrant or Mexican American—or an amalgamation, as lines of identity have been historically blurry, especially in the border region. His wish, in any case, would be fulfilled half a decade later. Mexican workers, as scapegoats for the Great Depression in the United States, returned to Mexico en masse beginning in 1929. Within two years, Sonora and Sinaloa, in turn, began widespread evictions of Chinese, whom they had likewise blamed for Mexico’s economic and social ills.
While many left directly from Mexican seaports, several thousand Chinese men and over 100 members of Mexican Chinese families passed through U.S. territory as “refugees from Mexico.” One such family was the Wong Campoy family from the southern Sonoran town of Navojoa. After narrowly escaping cruel antichinista tormenters who had driven him to run away and climb a roof—from which a fall caused serious heart problems—Alfonso Wong Fang knew he could no longer remain in Mexico as before. The wife and mother, Dolores Campoy Wong, decided that she and their children, Alfonso Wong Campoy, María del Carmen Irma Wong Campoy, and Héctor Manuel Wong Campoy—all under five years old—would accompany him to keep the family together. In early 1933, the Wong Campoy family headed north and crossed the border illegally into the United States. Enforcing the Chinese Exclusion Acts, U.S. immigration agents apprehended the family and held them in an immigration jail in southern Arizona before putting them on a train to San Francisco for ultimate deportation to China with other “Chinese refugees from Mexico.”
Attempting to understand and control the situation, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) took statements from hundreds of Chinese men, who described the brutality they had endured in Mexico. U.S. authorities at first perceived Chinese men and Mexican Chinese families from Mexico through the decades-old lens of Chinese Exclusion. But after taking testimony, they saw a new pattern: These Chinese had fled Mexico owing to anti-Chinese hostility. Thus, they were refugees whom the agency could neither send back to Mexico in good conscience nor allow into the United States because of the policy of Chinese Exclusion. Officials usually referred to “illegal” Chinese immigrants as “contraband” or “smuggled.” In the case of the Mexican Chinese, however, the INS and the State Department used the term “refugee,” even though nations in the prewar era were not yet in the regular practice of understanding the concept or employing the term in this way. The use of the term pointed to the complexity of the situation and the diplomatic issues it raised. In the end, the United States spent over half a million dollars to feed, house, and deport the Mexican Chinese in a depressed economy; the Chinese government repaid a small fraction, but Mexico never offered any reimbursement.
U.S. immigration agents deployed a gendered rubric of Chinese Exclusion as they labeled not only Chinese men but also Mexican women, whether married or unmarried, and Mexican Chinese children, as “Chinese refugees from Mexico” and ultimately deported them to China. Strikingly, the INS avoided sending Mexican women and Mexican Chinese children back to Mexico, even though it would have cost the agency far less than the trip to China; moreover, the mass forcible repatriations of Mexicans were well under way, so returning these women and children would have been a simple undertaking. With few exceptions, U.S. immigration agents did not even take Mexican women’s testimony, focusing instead on gathering Chinese men’s statements. The ideology of men’s control over women under “coverture” and “the femme covert” legitimized the deportation to China of entire Mexican Chinese families, including women in free associations rather than legal marriages with Chinese men. Gender norms and citizenship policy commonly upheld around the world during this time stripped women of their status when they married or formed unions with foreigners. While men (unless they were excluded by race) maintained citizenship regardless of marriage, these notions defined women by the status of their husbands or companions. Mexican women would fall deeper into the interstices of the nation-state once they reached China, where in some cases Chinese men’s previous marriages removed the possibility that authorities would consider these women Chinese citizens.
Chinese men arrived in Mexico with greater frequency following formal exclusion from the United States. While some entered that nation illegally through its southern border, others remained in Mexico, participated in the border economy, and started families. A highly vitriolic and hateful anti-Chinese movement ultimately expelled the vast majority of Chinese and many of their Mexican-origin families from Sonora and Sinaloa. As some passed through U.S. territory as “refugees,” racial exclusion and gendered notions of citizenship guaranteed that mixed-race families would begin new lives—and face another set of obstacles—in southeastern China.
JULIA MARÍA SCHIAVONE CAMACHO
University of Texas at El Paso
Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s, rev. ed. (2006); Mercedes Carreras de Velasco, Los Mexicanos que devolvió la crisis, 1929–1932 [The Mexicans the Crisis Sent Back, 1929–1932] (1974); Patrick Ettinger, Imaginary Lines: Border Enforcement and the Origins of Undocumented Immigration, 1882–1930 (2009); Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Amerasia 9 (1982), Amerasia 15 (1989); Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (2003), Journal of Asian American Studies 8, no. 5 (2005); Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (2004); Robert Chao Romero, The Chinese in Mexico (2010); Miguel Tinker Salas, In the Shadow of the Eagles: Sonora and the Transformation of the Border during the Porfiriato (1997).
Although traditionally the American South has been thought about as a largely rural, agricultural area, it is also the most coastal region of the contiguous 48 states, with 2,871 miles of shoreline along the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico. The South is anchored by port cities like Baltimore, Charleston, Miami, Mobile, New Orleans, and Norfolk, all of which have served as important points for importing goods and for immigration, while smaller fishing communities dot the beaches and marshlands that define the littoral. From the beginning of the 19th century through World War II, the South’s preeminent city, New Orleans, was the second-largest port in the country by volume of trade, second only to New York City. Although the city is often held up as exceptional, the Atlantic forces that shaped New Orleans simply acted on a grander scale in the region’s largest port and can be taken as exemplars of influences that have shaped and continue to shape all of the maritime South.
For the last 25 years, scholars have reframed European colonization of the 16th through 19th centuries as the making of the Atlantic World. This perspective emphasizes the multidirectional circulation of people, ideas, and commodities among the regions that border the Atlantic Ocean (West Africa, Western Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean). Exploring the Atlantic World offers a perspective that escapes the limits of both regionalism and nationalism, opening possibilities for examining multiracial, multiethnic, multinational, and multi-imperial connections.
The foundational historical event most associated with the Atlantic World is the slave trade, which involved the transport of people primarily from the coastal regions of West and Central Africa, with nearly 500,000 brought to the American South. But since slaves, when they survived the Middle Passage, did not always continue to circulate in the Atlantic system, the continuous connections across the waters that affected racial formations may be best captured by sailors, traders, and free travelers, who throughout their restless lives experienced the South as a region connected to a larger sphere.
Free and enslaved sailors of African descent traveled extensively throughout the Atlantic World and were well versed in both African and European languages and customs. These “Atlantic Creoles,” as historian Ira Berlin calls them, worked as skilled sailors and shipwrights, shipboard servants, and interpreters. Many ships’ crews of the Atlantic were multihued and multilingual, and the men spent more time on the sea than on land, such that by the early 18th century many sailors thought of themselves as “nationless brethren.” When they arrived in or settled in southern ports, Atlantic Creoles were instrumental in refashioning the icons and ideologies of the Atlantic World into their new lives, which inevitably affected racial experience, accounting for some of the striking differences seen between the South’s port cities and its interior. It is no accident that prior to the Civil War, Baltimore, New Orleans, and Charleston had the highest percentage of free people of color, not only in the South, but in the entire United States. Still, the encounters that produced a different demography in the South’s port cities were not without conflict, as evidenced by the case of one Etienne LaRue. A classic “Atlantic Creole,” LaRue was a Senegalese free mulatto sailor fluent in French who arrived in New Orleans in 1747, like other sailors, to enjoy shore leave in the city’s taverns. He met up with some less cosmopolitan French soldiers in the street, who addressed him with a racial slur. LaRue was comfortable enough in his status to respond in kind, addressing his verbal assailant as “Milord Bugger.” While authorities were not pleased that LaRue’s gun had gone off in the ensuing scuffle, the court treated the parties as legal equals (over the protests of the soldiers). Indeed, the maritime Atlantic long continued to be a virtual classroom for political rights. Although scholars dispute his birthplace, Denmark Vesey is known to have traveled through the Caribbean, working briefly in Saint-Domingue (later Haiti), before landing in the port of Charleston, where he purchased his freedom and participated in planning a major slave rebellion in 1822. In the late 19th century, many of the people who organized some of the most sustained protests against racial injustice had roots in that same Atlantic milieu.
Historian Rebecca Scott traces three generations of an Atlantic Creole family whose travels spanned Senegal, Haiti, France, Belgium, and Louisiana. Her work shows how the movement of Atlantic World émigrés fueled the tradition of public rights and anticaste thinking in New Orleans, which would eventually lead to the landmark civil rights case Plessy v. Ferguson. The story begins with Marie Françoise dite Rosalie, a young woman who lived in 18th-century Saint-Domingue as the property of a prosperous free woman of color. A notary recorded Rosalie as a “negresse de nation Polard,” identifying her with the Peul or Fulbe people, a largely Muslim ethnic group from the Senegambia region of West Africa. In the late 1700s, Rosalie’s domestic partner, a Frenchman named Michel Vincent, drew up unofficial documents that declared Rosalie and her children as his slaves to whom he wished to grant freedom. In the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution, Rosalie fled with Vincent and their four children to Havana, Cuba. While there, she presented her manumission documents to representatives of the French government, who granted her French citizenship. When refugees of the Haitian Revolution were expelled from Cuba in 1809, the family fled again, this time to New Orleans.
Rosalie’s family were part of a multipronged out-migration from Haiti of free whites, free people of color, and the still enslaved to the United States (estimated to be about equal thirds of the emigrant population), who landed in port cities such as Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore, and New Orleans. In New Orleans, the immigrants had a major impact by reinfusing the francophone population in the wake of the Anglo invasion of the Louisiana Purchase territory. Many now iconic New Orleans cultural traditions have been credited to the influence of Saint-Dominguans, including the Creole cottage, voodoo, and even gumbo. Immigrants strengthened the middle classes of free whites and free people of color in the “Creole” neighborhoods of Marigny, Tremé, and the Vieux Carré, offering their skills in the building trades or becoming small business owners in Caribbean luxuries such as tobacco, coffee, and even chocolate, such as Madame Berquin, who transported her knowledge of cocoa cultivation from Saint-Domingue to open a chocolate factory in the French Quarter in the 1810s.
This circulation of people and ideas did not end with the revolutionary generation, nor did the more cosmopolitan aspirations of Atlantic Creoles. Rosalie’s children and grandchildren did not stay put in New Orleans. They traveled throughout the Atlantic World in search of better opportunities and freedom from the growing racial restrictions of the antebellum and Jim Crow South. Rosalie’s grandson, Edouard Tinchant, was born in France after his parents left New Orleans seeking what he would later describe in a letter as a place where the “stupid prejudices” of racial marginalization did not exist. As a student in French schools, Edouard spent the majority of his formative years as an advocate of French republicanism and suffrage. By the age of 21, Edouard had lived in Antwerp, Belgium, and Veracruz, Mexico, in an attempt to expand the Tinchant family’s cigar-making business. When he arrived in New Orleans in 1862 to assist his brother Joseph with the American arm of the family business, the country was entrenched in civil war and his brother had recruited a regiment of free and enslaved Union soldiers. Edouard joined his brother’s regiment and wrote an editorial in the New Orleans Tribune declaring his entitlement to rights as a U.S. citizen.
In the 20th century, other southern ports began to compete for New Orleans’s place in the Atlantic World, but the city held its own between the world wars, not only as a major economic entrepôt but also as a hearth for new immigrants, both domestic and international. Another example of the ways in which maritime labor and travel have shaped the population of the South is the relationship of New Orleans to the “banana boat” republics of Central America, particularly Honduras. Latin American men who worked the plantations and boats of the New Orleans–based United Fruit Company were introduced to the city via this route, gradually settling and bringing their families. As a result, prior to Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans area was home to the largest Honduran population outside the capital of Tegucigalpa. After Katrina, the racial map of New Orleans has changed, with an estimated 20 percent loss of the local African American population and an influx of Latino (especially Mexican) workers and their families. While these transitions have been attended by difficult family separations and political struggles, the older history of the city’s Latin American connections is now being invoked as a recovered memory to comprehend the ongoing process of creolization.
New Orleans’s Atlantic World connections have deep historical roots that are fully evident to even a casual tourist sampling its unique cultural flavors and architectural facades. Other southern coastal cities have had similar links to that world. Atlantic trade stimulated immigration into Florida’s fast-growing port cities, for example, culminating in 20th-century Cuban and Haitian immigrations, echoing those that shaped New Orleans in the prior century. Far from being insular, therefore, the South has always been global, looking out onto the waters of the Atlantic, especially the Caribbean Basin. As in the past, its porous coastline continues to absorb new commodities, the people that transport them, and the new ideas that float on worldly currents.
ZADA JOHNSON
SHANNON LEE DAWDY
University of Chicago
Ira Berlin, William and Mary Quarterly (April 1996); Shannon Lee Dawdy, Building the Devil’s Empire: French Colonial New Orleans (2008); Nathalie Dessens, From Saint-Domingue to New Orleans: Migration and Influences (2007); Jack P. Greene and Philip Morgan, eds., Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (2009); Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (2001); Raymond A. Mohl, Journal of American Ethnic History (Summer 2003); Walter G. Rucker, The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture, and Identity Formation in Early America (2006); Rebecca Scott, Current Anthropology (April 2007).
The modern civil rights movement succeeded in three very important ways. First, it played a decisive role in the destruction of Jim Crow; second, it transformed the ongoing and larger black freedom struggle within which the civil rights movement transpired; and third, it transformed the status of blacks and race relations in the United States. American democracy moved closer to realizing its ideals of liberty, equality, and justice for all because of the civil rights movement.
The Fourteenth Amendment (1868) established that blacks were U.S. citizens. Blacks have consistently used the Fourteenth Amendment as the constitutional bulwark for their civil rights battles. As it evolved, the civil rights movement employed three broad and interrelated strategies: (1) moral appeal, or moral suasion, or speaking to the moral conscience, especially the white, moral conscience; (2) collective protest action, ranging from boycotts, sit-ins, and marches to nonviolent civil disobedience; and (3) legal action—employing civil rights jurisprudence rooted in the Fourteenth Amendment as a way to abolish the legal/constitutional impediments to black citizenship.
The horror of escalating disfranchisement, lynching, and Jim Crow in the late 19th and early 20th centuries only intensified the urgency of black civil rights struggles. The increasing virulence of the white supremacist offensive forced an interracial coalition to create the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. The NAACP soon emerged as and has remained the single most important institutional vehicle for advancing the black civil rights struggle.
The infamous decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) legitimized the doctrine of Jim Crow: the myth of separate but equal public accommodations and institutions for blacks and whites in the South. A legal fiction as well as a powerful institutionalization and symbol of white racism, Jim Crow and the white supremacist mind-set that rationalized it rapidly proliferated across the South. The Plessy decision was the legal/constitutional bulwark of the inherently separate, unequal, and white supremacist world of Jim Crow.
The southern black struggle to defeat Jim Crow lay at the heart of the 20th-century civil rights movement. At the heart of the legal/constitutional war against Jim Crow were various legal campaigns. Pioneered by Charles Hamilton Houston, the ultimately successful NAACP battle against Jim Crow began in the 1930s and 1940s with a series of important legal victories that culminated in the Brown decision.
The 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education was a watershed in the modern civil rights movement. First and foremost, the landmark decision overturned Plessy, the constitutional justification for Jim Crow. The court unanimously ruled that the doctrine of separate and equal schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment–protected rights of the black plaintiffs precisely because such Jim Crow arrangements were inherently unequal and thus inherently unjust.
Southern white resistance to school desegregation was widespread and intense. Massive resistance—the organized regional white opposition to racial integration—undermined both. The Supreme Court’s toothless enforcement decree in Brown II (1955)—that the schools were to be desegregated “with all deliberate speed”—further undermined progress toward school desegregation and racial integration. In 1957, black students in Little Rock, Ark., backed up by the local black community, fought to integrate the all-white Central High School. That valiant effort in the face of furious local white opposition epitomized the kind of insurgent mobilization of local black communities necessary to realize what Brown mandated.
After Brown, the civil rights movement increasingly encompassed expanding and widespread grassroots campaigns to uproot Jim Crow in public accommodations as well as in areas like housing and schools. Indeed the insurgent spirit of Brown inspired a burgeoning direct-action phase of the movement, exemplified by the Montgomery Bus Boycott from December 1955 through November 1956.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott saw local blacks boycott the city buses for almost a full year in order to end the bus system’s degrading Jim Crow practices. The boycott grew out of one of the most famous moments in civil rights history lore: local NAACP activist Rosa Parks’s defiance of the local Jim Crow statute by refusing to give up her seat to a white person. Parks was not, as enduring legend has it, simply tired. Instead, Parks was a committed long-distance black freedom fighter.
As the head of the Montgomery Improvement Association, Martin Luther King Jr. helped lead the Montgomery campaign. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the organization of ministers that King subsequently created and led, not only modeled nonviolent civil disobedience; it also served as the institutional network that backed up the many grassroots campaigns King embraced. Soon King became not just the most important black spokesman of his time and beyond, but also one of the most important leaders in all of U.S. history.
In addition to the grassroots insurgency, the Montgomery struggle fought the Jim Crow city bus system in the courts. The legal battle worked hand in hand with the grassroots insurgency. The successful litigation led to Browder v. Gayle (1956), in which the Supreme Court upheld a federal court ruling that declared unconstitutional the Montgomery and Alabama statues requiring racially segregated buses. The legal victory indeed underwrote the successful conclusion of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
The Montgomery insurgency catalyzed the escalating civil rights insurgency. In early February 1960, four students at A&T College for Negroes in Greensboro, N.C., sat in at the downtown Woolworth lunch counter seeking to integrate it. The resulting desegregation campaign sparked an escalating series of desegregation campaigns throughout the South. These innumerable mobilizations contributed to the successful desegregation of stores and public facilities not only throughout the South but in the West and North as well.
Out of this student-led insurgency emerged the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the organization that would be the radical cutting edge of the movement. Along with the King-led SCLC and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), SNCC modeled nonviolent direct action, especially militant civil disobedience.
The 1961 Freedom Rides tested the nation’s commitment to desegregated interstate travel. In Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia (1946), the Supreme Court outlawed segregated seating on interstate buses. In Boynton v. Virginia (1960), the Supreme Court expanded the reach of the Morgan decision, outlawing segregated facilities for interstate passengers. The Freedom Riders were an integrated group that traveled from the upper South through the lower South. Mass media images of a burning bus in Anniston, Ala., the bandaged face of Freedom Rider James Peck lying in a hospital bed, and race riots in Birmingham and Montgomery, Ala., rallied the nation to the side of the Freedom Riders. In September 1962, the Interstate Commerce Commission outlawed segregated seating on interstate buses, sealing the Freedom Riders’ victory.
Insurgent action proved essential to the passage of the two towering achievements of the civil rights movement: the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The Birmingham movement played a crucial role in forcing the passage of the Civil Rights Act. The 1965 Selma to Montgomery March pushed Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act.
The 1963 Birmingham movement was a powerful black grassroots mobilization that fought to desegregate public facilities and to end discriminatory hiring practices. Boycotts, sit-ins, and marches galvanized the insurgency. When King heeded the call of the Birmingham campaign to help out, the mobilization kicked into a higher gear. King went to jail rather than abide by local orders that he not march, from which he wrote his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” compellingly articulating the urgent need for direct action to bring down Jim Crow immediately.
The Children’s Campaign, in which black youth participated in the marches, invited a vicious response from local police, who turned attack dogs and fire hoses on the marchers, including the children. These startling images horrified the world and made it clear that Jim Crow must be destroyed not only in Birmingham but everywhere. Coming shortly after the high of the 1963 March on Washington, the cold-blooded murder of four little girls in the September bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church only strengthened the resolve of the Birmingham Campaign, which soon succeeded.
The Selma Voting Rights Campaign fought to register blacks in an area where they constituted a majority but where, owing to racist barriers, relatively few were able to register to vote, let alone actually vote. In late 1964, at the request of the Selma Campaign, King and SCLC joined the SNCC-led protests. In early 1965, increasingly large and militant demonstrations against the racist practices of the local voting system led to growing numbers of arrests. The murder of Jimmy Lee Jackson, a black worker, by state trooper J. Bonard Fowler outraged the campaign and led to calls for a march on Montgomery from Selma to demand immediate action on black voting rights.
On Sunday, 7 March 1965, “Bloody Sunday,” over 600 blacks led by SNCC’s John Lewis and SCLC’s Hosea Williams began a march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the way to Montgomery when 90 troopers and deputies beat them, forcing them to retreat back across the bridge. Of the marchers, 56 had to be hospitalized. On 9 March, King led 2,500 across the bridge to the point of the infamous “Bloody Sunday” attack, but then heeding the police officials rather than forcing the issue, he led a controversial retreat back across the bridge.
On 17 March, however, King led 8,000, including thousands from across the nation, across the bridge. In Montgomery, King insisted before a crowd of 25,000 that victory in the voting rights struggle was imminent. The Selma Campaign generated enormous support for the Voting Rights Act, which President Lyndon Johnson signed into law on 6 August 1965.
The civil rights movement began to splinter in the mid-1960s. The failure of the Democratic Party to seat the interracial Mississippi Freedom Party delegation at the 1964 convention instead of the all-white official delegation soured many not only on the racial liberalism the party represented, but also on interracialism. The 1965 Watts Riot in Los Angeles and the many urban rebellions of the late 1960s signaled a growing black rage that the southern-based movement and its successes had left poverty and economic oppression untouched. These rebellions also clearly revealed intensifying black disenchantment with nonviolent direct action.
During the 1966 Memphis-to-Jackson “March against Fear,” James Meredith was shot as he sought to show that racial progress had come to Mississippi and the South. When Stokely Carmichael and Willie Ricks shouted the words “Black Power” at a rally during the march, they captured the escalating militancy of the moment. They likewise captured the deep questioning among a growing number of blacks regarding the efficacy of nonviolence. A small yet growing number of blacks began to embrace the call of leaders like Robert Williams and Malcolm X for armed self-defense. Growing numbers of blacks rejected the integrationism of the civil rights movement in favor of the racial nationalism of Black Power.
After 1965, King’s leadership showcased a growing concern for economic justice and opposition to the war in Vietnam. In 1968, when he joined the struggle of the Memphis sanitation workers for better pay and working conditions, he also spearheaded the planning for a multiracial Poor People’s Campaign on behalf of economic justice. King’s assassination in Memphis on 4 March 1968 traumatized the nation and, for a growing number of Americans, especially radical blacks, hammered the nails in the coffin of nonviolence. The black freedom struggle would never be the same.
WALDO MARTIN
University of California at Berkeley
Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–68 (2006), Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 (1988), Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963–65 (1998); Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer, eds., Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s (1990); Vincent Harding, There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (1982); Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality (1975); Manning Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America, 1945–2006 (2007); Howell Raines, My Soul Is Rested: Movement Days in the Deep South Remembered (1977); Harvard Sitkoff, The Struggle for Black Equality (2008); Patricia Sullivan, Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement (2009).
Mexican Americans actively struggled for civil rights in the United States throughout the 20th century. In the South and in Texas—the only southern state with a large Mexican-origin population—Mexican Americans experienced a pervasive segregation order that denied persons of Mexican descent basic equality and dignity. The Mexican American Jim Crow included the segregation of public places, neighborhood segregation, separate Mexican schools, employment discrimination and low wages, disfranchisement, and a general perception among white people that Mexican Americans were racially degenerate and inferior. Mexican Americans challenged this racism using a variety of methods, beginning in the early 1900s.
Labor organizing was at the forefront of Mexican American civil rights activism in the early 20th century. As many Mexicans and Mexican Americans understood, workers’ rights were civil rights. For example, Mexican-origin workers formed the Federal Labor Union (FLU) in Laredo, Tex., in 1905. The FLU represented hundreds of skilled and unskilled laborers working on farms and for railroad companies. The union called a general strike in 1906 to protest the low pay railroad workers received. After three months, the railroad companies agreed to a wage hike from 75¢ to $1 for a ten-hour day. This general strike was so successful that the following month the mineworkers represented by the FLU walked off the job. When the FLU threatened another general strike, the mine company settled. But the mine owners reneged on their agreement, another general strike failed, and the FLU folded shortly thereafter.
Union organizing represented a nascent struggle for rights that only increased throughout the 20th century, culminating in Cesar Chavez’s organization of the National Farm Workers of America in 1962. Mexican Americans successfully organized to resist poor conditions, low wages, and harassment. However, labor activism proved untenable, and victories won in one year could be lost the next. For Mexican-origin workers, as for all laborers who were economically poor, protesting was difficult because striking meant not working. Union organizing helped, but workers could not remain off the job forever.
Other groups advanced different agendas. El Congreso del Pueblo de Habla Española (Congress of Spanish-Speaking Peoples), founded in 1939, for example, pushed more aggressively for civil rights. El Congreso sought to improve the social and economic conditions of Mexicans in the United States. This meant that the group supported the New Deal, sought increased wages for the underpaid, and called for the destruction of racial discrimination. Aside from these goals, El Congreso had a bold agenda of encouraging unity among all oppressed groups, including the Mexican, Mexican American, white liberal, and African American communities. But it proved to be short lived. It was damaged by red-baiting, and the organization folded in 1942.
In addition to labor and civic group activism, many Mexican Americans looked to military service as a strategy for securing rights. Individuals and leaders hoped military service would prove to the majority Anglo population that Mexican-origin people were decent, patriotic, and honorable citizens who would sacrifice for the cause of the United States. Many also viewed military service as a route to citizenship (if they did not have it). During the two world wars, these expectations were only partially fulfilled, as many of the soldiers found racism in the military, and most returned home to find things as they had left them. While their hopes were perhaps misplaced, nearly 400,000 Mexicans and Mexican Americans served in World War II.
While Mexican-origin soldiers fought bravely throughout World War II, their compatriots at home experienced many problems. The U.S. government initiated the Bracero guest-worker program in 1942, allowing Mexican workers to legally come to the United States to work in agriculture. These “braceros” experienced a good deal of abuse and harassment, and their presence also depressed the wages of Mexican American workers. More problematically, race relations increasingly intensified between Mexican Americans and whites throughout the war period, culminating in 1943 in the so-called Zoot Suit Riots. White police and military personnel beat hundreds of men, tore off their zoot suits, cut off their long hair, and left the men bleeding in the street. These conflicts, which occurred in California, Florida, Texas, New York, and several other states, demonstrated that military service would not change the opinions of white people.
These negative events contributed to increased activism. For example, Mexican Americans had long opposed segregated education. In the 1950s and 1960s, civic groups such as the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) fought several important school desegregation cases. LULAC won the 1948 Delgado v. Bastrop Independent School District case, primarily by arguing that Mexican Americans were white and hence segregation did not apply to them. This case serves as an example of Mexican American white racial formation. Regarded as neither white nor black in the United States, Mexican Americans fell uncomfortably into a racial hinterland. White racialization proved a natural, albeit controversial strategy for securing rights. In the Delgado case and in the Bastrop schools, whiteness won some benefits, but in numerous other instances white racialization did nothing.
LULAC attacked another aspect of segregation with the 1954 Pete Hernandez v. State of Texas case. An all-white jury had convicted Hernández of murder, sentencing him to life in prison. On appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court, Hernández’s attorneys asserted that the trial neglected their client’s constitutional rights because Mexican Americans had not served on the jury. Instead of arguing that the jury was all white (and hence could not be considered exclusionary since Mexican Americans were classified as white), the lawyers declared that Mexican Americans were a separate class of white people who could not be excluded from jury service. The court agreed and concluded that exclusion of Mexican Americans as a group of whites, distinct from Anglos, violated their rights.
In addition to legal activism, Mexican Americans began to politically organize in the 1950s and 1960s. One of the most important political campaigns occurred in Crystal City, Tex. In 1961, local leaders organized the Citizens Committee for Better Government (CCBG) to challenge the white families who had controlled local politics for decades. With support from the newly founded statewide Political Association of Spanish-Speaking Organizations (PASO) and funding from the Teamsters Union, the CCBG began registering Mexican American voters for the 1963 city council elections. The group also ran five candidates—“Los Cinco Candidatos”—for the election (Juan Cornejo, Manuel Maldonado, Reynaldo Mendoza, Antonio Cárdenas, and Mario Hernández). The registration and voting drive ensured that “Los Cinco Candidatos” beat all five white incumbents, replacing the Anglo council with an all–Mexican American government.
The 1963 elections were a momentous victory in the Mexican American struggle for rights. But these democratically elected officeholders were treated like political usurpers, harassed by the Texas Rangers, and voted out of office in the next election cycle by a newly developed Anglo–Mexican American political machine in 1965. Mexican Americans understood they would have to more forcefully push for rights in order to win lasting victories.
That more forceful stance appeared starkly in 1966. That year, government officials began debating the establishment of a uniform minimum wage of $1.25 per hour for farmworkers as part of the War on Poverty. But Texas governor John Connally opposed the idea. Farmworkers in the Rio Grande Valley therefore walked off the job in the summer of 1966. To dramatize their plight, they also planned a march from the Rio Grande Valley to Austin. They set out on Independence Day to highlight the symbolism of the protest. This Minimum Wage March took over 65 days to complete. The marchers hoped to meet Governor Connally in Austin and convince him that he should publicly endorse a $1.25 minimum wage, but he refused.
In the end, the strikers failed to secure the desired minimum wage. In many ways, however, the protest succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of most of its participants. The march proved to many Mexican Americans that nonviolent, direct action demonstrations could unite the Mexican-origin community. Many began to embrace a new sense of what it meant to be a person of Mexican descent living in America. This more radical or militant group of Mexican Americans looked to civil disobedience and social activism to challenge racism. They also rejected whiteness as a civil rights strategy. Mexican Americans, they argued, were brown, not white, people. With this new racial focus came a change in ethnic identification. No longer content with being Latin American, Spanish American, or even Mexican American, these activists adopted a new name for themselves—Chicano.
In Texas, the main Chicano leader was José Angel Gutiérrez. He was born and raised in Crystal City and had his first taste of civil rights activism during the campaign of “Los Cinco Candidatos.” Gutiérrez helped form two of the most important Chicano organizations. The first group was the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO), founded in San Antonio in 1967. MAYO was a student-centered, militant, direct-action organization that protested police brutality, the Vietnam War, and racism more generally. MAYO sprouted dozens of chapters that battled for civil rights across the state.
In addition to MAYO, Gutiérrez also helped found La Raza Unida Party (RUP, the United People’s Party) in 1970. RUP fielded Chicano political candidates who would be accountable to the Latino community. RUP’s initial focus was on local elections in Crystal City. Gutiérrez ran as a RUP candidate for a seat on the school board. The party also fielded two candidates for city council in Crystal City and ran candidates for all at-large positions in the four counties surrounding Crystal City. A total of 15 RUP candidates won election, including Gutiérrez. RUP’s first political outing was a success that inspired the Chicano community across the Southwest.
RUP next joined the 1972 Texas gubernatorial contest. The party ran Ramsey Muñiz, a Waco attorney and a popular former college football star. When the votes were tallied, Muñiz garnered an impressive 6 percent of the vote (or approximately 200,000 votes). RUP ran Muñiz for governor again in 1974. But political infighting within RUP damaged his chances for victory, and he was once again defeated (he received 190,000 votes). RUP’s statewide losses in Texas fractured the party. Muñiz’s defeat and his subsequent arrests for drug possession seriously damaged the party’s credibility. Its demise in many ways represented the end of the Chicano movement.
The Chicano movement witnessed the headiest days of Mexican American civil rights activism. The broader Mexican American freedom struggle sought political clout, an end to anti-Mexican racism, and, in the Chicano period, the basic reframing of what it meant to be Mexican in America. While Mexican Americans sought acceptance during the initial phase of the struggle, Chicanos aggressively demanded that acceptance and inclusion. No longer were Mexican Americans viewed as white, without a past, or foreigners. Rather, Chicanos argued for Mexican American cultural pride, nationalism, self-defense, the teaching of Chicano history, and the understanding that Chicanos were a distinct ethnic minority community in the United States. The basic ways in which the Mexican American community is perceived in the United States today is largely a result of Mexican American civil rights activism in previous decades.
BRIAN D. BEHNKEN
Iowa State University
Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos (2010); Brian D. Behnken, Fighting Their Own Battles: Mexican Americans, African Americans, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Texas (2011); Patrick J. Carroll, Felix Longoria’s Wake: Bereavement, Racism, and the Rise of Mexican American Activism (2003); Ignacio M. García, White but Not Equal: Mexican Americans, Jury Discrimination, and the Supreme Court (2008); Mario T. García, Mexican Americans: Leadership, Ideology, and Identity, 1930–1960 (1989); George Mariscal, Brown-Eyed Children of the Sun: Lessons from the Chicano Movement, 1965–1975 (2005); Benjamin Márquez, LULAC: The Evolution of a Mexican-American Political Organization (1993); David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (1987); Armando Navarro, The Cristal Experiment: A Chicano Struggle for Community Control (1998); Cynthia Orozco, No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (2009); F. Arturo Rosales, Chicano! The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (1997); Guadalupe San Miguel, “Let All of Them Take Heed”: Mexican-Americans and the Campaign for Educational Equality in Texas, 1910–1981 (1987); Zaragosa Vargas, Labor Rights Are Civil Rights: Mexican American Workers in Twentieth-Century America (2004).
The convict lease system was the means by which southern states dealt with their post–Civil War prisoners. Under this regimen, convicts were leased to individuals or corporations, who thus acquired a captive labor force and at the same time agreed to supervise it. As a result, the industrial landscape of the New South was dotted with prison work camps and stockades, home to inmates who were overwhelmingly (roughly 90 percent) African American. At their worst, these facilities afforded examples of human misery that shocked contemporaries and gave southern corrections a bad reputation.
Apologists pointed out that the state governments were impoverished, that penitentiaries erected before the war were destroyed, and that state and local officials had no reliable mechanism of control over recently freed black populations. In fact, models for privately run prisons were already in place. As early as 1825, Kentucky had leased its inmates to a businessman who sought to turn the penitentiary at Frankfort into a factory. In 1846, Alabama legislators leased the “Walls” at Wetumpka to the first of a series of entrepreneurs. The lure of turning a debit into a credit through off-site labor appealed to postwar officials, Republicans and former Confederates alike.
The convict lease system should be understood as a child of slavery. White southerners (and many northerners) believed that African Americans needed the tutelage of their former masters—that left to their own devices, freedmen would fall into idleness and crime. Judges imbued with these beliefs found themselves dealing with a range of behaviors (ranging from genuinely criminal acts to mere rudeness) that once would have been handled extralegally by plantation discipline. In the post-Reconstruction world, such offenses were punished by hard labor for the state or county. Judges of the period exercised considerable discretion in sentencing, taking into account the labor needs of sheriffs or lessees. Sentences tended to be long. Of 1,200 convicts leased by Georgia in 1880, over 500 were serving terms of 10 years or more. In Texas, with more than 2,300 incarcerated in 1882, only two men were sentenced for less than 10 years.
By the 1880s, several states had given their convicts over to large corporations. This had the merit of administrative simplicity and was also financially attractive. Georgia in 1876 divided 1,100 prisoners among three companies, each of which agreed to pay the state $25,000 per year. Tennessee and Alabama made their arrangements with the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company (TCI). In 1890, more than 800 Alabama convicts worked in TCI mines, for which the state was paid more than $180,000—6 percent of its yearly income. It would be an oversimplification to argue that the South was following the “Prussian Road” of authoritarian development. On the other hand—in light of many alliances between entrepreneurs and ultraconservative Bourbon politicians—it is true that racial ideology and law converged for the benefit of New South industrialists. The latter gained both cheap labor and a ready-made strikebreaking force.
Yet the concentration of convicts made them more visible to journalists, reformers, and other critics of the system. An assertion made during the period was that convict leasing was worse than slavery—that, as Woman’s Christian Temperance Union leader Julia Tutwiler said in 1890, it had all of slavery’s evils without the personal contact and paternalism that she viewed as “ameliorating features.” She was right to think that most lessees had few occasions to look upon their laborers as individuals and only the slightest of economic motives to promote their welfare. The frequency of escapes was such that camp managers tended to fire lenient guards and to employ shackles and close confinement whenever possible. The results were poor sanitation and scandalously high mortality from disease and accidents. While 1 to 2 percent of northern prisoners died each year, death rates of 15 percent were not unknown in the South.
Critics of the system were a diverse group and included the African American leaders Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Mary Church Terrell, white women activists like Tutwiler and Georgia’s Rebecca Felton, agrarian politicians and labor activists who opposed corporate power, and an intriguing number of well-placed, otherwise conventional whites who can be called “Bourbon reformers.” The most celebrated of the latter was the Louisiana writer George Washington Cable, whose nonfiction work eloquently denounced racial discrimination and southern penal practices. These disparate elements did accomplish certain reforms in the 1880s and 1890s.
Administratively, these years saw the creation of stronger state regulatory boards, staffed by men who were acquainted with professional organizations such as the National Prison Association. Through these boards (and with persistent lobbying by women’s organizations), the states mandated improved standards of housing, diet, and health care and began to provide educational facilities for inmates. During the same period, the states began to exclude female prisoners and minors from the camps, placing them in separate facilities. By the turn of the century, reformist and anticorporate influences were strong enough to put some states on the road to ending the lease system, initially by working convicts on state-owned farms. A leader in this development was Mississippi, which took steps to abolish the lease system in its 1890 constitution (interestingly, the same constitution that effectively disfranchised black voters) and had opened Parchman Farm by 1901.
For all these improvements, the convict lease system was irredeemably flawed. This is evident in the career of R. H. Dawson, chief inspector of the Alabama Department of Corrections (1883–96). A true Bourbon reformer, Dawson saw himself as a mediator between the convicts and TCI, the state’s chief lessee. Each prisoner was expected to produce 4,000 pounds of usable coal per day; Dawson worked to ensure honest time keeping and decent living conditions. To improve morale and fend off vice, he distributed writing materials and encouraged letter writing. Thus, miners could stay in touch with their families and more easily report corporate rule breaking. He gave each convict a card with two dates written on it: the date of the man’s full-sentence release and the date of his “short-time” release for good behavior. For several years, Dawson’s methods seemed to work, and convicts each had a fighting chance to survive prison—and to leave it with coal-mining skills, which many proceeded to put to use.
Yet, in the 1890s, TCI officials steadily undermined Dawson’s achievements. Guards goaded prisoners into riots that wrecked their “short-time” status. Company bosses bribed or pressured inmates into overtime work in exchange for company scrip that fueled gambling and black market activities. Clearly, the lessees preferred to handle overburdened, dissolute men, and Dawson concluded that the kind of order he was promoting—prison run as a school of discipline—could not take hold within the convict lease system. Gov. Thomas Goode Jones (1890–94) agreed, and under his administration the state prepared to shift its corrections to Mississippi-style prison farming. However, the Panic of 1893 touched off a crisis of state finance, and Jones’s successors preserved the always-profitable mining lease.
The eventual decline of convict leasing came about as a result of several factors: middle-class concerns over child labor, illiteracy, and public health; election of progressive Democrats such as Georgia’s governor Hoke Smith (a major actor in that state’s 1908 abolition of the lease); and the “good roads” movement in Georgia, North Carolina, and other states, which shifted convict labor to the highways under state control. State sponsorship of private unfree labor ended with Alabama’s 1928 laws terminating the convict lease. But public laws had little to do with the survival of a parallel regime—peonage—still very much alive in the 1930s.
Large numbers of African American farmers were sharecroppers who paid the landowner half their crops in addition to the value of supplies received. Declining prices of staple crops almost guaranteed that such men (and their white counterparts) fell deeper into debt each year, thus creating a class of hopeless debtors. When plantation owners compelled tenants to work out their debts, the result was peonage. Across the region, contract labor laws criminalized breach of contract, opening the way for shadowy collaborations between planters and local law enforcement. Under this system, a justice of the peace would arrange for a defaulting debtor to be arrested and fined on charges that might or might not be entered on his books. The landowner would appear, pay the fine, and be granted custody. Now the peon had to work out the fine (and the rest of his indebtedness) or risk another arrest. Though such practices appear (correctly) to modern eyes as a crude restoration of master-slave relations, they also meshed perfectly with a long-lived stereotype of black folk and poor whites alike—that the working classes must be forced to work.
Peonage was widespread in the Cotton Belt, in Florida’s turpentine camps, and in other settings of isolation and poverty. Nonetheless, in the early 1900s, a number of federal officials, most of whom were Republicans, joined forces with black spokesmen and a sprinkling of Bourbon reformers to challenge these practices. Acting under an 1867 statute, U.S. attorneys brought cases before district judges Charles Swayne (Florida), Thomas Goode Jones (Alabama), Emory Speer (Georgia), and Jacob Trieber (Arkansas). Their greatest success came in Alabama, where Judge Jones and Booker T. Washington quietly supported a state case, Alonzo Bailey v. Alabama (1911), in which the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Alabama’s contract labor law. Subsequently (in U.S. v. Reynolds, 1914), the High Court also struck down Alabama’s practice of assigning prisoners to private citizens. Still, these victories did not end peonage. So long as debt reigned supreme, so long as planters and industrialists were patrons of local lawmen, the corrupt regime could flourish.
PAUL M. PRUITT JR.
Bounds Law Library
University of Alabama
Brent Jude Aucoin, “‘A Rift in the Clouds’: Southern Federal Judges and African-American Civil Rights, 1885–1915” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Arkansas, 1999); Mary Ellen Curtin, Black Prisoners and Their World: Alabama, 1865–1900 (2000); Pete Daniel, The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901–1969 (1990); Matthew J. Mancini, One Dies, Get Another: Convict Leasing in the American South, 1866–1928 (1996); Blake McKelvey, American Prisons: A History of Good Intentions (1977); David M. Oshinsky, Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (1996); Paul M. Pruitt Jr., Reviews in American History (September 2001); Hilda Jane Zimmerman, “Penal Systems and Penal Reforms in the South since the Civil War” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina, 1947).
In April 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. was jailed for his role in a nonviolent protest against racial segregation in Birmingham, Ala. From the jaws of the southern criminal justice system, the southern jail, King put pen to paper to write “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” a powerful indictment of racial injustice that skewered white moderates for undermining progress on integration and other matters. Southern moderates, King believed, were “more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice.” King’s words resonated as the black freedom struggle confronted a white-dominated criminal justice system and well described the criminal justice system in the American South throughout much of its history: often more devoted to order than to justice, conventionally defined, and committed to an order first dedicated to and then tainted by the legacy of racial subjugation.
Criminal justice in the American South developed in the political and social climate created by slavery, as white southerners shaped its founding institutions from their position atop the backs of black slaves. The system they built operated by and large to protect the interests and human property of slave owners; this required achieving a careful balance between denying black slaves basic rights, granting white slave owners extraordinary privileges, and giving whites who did not own slaves enough power to invest them in the slave system but not enough to challenge it. The laws that governed white authority over slaves, first set down in Virginia in the early 1700s and soon reproduced around the South, extended beyond the boundaries of the plantation to establish a criminal justice system that operated according to the race of defendants and victims. It was a system that diminished the culpability of white perpetrators and enhanced the value of white victims; conversely, African American victims of crime found little protection under the law, which punished harshly those African Americans accused or convicted of crimes.
As a result, both before and after the Civil War, some forms of violence against blacks were not considered crimes, either socially or legally, including the sexual violence and the beatings—and sometimes the killings—visited on slaves by their masters. Similarly, lynchings, though technically illegal, often were not considered crimes socially, and if they were, disapproval was the only consequence suffered by the perpetrators, who were rarely arrested and charged. Furthermore, many white southerners understood lynching to work in concert with, or at least nip at the heels of, the formal legal system: opponents of lynching thought courtroom trials with satisfactory outcomes discouraged lynchings, while proponents believed lynchings encouraged “satisfactory” outcomes in courtroom trials. Thus the threat of lynching that hung over black men, even those arrested and standing trial, was both real and overt. No more so than in the 1880s and 1890s, when lynchings became increasingly frequent, brutal, and race based.
African American suspects who avoided extralegal violence entered the formal criminal justice system at considerable disadvantage, with limited or entirely curtailed rights. They were rarely found not guilty and were often punished violently and publicly, with the aim that their suffering would serve as a lesson for their peers. Judges and justices wrestled over a crucial irony here: as defendants in court, slaves were treated as human beings, even more gravely accountable for their actions than whites, but outside the courtroom, they were considered property. This dual identity meant slaves were more likely to face harsh punishments both within the formal criminal justice system and under the more informal slave justice system they faced outside it. Free blacks often found themselves constrained by and punished under the same laws that regulated slave behavior.
The period between the end of the Civil War and the civil rights era found much of the criminal justice apparatus in the South bent toward controlling the social, political, and working lives of African Americans. Many whites who subscribed to the tenets of white supremacy in the segregated South, whether vicious racists or naive paternalists, believed that the point of contact between African Americans and whites should be control. White elites’ desire for control became particularly urgent after the Civil War, when hundreds of thousands of freed slaves sought their place in southern society. As a result, new laws targeted African Americans by criminalizing normal behavior, such as gathering in groups, carrying a firearm, entering town with empty pockets, or not holding a job, sending many to prison.
Prisons were notably absent from the southern landscape before Reconstruction. Historians have suggested a number of reasons for southerners neglecting their prisons (and for being slow to build a functioning court apparatus): the South’s low population density in the 19th century, southerners’ distrust of centralized power, and their reliance on settling disputes personally. However, it was primarily race that stunted the growth of the antebellum prison system before the Civil War and race that nourished it afterward. Under slavery, white southerners were repulsed by the idea that whites might be confined—and forced to work—like black slaves. Afterward, the need for black labor propelled the prison industry, laying the foundation for the thriving correctional industry of today.
The stewards of the rigidly segregated southern prisons reserved their worst treatment for African American convicts, who suffered privation and torture not only in jails and prisons but also in the far-flung work camps, where convicts labored for state government or for private companies that leased their labor. Widely publicized horror stories did little to stem southern states’ reliance on convict leasing and chain gangs to keep their prison population and punishment budgets manageable. Convict leasing and chain gangs lasted well into the 20th century, long after they were condemned as cruel and unusual. They were often miserable places, but southern prisons were no more horrible than their northern counterparts, whose early experiments with penology, including forced silence and isolation, today are considered forms of torture. In fact, the chain gang may be the southern criminal justice system’s only truly unique feature. Often, all-black chain gangs became a potent symbol of the region’s slave legacy, especially when exported north, as in the 1932 film I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.
As the penitentiary put down roots in the South, so, too, did the death penalty. Like imprisonment, the death penalty was once a punishment reserved almost exclusively for slaves, who were executed brutally and publicly to frighten the slave population into submission. In the early 20th century, southern governments centralized executions, taking control from sheriffs and executing criminals in a central location. The death penalty in the South claimed the lives of a disproportionate number of African Americans. Southern states alone maintained rape as a capital crime, executing virtually only African American men convicted of raping white females. As late as the 1960s, when African American civil rights activists were loudly objecting to the influence of white supremacy on law enforcement, black men were being executed for raping white women after convictions by all-white juries. Such convictions and executions represented the criminalization of social contact between African American men and white women and held fast the line drawn by lynching decades earlier and the antimiscegenation laws that followed.
Well into the 20th century, court officials in the South maintained virtually all-white juries, finding legal justifications—such as “low moral character” or “insufficient intelligence”—to exclude African Americans without admitting to doing so on account of their race. These maneuvers helped skew trial outcomes against African American defendants and victims, even as the civil rights movement scored blows against racial discrimination. African Americans and other minorities facing trial before all-white juries faced predictable outcomes, given a criminal justice system that diminished the culpability of whites and inflated it for African Americans.
Historians have noted that African Americans and other minorities, such as American Indians, were not subject to uniform discrimination in the criminal justice system, pointing to the frequent paroles and clemencies granted to minority criminals. For instance, during many periods and in many southern states, African Americans on death row received commutations at a higher rate than whites. However, they often did so because trials of minority defendants were more likely to be marred by errors; because guilty verdicts often followed intense community desire for a death sentence, regardless of guilt; or because southern governors extended mercy to an African American criminal on behalf of the white community. Such acts of clemency often resulted from petitions by white citizens who vouched for the prisoners’ good behavior. Thus, the extension of mercy further demonstrated the power of the white community over the lives of African Americans.
The profound influence of race on criminal justice did not preclude interregional variation. In states like Virginia and North Carolina, reformers agonized about the inefficiencies of the criminal justice system and introduced frequent changes intended to increase efficiency and fairness, often before their northern neighbors did so. Such changes—including the centralization of the death penalty process—not only altered procedures but also moved southern states away from the personal, community-driven justice that embedded racial codes in the legal culture. Yet new processes often changed the criminal justice system more in form than in function, as dramatically revealed in Tim Tyson’s Blood Done Sign My Name, an account of the 1970 murder of a black man in Oxford, N.C. The man’s white killer was never convicted.
Edward Ayers, whose Vengeance and Justice remains the authoritative historical work on criminal justice in the American South, argues that crime and punishment demonstrate the region’s continuity with its past, writing that “among every new generation walk the ghosts of the old.” Yet unlike the specters left behind by duelists and brawlers, the pernicious influence of race on the administration of criminal justice remains real in the modern-day South. African Americans and other minorities are imprisoned at disproportionately high rates, are executed in numbers too high to be explained by any factor other than race, and remain underrepresented in courtrooms, except as defendants. Around the South, lawmakers have rewritten laws to define crimes and administer punishments in less discriminatory fashion, but nowhere is the power of history more evident than in the profound and enduring influence of race on criminal justice in the American South.
SETH KOTCH
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction (1992), Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth-Century American South (1985); W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (1993); Michael Steven Hindus, Prison and Plantation: Crime, Justice, and Authority in Massachusetts and South Carolina, 1767–1878 (1980); Heather Ann Thompson, in The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism, ed. Joseph Crespino and Matthew D. Lassiter (2009).
In “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” black novelist and autobiographer Richard Wright described the “ingenuity” required of black southerners who wanted “to keep out of trouble” with whites. “It is a southern custom that all men must take off their hats when they enter an elevator,” Wright explained. “And especially did this apply to us blacks with rigid force.” Unable to remove his hat in an elevator one day because his arms were full of packages, Wright faced two white men who stared at him “coldly.” Finally, one of the men took off Wright’s hat and placed it on top of his packages. “Now the most accepted response for a Negro to make under such circumstances is to look at the white man out of the corner of his eye and grin,” Wright wrote. “To have said: ‘Thank you!’ would have made the white man think that you thought you were receiving from him a personal service. For such an act I have seen Negroes take a blow in the mouth. Finding the first alternative distasteful, and the second dangerous, I hit upon an acceptable course of action which fell safely between these two poles. I immediately—no sooner than my hat was lifted—pretended that my packages were about to spill, and appeared deeply distressed with keeping them in my arms. In this fashion I evaded having to acknowledge his service, and, in spite of adverse circumstances, salvaged a slender shred of personal pride.”
Many autobiographers, historians, and other observers have commented on the customs that guided day-to-day encounters between blacks and whites in the Jim Crow South. Like Wright, they have noted that the definition of good manners depended on one’s race, that there were “accepted responses” for blacks to use with whites and vice versa, and that rules of appropriate behavior applied to blacks with especially rigid force. Increasingly, this “etiquette of race relations” has attracted the attention of scholars interested in its purpose and effects, as well as its significance to historical interpretations of the Jim Crow era.
Among the first and most influential of these scholars was sociologist Bertram Wilbur Doyle, author of an often-cited 1937 book titled The Etiquette of Race Relations in the South: A Study in Social Control. Doyle outlined customary forms of deference and paternalism between slaves and masters in the Old South and then offered myriad examples of how these practices continued, with some alteration, up to his own day. He also emphasized, and indeed encouraged, blacks’ “adjustment” to unjust social relations to a degree that seems difficult to comprehend, given that he was himself a black southerner. However, Doyle was also a student of pioneering sociologist Robert E. Park at the University of Chicago and, according to Gary D. Jaworski, believed in a “race relations cycle” delineated by Park and his colleague Ernest W. Burgess, in which accommodation was a step toward inevitable, if gradual, assimilation, during which time any evidence of conflict between the races signified a lack of progress. Doyle recognized that blacks’ performance of humility could be insincere, a matter of survival rather than belief. But his model provided very little room for theorizing black resistance.
Although more recent scholars have not adequately addressed the question of continuity versus change in racial etiquette and have almost universally disagreed with Doyle’s portrayal of black southerners as fully accommodated to racism, they have frequently adopted the word “etiquette” and drawn on Doyle’s work (as well as that of John Dollard, Hortense Powdermaker, Allison Davis, Charles S. Johnson, and other Depression-era social scientists) to detail the codes that governed interpersonal relations between blacks and whites under Jim Crow. In brief, these codes required blacks to demonstrate their subordination and supposedly natural inferiority, while whites demonstrated white supremacy. For example, whites denied blacks common courtesies, above all the titles “Mr.,” “Mrs.,” and “Miss,” while insisting that blacks be polite, respectful, and even cheerful toward whites at all times. In addition to using racial epithets and calling blacks of all ages by their first names, white southerners often substituted generic names such as “George” or “Suzy,” “boy” or “girl,” or the somewhat more respectful (from the white point of view) “uncle” or “aunt.” White men did not tip their hats to blacks, including black women, and to shake hands with a black person was a self-conscious gesture denoting unusual intimacy or noblesse oblige. Blacks, on the other hand, were expected to tip or remove their hats in the presence of whites, step out of whites’ way on sidewalks, and enter white homes only by the back door. In some communities, whites’ demands for precedence even extended to the roadways, making it perilous for a black driver to pass a white one. Blacks could also expect to be kept waiting in stores rather than being helped on a first-come, first-served basis, and many stores that relied on black customers refused to allow them to try on hats, gloves, and other articles of clothing because to do so would make the items unfit to sell to whites.
As this prohibition illustrates, racial etiquette distinguished between not only dominant and subordinate but also pure and impure, embodying the principle that, as Mary Douglas explained in her classic Purity and Danger, dirt is “essentially disorder” or “matter out of place” and thus can be threatening to the social order itself. “The most important of all rules of purity involved sexual contact,” historian J. William Harris adds, noting that “sexual contact between black men and white women was an extraordinary symbolic threat precisely because it occurred at the point where systems of race and gender intersected in the southern cultural matrix.” Within this matrix, whites sometimes perceived little distance between the breaking of one taboo and the breaking of another; thus, prohibitions against blacks and whites eating and drinking together on a basis of equality were upheld with almost as much force as prohibitions against interracial sex. (And both prohibitions were nonetheless also breached, as much recent scholarship on interracial sex in the South indicates.)
“All told, this was a social code of forbidding complexity,” historian Neil McMillen summarizes. Not only local customs but also individual whites’ expectations could vary, yet blacks had to try to anticipate what was expected of them. Failure to do so could result in a verbal rebuke, a beating, or even arrest and imprisonment or lynching. For all of its capriciousness, however, racial etiquette was “anything but irrational.” As McMillen explains, “If violence was the ‘instrument in reserve’—the ultimate deterrent normally used only against the most recalcitrant—social ritual regulated day-to-day race relations.” Racial etiquette “assured white control without the need for more extreme forms of coercion.”
Like McMillen, historians Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, David R. Goldfield, Leon F. Litwack, and others have wisely emphasized the role of violence in maintaining racial etiquette as an everyday form of social control. Important essays by J. William Harris and Jane Dailey have reiterated this connection but also theorized racial etiquette at a deeper level. Arguing that “race” is “a matter of culture; it is part of a system of meanings,” Harris understands racial etiquette as not merely reflective of racial power relations but as constitutive of “race” itself. Dailey is most interested in blacks’ everyday forms of resistance and the extent to which blacks’ and whites’ shared recognition of what civil behavior was and what it meant allowed “the discourse of civility itself” to become “a primary mode of confrontation” for blacks and whites in street-level encounters. Dailey also notes parallels between post–Civil War practices of racial etiquette and older notions of “honor” that, as Bertram Wyatt-Brown and other historians have argued, had long been dear to white southerners, especially white men.
Focusing on racial etiquette can result in valuable insights about the “public transcript” of white dominance. Recognizing that racial etiquette and other “vertical” and largely face-to-face forms of domination continued to operate in white households, on farms, and in urban spaces such as stores and sidewalks that were difficult to regulate, Jennifer Ritterhouse argues that the “horizontal” system of segregation has occupied too prominent a place in historical scholarship. Although both legal and customary forms of white supremacy were important, it was largely the continued salience of racial etiquette that allowed the majority of white southerners to convince themselves that white supremacy was “natural” rather than violently and governmentally enforced. Considering the significant role that racial etiquette played in white children’s racial socialization (and, in an oppositional mode, in black children’s as well), Ritterhouse also sheds light on the social reproduction of the South’s racial culture and on women’s, especially mothers’, very important contributions to patterns of domination and resistance.
Used with care, the notion of an “etiquette of race relations” can reveal a great deal about southern culture. Nevertheless, as Richard Wright’s explanation of how he managed to “salvage a slender shred of personal pride” indicates, blacks were able to keep their emotional distance from the demands of racial etiquette and, despite the ever-present threat of violence, often refused to provide the “accepted responses” that Jim Crow customs required.
JENNIFER RITTERHOUSE
Utah State University
Jane Dailey, Journal of Southern History (August 1997); Allison Davis, Burleigh B. Gardner, and Mary R. Gardner, Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class (1941); John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town (1937); Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966); Bertram Wilbur Doyle, The Etiquette of Race Relations in the South: A Study in Social Control (1937); David R. Goldfield, Black, White, and Southern: Race Relations and Southern Culture, 1940 to the Present (1990); Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign against Lynching (1979; rev. ed., 1993); J. William Harris, American Historical Review (April 1995); Gary D. Jaworski, Sociological Inquiry (May 1996); Charles S. Johnson, Patterns of Negro Segregation (1941); Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (1998); Neil R. McMillen, Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow (1989); Hortense Powdermaker, After Freedom: A Cultural Study of the Deep South (1939); Jennifer Ritterhouse, Growing Up Jim Crow: The Racial Socialization of Black and White Southern Children, 1890–1940; James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (1990); Richard Wright, in Uncle Tom’s Children (1936); Bertram Wyatt-Brown, The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace, and War, 1760s–1880s (2001), Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (1982).
The temptation is strong to read our own ideas about race backward in time. What we know and experience today becomes the historical pattern. When considered this way, racial ideas and experiences assume an unchanging and fixed character. They become phenomena that are outside of human control, something natural or inevitable. But that is not the way racial understandings and experiences actually operate. When viewed from the perspective of the past and over a long period of time, ideas about human difference show themselves to be as much a creature of the specific conditions of a specific time and place as any other set of ideas or social practice.
In the context of the American South, a region long associated with some of the most labor-intensive of staple economies, ideas about race were tightly linked to productive and political life. Thus, as those economies came and went, expanded and contracted, and in some cases, disappeared altogether, what it meant to be black and white evolved and changed, too. Never static, never the same from one age or place to another, race and its meanings are a constantly moving target. Race has taken on the exclusionary characteristics of segregation and Jim Crow; it has been understood in the more inclusionary if equally as oppressive language of “my family, black and white.” Race has often been deployed by the propertied and the powerful to advance their own interests: as landowners, employers, bosses, women, and men. In some places and times, race has not mattered at all, and even when race mattered a lot, those notions of difference and the ideals they expressed sometimes mapped imperfectly, if they mapped at all, onto the day-to-day realities of southern life. Indeed, expressions of race and racial difference can be sometimes considered prescriptive as much as descriptive. Stuart Hall once famously wrote that race is the idiom through which class is lived. Class is messy, contingent, and contentious. It stands to reason that race is, too.
But racial difference did not initially matter, at least not very much. Other attributes and behaviors tended to matter more. Early colonial Americans categorized and divided along religious lines, seeing themselves and others as Puritans, Catholics, Anglicans, and pagans (to name just a few). They also organized themselves around lineage and community and split people between the savage and the civilized, a line of demarcation that was often deployed to distinguish Europeans from Native Americans. Products of a turbulent early Atlantic world, these ideas about difference grew out of and reflected a world in which English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch adventurers jostled with each other and with native peoples for a foothold in the New World. This is not to say that notions of race did not matter. Both Europeans and Native Americans recognized racial distinctions. But during the early years of settlement, no particular economy grew up around black people’s labor. As a result and as Ira Berlin explains in Many Thousands Gone, the kind of racial divisions that would become appallingly common in later periods were all but absent for most of the 17th century. Neither law nor custom, for example, made any significant distinction between black workers and white ones. Instead, they routinely worked side by side—sawing logs on the Carolina frontier and hoeing tobacco on Chesapeake plantations. When not at work, white servants, and the small number of black slaves who had gradually joined them, lived together, played together, prayed together, absconded together, and, not infrequently, married and raised families together. In a society in which it mattered more if a person was Christian than if a person was colored, even slavery itself was not firmly established. Burdened by none of the later assumptions that to be black was to be forever a slave, opportunities existed for early colonial slaves to change their status, and many did. Francis Payne, who had once been known as “Francisco a Negro,” brokered a deal with his Chesapeake owner that resulted in the freedom of Payne and his entire family. Others found their loopholes in early colonial laws that allowed men like John Graweer, who lived in a society that generally agreed that Christians ought not to be slaves, to win his child’s freedom by proclaiming a wish to raise the youngster in the Anglican faith. By the middle of the 17th century, as many as 30 percent of the Chesapeake’s black people were free, and a good many of them had accumulated substantial property in livestock, houses, and land.
But the world was changing around the Paynes, the Graweers, and all the others who had taken advantage of an early colonial society that was concerned about much more than race. By the last quarter of the 17th century, American planters had begun to reconfigure their labor forces. It was a process that began on Chesapeake tobacco plantations when, as access to and control over indentured servants began to slip, landowners shifted their attention toward African slaves. Once deemed too expensive and for cultural reasons too inefficient for plantation labor (everyone was bound to die in less than a decade, and it was easier to boss workers who spoke the boss’s language than it was to direct the labor of linguistic strangers), the percentage of slaves shot skyward. By 1700, slaves represented 20 percent of the Chesapeake population, up from 7 percent only 20 years earlier. In the Carolinas and what would become Georgia, the transition took a little longer. But Lowcountry colonists eventually abandoned their initial trade in deer hides for the more lucrative—and labor-intensive—trade in indigo and rice. Following the example of their northern neighbors, Carolinians and Georgians looked to Africa to meet those labor needs. By 1720, slaves in those colonies accounted for an astonishing 60 percent of the entire population, and a nervous white minority began to conflate blackness and slavery into a singular state.
Simply conflating color and caste was not enough for America’s colonial planters. They strove to institutionalize control over the people on whom their own fortunes depended by redefining race and its role in American society. In short order, the southern colonies developed new bodies of law that instead of treating workers alike, which had been 17th-century practice, departed from English common law to draw explicit legal lines between those who were slaves and those who were not. In Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia, legislators began to reserve the harshest punishments for the enslaved, decreed that children born to enslaved mothers would themselves be enslaved, and demolished any lingering possibility that Christianity might provide an escape route from slavery. To further distinguish free from slave, black from white, and to further secure the dominance of planter capital over plantation labor, colonial slaveholders assigned black workers demeaning, mocking, and dehumanizing names. They loudly condemned the growing population of the African-born for their “gross bestiality” and alien customs and reduced the quality and quantity of clothing customarily provided to colonial servants, denying to their bound workers the most visible trappings of “civilization.” This was a new idea of race and one that took deep hold among American colonialists, who, slaveholders or not, had come to appreciate the wealth slaves and their labor could generate. Thus, even in the wake of a revolutionary war fought for principles of democracy and manhood rights, the nation could rally behind leaders who, like Thomas Jefferson, claimed forthrightly that Africans and their descendants were a people apart, and a substandard people at that. Ignoring the children he had already fathered with the slave Sally Hemmings, it was Jefferson who, in a tortured logic that itself had been shaped by colonial racism, argued in his Notes on the State of Virginia that any improvement Africans enjoyed “in body and mind” from admixture with Europeans proved without a doubt that black “inferiority [was] not the effect merely of their condition of life.”
Jefferson’s words were more prescriptive than descriptive—wishful thinking of an intellectually and certainly self-interested sort—for even as he penned those sentences, exceptions abounded. Race in the abstract should not be confused with race in reality. Shaped as they were by specific historical circumstances, racial ideas and practices differed radically not only across time but across space too. Thus while the tobacco grandees of the colonial Chesapeake and Lowcountry rice planters were pulling out all stops to draw rigid lines between white people and black, other colonial Americans challenged those lines. In Charlestown (Charleston), S.C., for example, a city surrounded by densely populated plantations but also a city that depended on enslaved hucksters for food for their tables, white residents chose to excuse the aggressively entrepreneurial market women from racial proscription. In a very literal attempt to have their cake and eat it too, hungry townspeople redefined the women in ways that separated color from caste by recoding the hucksters as unruly women rather than punishing them as unruly slaves. Similarly, the Spanish and French, who had established toeholds along the Florida and Gulf coasts, subordinated racial difference to imperial political concerns, and, even as racial lines hardened in Virginia, Maryland, and the coastal Carolinas, the European colonists to their south welcomed Africans into their Catholic communities, stood as grandparents to black babies, and, with hostile forces always on the horizon, recruited black men (including former slaves) into their colonial militias.
But it was not just other Europeans who envisioned and enacted early America’s many and competing racial orders. Black people did too, and everywhere both slaves and free people doggedly articulated a sense of self that belied American slaveholders’ efforts to push Africans and their descendants to the outermost margins of social and political life. The female hucksters who staked out places at the center of colonial Charlestown’s public markets and the black men who drilled with Spanish commanders were not alone in promoting alternative racial orders. Throughout the Chesapeake, where planters’ practice of assigning small groups of workers to noncontiguous units of land gave rise to a culturally, geographically, and politically literate labor force, slaves quickly learned their owners’ language, adopted their owners’ dress, and, as front-row witnesses to souring relations between colony and crown, demanded that the principles of liberty and universal right be extended to all people, not just free and white. By the eve of the Revolutionary War, slaves in Maryland and Virginia were pressing up against—and threatening to march across—the racial divide on which their owners depended. Hundreds did once war broke out, abandoning slavery and slaveholders when the last royal governor of Virginia offered to free “all indented Servants, Negroes, or others” in exchange for military service.
Slaves further south were equally as creative, but in the swampy and sickly environment of the coastal Carolinas and Georgia the circumstances of colonial slavery gave rise to one of the most distinctive racial orders in mainland North America. There, a combination of superior numbers, isolation, knowledge of rice cultivation, and the presence of diseases particularly deadly to Europeans allowed enslaved women and men to win unusual control over their lives and their labor. But instead of appropriating European practices, as did their counterparts in the urban and Upper South, Lowcountry slaves created an African-influenced hybrid. Known as Gullah north of the Savannah River and Ogeechee south of it, theirs was a culture set apart by language, diet, dress, art, religion, music, and tools. Even the everyday practices of planting, irrigating, and processing the chief staple crop—rice—bore more than a passing resemblance to West African tradition. To be sure, the social and cultural order that emerged on Lowcountry estates continued to emphasize racial distinction, but what slaves created in the hinterlands of Charlestown and Savannah resisted the hierarchical system their owners aspired to. Different, yes—subordinate or savage, no.
The struggle for independence thrived on and ushered in a host of new ways of thinking about black women and men and the roles they should play in a young nation. The change registered most visibly in the Chesapeake region, where the combined effects of war, a declining tobacco economy, and a widespread commitment to Enlightenment ideas opened up fissures in a racial order inherited from colonial slaveholders. Determined to reconfigure labor forces and practices to meet new economic and moral imperatives, farmers and planters manumitted hundreds of slaves in the last decades of the 18th century and then hired them back as free workers. Between 1790 and 1800, the free black population in the Chesapeake region more than tripled. It was not change enough to restore the early colonial world of Francis Payne and John Graweer, where race had been just one of many markers. Nor were white citizens universally inclined to embrace the abolitionism that had begun to spread across the Atlantic and into New England communities. Nevertheless, the once-tight association between blackness and status weakened throughout Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and portions of North Carolina in the decades immediately following the American Revolution. In some locations, most notably North Carolina and the new state of Tennessee, free people of color even won the right to vote. But the effects of racial rethinking were limited to the Upper South. In South Carolina and Georgia, where the colonial staples of rice and Sea Island cotton retained their market value despite the disruptions of war, planters swiftly and violently reasserted control over their slave forces. Their assault paid off. By the last decade of the century, rice production had surpassed colonial levels, reinvigorating Lowcountry planters’ commitment to both slavery and its justifying ideas of race.
Despite the promises of the postrevolutionary era, slavery and its racialist substructure soon revived in the Chesapeake region. With the introduction of short-staple cotton as a viable commercial crop, the opening of the trans-Appalachian frontier, and, in 1808, the closing of the transatlantic slave trade, Upper South slaveholders quickly rediscovered a value in and market for excess laborers. Rather than freeing the black people they no longer needed, Virginian and Maryland owners elected to sell them. By the early 19th century, the Chesapeake had become a major slave-exporting area. Thus, even as antislavery advocates picked up momentum from Pennsylvania northward (regions that not incidentally had never developed a comparable dependence on slave labor), slavery’s champions were joining forces with a sympathetic national government to open a kingdom for cotton on the western frontier. Like tobacco and rice before it, cotton was a labor-intensive crop and one that growers thought best served by slave labor. And like the slavery that sprang up in the late 17th century, the exploitative system that arose in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and east Texas took shelter behind a welter of racialist ideas and the laws that enforced them. But the ideas of difference that slaveholders articulated as cotton drew them west reflected the social and political realities of a world in which slavery was coming under sharp attack by an increasingly radical antislavery coalition. Gone were the open references to black savages and the imposition of names that recalled barnyard livestock that had been all too common during the colonial era. Gone too were more visible manifestations of the brute force on which New World slavery always rested: amputations, mutilations, and the decapitated heads of dead rebels that colonialists would line up along busy roads in a grisly display of class power. Instead, more and more antebellum slaveholders chose to represent themselves as fatherly figures, stern yet benign paternalists who opened their homes to the perpetual children who were also their slaves.
Antebellum paternalism was a far more inclusionary vision of race than any previous American configuration, and one that brought black people into human society, albeit on a severely constrained basis. Permanent children, after all, require permanent parenting. It was a more explicitly defensive racism too, and its proponents hedged their bets by planting supportive struts in science, theology, and political economy. Eager, for instance, to deflect abolitionists’ complaints that slavery did violence to black people’s families as well as to Christian beliefs, slaveholders distanced themselves from slave traders, cautiously established religious missions to slaves, and argued loudly, as Virginian George Fitzhugh did in his 1857 Cannibals All! Or Slaves without Masters, that not only did the Christian Bible sanction man’s ownership of man, but that the nation’s slaves enjoyed a much higher quality of life than did northern and foreign wageworkers. These were powerful arguments, which resonated far beyond the boundaries of the slaveholding states, but science too found a national audience. Especially compelling was the work of Swiss paleontologist Louis Agassiz, whose belief in a hierarchically ranked animal kingdom informed American scientists, including Alabama physician Josiah Nott, who in 1854 helped to popularize a new human order, one that located Africans at or near the bottom of a taxonomy of man.
Historians call this multifaceted articulation of race the antebellum “proslavery defense.” It was a defense meant less to describe than to hide the horrors that continued to define black people’s lives. To be sure, the practices of slavery had evolved since the Revolution. The 19th century’s greatest staple—cotton—had its own rhythms and routines, characteristics that set it apart from tobacco, sugar, and rice. In contrast to the Lowcountry, where planters continued to organize agricultural enterprise around the task system, and the Chesapeake, where mixed farming and the intensification of industrial work gave rise to a much more elastic, diverse, and in many respects self-directing labor force, the slaves who made cotton labored in large gangs under the close supervision of an owner or his agent. They worked longer days and more of them, as planters seized back the Sundays and holidays that slaves in the Upper and seaboard South continued to enjoy. The slaves who made cotton often labored as strangers too, thrown together in new constituencies by an interstate trade that was notorious for fracturing families. Indeed, in the Chesapeake region alone, as many as half of all slave sales separated parents from children and one-quarter tore husbands from wives. Social and affective ties were not all that slaves lost to a changing commercial and political context. In this period, state governments banned the education of slaves, ordered ships’ captains to quarantine or confine black sailors on arrival in southern ports, sharply restricted the ability of slaves to gather together without white supervision, and debated evicting free people of color from slaveholding states, all part of an effort by slaveholders to strengthen their grip on black workers by isolating them from other influences.
As much as these changes disrupted black people’s lives, slaveholders once again failed to make reality conform to their rhetoric of race. Instead, the enslaved fought back, rejecting the world their owners thrust toward them. But what slaves managed to make of and for themselves continued to be shaped in small and large ways by the specific circumstances of their day-to-day lives. In the Upper South, where tobacco continued its long decline, new opportunities had opened for slaves in skilled work, mobile work, and industrial work, arrangements that destabilized slaveholders’ authority by giving slaves expanding authority over their lives. Agricultural routine likewise changed in ways that worked in black people’s favor. One of the most noticeable developments was the replacement of white overseers with black, men who were often slaves and often related to those whose labor they supervised. Edmund Ruffin, for instance, employed a black man named Jem Sykes at his Virginia plantation, and in relaying to Sykes, “& through him to his fellows, correct information” about John Brown’s attempt on Harpers Ferry, Ruffin implicitly recognized a shifting racial dynamic. Relations between black people and white people were not all that changed in the Chesapeake as cotton revolutionized the southern economy. Domestic order changed, too, and as a booming trade in labor continued to sweep enslaved teens and young adults away to Deep South plantations, those left behind reconfigured family and family obligations in order to accommodate a population that skewed toward the very young and the very old.
It was the vast stream of forced migrants, however, that faced perhaps the biggest challenge. Unlike the loved ones they had left behind, the slaves who followed cotton south and west had no choice but to restore order to their lives on new ground, among new faces, and against the heavy demands of planters whose primary interests revolved around profit. It was a slow and fitful process, for few antebellum slaves went to their graves without being sold several times, and changes of ownership invariably meant starting all over again. Nevertheless, cotton’s forced migrants eventually made friends, friends became families, and families gave birth to new generations. Some of cotton’s migrants were able to convert skills or a personal relationship with an owner into the right to keep a small garden or raise a few chickens. Rural churches appeared, too. But what slaves made for themselves on cotton’s terrain was at best a dim and distorted reflection of what they had known in their old homes. The difference registered most vividly in the case of gender relations and the ways in which cotton’s migrants understood their roles as women and men. Torn out of a world of increasing urbanization and economic diversification, one that invited women as well as men into public spaces, migrants to the Deep South discovered that by virtue of agricultural technology and tools, men and women occupied distinct geographic and, by extension, social and political places. The chores women performed for their owners kept them, by and large, confined to their home plantations: sowing, hoeing, and harvesting. Men did all that, too, but it was men far more frequently than women who delivered that finished cotton to market, who built and maintained public roads, and who, during slack periods in the agricultural year, were dispatched by their owners to join slave men from elsewhere in the South to work Appalachian and western mines, to turn timber into turpentine, and to lay the hundreds of miles of railroad track that proliferated in the slaveholding states by the late 1850s. These were experiences that introduced male slaves into a multicultural world described by one North Carolinian slaveholding ’49er as a “heterogeneous comminglement” of all the people of the civilized world. It was a world that most Deep South black women knew only indirectly and by secondhand means. Thus, while slaves in the Upper and seaboard South were reordering families and family roles to take into account the loss of what amounted to a whole generation, those who were made to migrate rebuilt their lives on a very differently gendered terrain.
Slavery died along with the Confederacy in April 1865. Its demise stripped southern landowners, planters, and employers of the chief mechanism by which they had for generations forcibly appropriated black people’s labor. The end of slavery did not, however, sever the relationship between the southern economy and race. Nor did war and emancipation mark the decline of cotton. Thus, while changing economic imperatives in the postrevolutionary era had prompted Upper South planters to reconsider (at least for a time) a racial order developed during the colonial period, the importance former Confederates continued to attach to cotton helped to keep intact a long-standing association between race and staple production. It was an expectation made manifest almost immediately following the Confederate surrender as former slaveholders scurried to recast labor relations on a free-labor basis. Determined to halt the revolution before it completely subverted a cherished—and exceedingly profitable—old order, planters generally acknowledged that henceforth they must pay for labor services once stolen, but few ceded much else. In most planters’ minds, managers, not workers, would be the sole arbiters of productive relations and brusquely denied to their ex-slaves any role in the bargaining process. Former slaveholders likewise anticipated “wield[ing] the bone and muscle of the negro” in freedom, as had been their custom in slavery, and insisted on the same obsequious deference from free people that they had demanded of slaves. It was a vision one Georgia planter captured in contractual terms when he described in 1865 ex-slaves turned wageworkers as the “Negroes once owned by him and now controlled by him.” The same vision informed the notorious and fortunately short-lived Black Codes, the body of law developed in late 1865 and early 1866 by southern state governments that represented an explicit attempt by ex-slaveholding constituents to restore capital’s sovereignty over black labor.
Former slaves were not impressed. Spurning both planters’ efforts to remand them back to a subordinate class and the racial structures that would keep them there, the newly emancipated envisioned—at least for a time—the possibility of a color-blind world. Believing that in leaving behind slavery they had also left behind the racisms that had been used to justify their oppression, a number of black Floridians spoke for the many when in the summer of 1865 they confidently announced to a senior Freedmen’s Bureau official that “we have no massa now—we is come to the law now.” But while it is important to understand that former slaves rejected ex-slaveholders’ efforts to use racialist ideas to secure working-class order, it is just as important to understand that freedpeople’s aspirations for their futures had been deeply shaped by their lives as slaves. Even as legal slavery expired, past experiences helped to give rise to what historians now acknowledge were a welter of black “freedoms”: those sets of ideas and expectations that guided black southerners as they sought to define who they were and the positions they should occupy in a free nation. Thus it was that the black men of the South Carolina Lowcountry articulated desires that emerged out of a past distinctly their own. Products of a labor regime characterized by a relative demographic and social stability, as well as by tasking, and convinced that they had earned a right to occupy, in freedom, land they had made productive in slavery, these men (and it was wholly men in this instance) pushed the national government to make good on its wartime promises to redistribute land to ex-slaves. “General,” pleaded one such community, “we want Homesteads,” positioning themselves in opposition not only to those who, like Louisiana’s sugar workers, accepted a future as wageworkers but to black southerners who had accumulated enough of their own property to look askance on any program that might jeopardize those holdings. In urban areas, it was often black women who articulated the freshest vision of freedom, drawing on personal experiences as hucksters and market women to lay claim to what most Americans—southern and northern—understood to be masculine civil, political, and public spaces. Indeed, in Portsmouth, Va., a group of longtime female entrepreneurs upended those mainstream assumptions by speaking not only for themselves but for their husbands too. It was an articulation of gender and race that their rural counterparts could not embrace. There, in the so-called Black Belt, where cotton continued to reign and where planters now looked upon black women and their babies as an economic liability (the “incubus among them,” some declared), black women elected to slip in the opposite direction. Rather than subverting conventional gender order, the women of the plantation South used what their husbands, brothers, and fathers knew and could do as workers to secure access to subsistence and shelter.
Southern African Americans reasserted themselves as classes, too, in the postemancipation nation. And while such expressions opened up yet more fissures among the region’s black population, it was also perhaps the one aspect of their efforts to define new roles for themselves in freedom that most unnerved white southerners. After all, it had been the very real threat of a working-class revolt that had prompted 17th-century colonial planters to abandon a mixed labor force for one composed almost wholly of slaves. But without the customs and laws of slavery to divide workers along racial lines, white planters and their allies had to devise new mechanisms by which to control and contain the black labor, upon which they continued to depend. Their answer was a lethal combination of terror, debt peonage, vagrancy codes, disfranchisement, and segregation known as Jim Crow. So long as federal forces remained on the ground in the former Confederacy and so long as northern attention remained fixed on southern affairs, white capitalists had to bide their time. They also had to systematically destroy any alliances black workers had forged with white workers and to convince the latter that their interests would be best served in a world defined not by class but by color. White supremacy, as Stephen Kantrowitz explains in a biography of South Carolina’s Ben Tillman, was hard work. But by the last decades of the 19th century, white supremacy was reaching its apogee. An endless cycle of sharecropping defined the lives of most rural black people, segregation trapped the black residents of southern cities into new urban slums, and reworked state constitutions had all but silenced what had once been powerful black political voices. Where black people refused to accept a new and exclusionary racial order, and where biracial alliances stubbornly stood their ground—as happened in Wilmington, N.C., in 1898—white supremacists pulled out their guns, confident that a North that was by then distracted by its own social, political, and economic problems would no longer rally to black southerners’ defense.
It is tempting to call this the end of the story, and too often we do. But stopping our analysis with Jim Crow requires that we accept as definitive a late 19th-century racial order that historical scholarship suggests was anything but. It also requires severing a long-standing connection between race and class. Neither of these is possible. The southern economy continued to evolve in the 20th century, pushed in new directions by the development of coal mines deep underground in Birmingham, Ala., by the final demise of rice as a profitable commercial crop, and by the growth of a timber industry that in the early decades of the 20th century would give rise to the corporate plantations that made the Mississippi Delta an American Congo. World war sent another shock wave through the once-slaveholding South, opening up new opportunities for rural black workers in northern industry, a tectonic shift that, among other things, prompted southern employers to begin replacing men with machines. And as had happened in the past, as the region’s economy continued to change, so too did ideas about race. Liberated from the vicious constraints of Jim Crow (though, importantly, not from discrimination), southern transplants in northern cities reconfigured themselves the most quickly and helped to animate a cultural renaissance, but as migration strengthened channels of communication leading in and out of the South, those who remained behind on rural plantations likewise explored and then advanced new sensibilities. Some embraced the internationalism of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, Pan-Africanism, or the Communist Party. Others—like the railroad men whom Scott Reynolds Nelson encountered in his search for the historic John Henry and the laundresses who amused themselves by dancing the nights away in Atlanta’s juke joints—put to music a black working-class aesthetic and, in the process, unwittingly laid the groundwork for what has become a global industry. What no one did as Jim Crow peaked and the world went to war was to stop moving, and neither have we in the 21st century. Though the southern labor force has grown progressively more complex with the introduction of Asian and Latino populations and the southern economy has dissolved into a global marketplace, race remains as it was in the 17th century: the preeminent idiom by which we organize—and reorganize—our lives.
SUSAN EVA O’DONOVAN
University of Memphis
Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (1998); Tera Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (1997); Philip C. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (1998); Susan Eva O’Donovan, Becoming Free in the Cotton South (2007); Calvin Schermerhorn, Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom: Slavery in the Antebellum Upper South (2011); Nan Woodruff, American Congo: The African American Freedom Struggle in the Delta (2003).
From the colonial period to the civil rights era, southern Jews have striven to acculturate into southern society, fighting to be defined as white in order to gain acceptance. Considering the racial hierarchies of the South, whiteness guaranteed Jews a safer position, even in a region considered less anti-Semitic than others. A chronological view of southern Jewish history reveals how, from colonial times to the Civil War, Jews have been excluded from white southern culture because of their religious practices, how, in the antebellum period through the Civil War, Jews who adopted a white southern mentality tended to be accepted as white, how, before and after the Civil War, Jews who crossed white southern racial lines faced ostracism from their families and society, how economic changes in the 1890s caused Jews to be scapegoated by white southern society, and how 20th-century fears of anti-Semitism forced Jews to embrace whiteness. In these ways, from colonial times to today, Jews have struggled to fit into white southern society.
From the colonial period to the Civil War, the practice of Judaism prohibited Jews from fully integrating into southern white society. Because they were few in number, Jews were perpetually aware that they were different. Christian fundamentalists—Protestants, specifically—considered both German and Sephardic Jews to be “Christ Killers.” In an effort to blend in, Jews emulated their southern Christian peers by modeling their synagogues after churches and moving Sabbath services from Friday to Sunday. Revered as the people of the Old Testament, Jews nonetheless enjoyed few political rights. The Virginia Law of 1705 prohibited them from marrying Christians or acquiring Christian servants. Both South Carolina and North Carolina prohibited Jews from political office. North Carolina law stipulated that in order to obtain office, one had to believe in the sanctity of the New Testament. Therefore, Jews could not hold office until 1858.
In the Civil War era, southern Jews were permitted to play a part in southern politics, but senators Judah Benjamin and David Yulee gained political access only by declining to openly practice Judaism. Indeed, both Yulee and Benjamin were discriminated against and even described as having African features. Despite the fact that he married a non-Jew, Benjamin was blamed for numerous problems the Confederacy encountered during the Civil War. Even when Jews disassociated themselves from their religion, they faced persecution from white southern society.
Judaism continued to complicate acculturation, but as long as antebellum Jews were able to embrace the ideals of what it meant to be southern and white, they could potentially fit in. Because they were perceived to be of an unstable racial identity, they had to prove their whiteness. To do so, some owned slaves—a way of asserting class privilege and confirming their place in the black and white binary of southern life. Jews who opposed slavery did so privately for fear of anti-Semitism, wanting to emphasize that Judaism was only a religion, not a complex identity. Another way Jews reinforced their identification as southern was by enlisting in the Confederate army during the Civil War. Ironically, Jews had escaped Europe to avoid military service, but in the South Jews enlisted to affirm their white southern status.
From the antebellum period to the 1890s, some Jews transgressed southern whiteness at the risk of ostracism, both inside and outside of the Jewish community. David Isaac, a German Jewish immigrant, and Nancy West, a free woman of color, raised children in a common-law marriage in Virginia before being brought to Albemarle County court. Effectively, their relationship had been ignored for 20 years because the South viewed Jews as being ambiguously white. Escaping the punishments usually meted out to interracial relationships, the couple saw charges dropped against them, paid no penalty, and were not imprisoned. Although not all relations between Jews and African Americans were prosecuted, Charles Moritz and Dorcus Walker of Pine Bluff, Ark., as well as Adolph Altschul and Maggie Carson of Natchez, Miss., established similar relationships. When German immigrant and peddler Altschul married Carson—a former slave—his family disowned him. In Natchez, Miss., the Jewish population had integrated well with southern society, so Moritz and Walker chose not to marry in order to conform to southern white racial hierarchies.
Other interactions with African Americans demonstrated how Jews transgressed southern whiteness. During the Reconstruction and after, Jews engaged in economic relations with African Americans. Furthermore, new Jewish immigrants to the South—largely Eastern European—held a different perspective on African Americans because they did not have a problem in identifying themselves as Jews. Lacking the history German and Sephardic Jews had experienced in the South, Eastern European Jews recognized a similarity in experience between themselves and African Americans. Jews had fled from the pogroms, while African Americans had faced the plight of slavery. The influx of Eastern European immigrants to the South was admittedly limited, but the few who arrived were markedly different from the Jews who had preceded them—to the extent that some were even accused of being black. With the exception of Eastern European Jews and a few others, in the post–Civil War period southern Jews mostly desired to maintain their whiteness and disassociate themselves from African Americans.
During the depression of the 1890s and after, surging anti-Semitism caused the whiteness of southern Jews to again be questioned. In a no-longer agrarian-based economy, Jews represented industrialization and conspiracy. The Populist Movement of the 1890s waged war against Jews, blaming them for the economic hardships of the South and causing the vandalizing of Jewish-owned businesses in Louisiana and Mississippi. Early 20th-century literature also reflected this mind-set. Albert Abernathy’s Jew a Negro (1910), the folk ballad “The Jew’s Daughter,” and Lucian Lamar Knight’s “Twentieth Century of the Jews” depicted the close intersection of Judaism and race, while the unstable position of Jews as whites came under even greater scrutiny during the Leo Frank case.
In 1913, Frank, a prominent Jewish pencil factory owner, was falsely accused of raping and murdering Mary Phagan, a white southern girl. An easy scapegoat, Frank was both Jewish and an industrialist. Even though the other suspect was an African American janitor named Jim Conley—whom a witness had reportedly spotted in a blood-stained shirt—Frank became the prime suspect. Newspapers sensationalized the case, paralleling Frank’s sexual behavior with that of African Americans and attributing his deviant sexual behavior to his innate Jewishness. Tragically, Frank was taken from his prison cell and lynched. His murder at the hands of an anti-Semitic mob signaled to southern Jews that they continued to be dangerously marginalized by white southern society.
The Frank case made southern Jews fearful of anti-Semitism, which inevitably caused them to be leery of joining the civil rights movement. Indeed, Jews embraced their whiteness during the civil rights era for fear that if they showed sympathy for African Americans it would only make them more vulnerable to anti-Semitism. Throughout the 20th century, the Ku Klux Klan had reminded southern Jews that they were different and vulnerable even if they were not always its target. Nonetheless, many southern Jews could not remain silent during the civil rights era. Not only had northern Jews and Jewish agencies (for example, the American Jewish Congress) championed African American rights, but the passage of Brown v. Board of Education associated Jews with the African American cause, inciting anti-Semitism throughout the South in the 1950s through the 1960s. Because Jews were blamed for the civil rights movement, white Christian groups like the Stoner Anti-Jewish Party opposed not only desegregation but the entire American Jewish presence as well. Out of fear, a significant portion of southern Jews opposed desegregation, and a few even considered joining anti-Semitic prosegregation groups like the Citizens’ Council. In addition, southern Jews even battled with northern Jews and Jewish agencies for publicly showing visible support for civil rights and heightening their precarious position within white non-Jewish southern society.
Southern rabbis at the center of the civil rights movement hailed predominantly from the North because there were no seminaries in the South. Temple bombings that occurred throughout the South in 1957 and 1958 and again in 1967 only reinforced southern Jewish fears of anti-Semitism. As spokespersons for the Jewish community, rabbis defended southern Jews for acquiescing to the white southern majority and fought Jewish agencies for pressuring them to join the civil rights movement. Southern Jews may have been more liberal than their white non-Jewish counterparts, but they remained reluctant to fight for African American rights during the civil rights era. This fear of being perceived as nonwhite persisted until the demographics of the southern Jewish community began to change. After the 1980s, southern identity shifted as more northern Jews moved to the South. With this came an ethnic revival (for example, openly wearing Stars of David) and a greater desire to appear more openly Jewish. The long-standing desire of southern Jews to conform to standards of southern whiteness was beginning, at last, to change.
ALLISON SCHOTTENSTEIN
University of Texas at Austin
Katya Gibel Azoulay, Black, Jewish, and Interracial: It’s Not the Color of Your Skin, but the Race of Your Kin, and Other Myths of Identity (1997); Mark Bauman, ed., Dixie Diaspora: An Anthology of Southern Jewish Life (2006); Mark Bauman and Berkley Kalin, eds., The Quiet Voices: Southern Rabbis and Black Civil Rights, 1880s to 1990s (1997); Jack E. Davis, Race against Time: Culture and Separation in Natchez since 1930 (2001); Leonard Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America (1994); Leonard Dinnerstein and Mary Dale Palsson, Jews in the South (1973); Eli Evans, The Provincials: A Personal History of Jews in the South (1997); Marcie Cohen Ferris and Mark Greenberg, eds., Jewish Roots in Southern Soil: A New History (2006); Seth Forman, Black in the Jewish Mind: A Crisis of Liberalism (1998); V. P. Franklin et al., eds., African-Americans and Jews in the Twentieth Century: Studies in Convergence and Conflict (1998); Eric Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (2006); Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century (2006); Bertram Korn, Jews and Negro Slavery in the Old South, 1789–1865 (1961); Julius Lester, Lovesong: Becoming a Jew (1988); Jeffrey Melnick, Black-Jewish Relations on Trial: Leo Frank and Jim Conley in the New South (2000); Robert N. Rosen, The Jewish Confederates (2000); Joshua D. Rothman, Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787–1861 (2003); Clive Webb, Fight against Fear: Southern Jews and Black Civil Rights (2003).
Since emancipation, the question of race has been at the heart of organized labor’s efforts in the South. As early as the 1860s, the nascent American labor movement confronted the dilemma that faced it well into the 20th century, namely whether to exclude black workers from unions as a means of limiting the labor supply, or to recruit African Americans in behalf of common interests. The leaders of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) (established 1886) often proclaimed the latter position, but in fact many of its affiliated unions, as well as the independent railroad brotherhoods, followed the former option. Most barred blacks from membership or relegated them to second-class status. Meanwhile, more inclusive organizations such as the Knights of Labor (KOL) (founded 1869) and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) (founded 1905), along with a handful of AFL unions, welcomed blacks, albeit with varying degrees of enthusiasm.
A more egalitarian strand of biracial organization emerged in the 1930s and 1940s, as the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) (established 1935–38) focused attention on the increasingly important role of black workers in the southern economy. Also important was the determination of black workers to form their own unions, sometimes apart from the mainstream labor movement. The most notable example of this development was the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, founded in 1925, which, under the leadership of Florida-born A. Philip Randolph, provided a base for labor and civil rights activism in southern communities. For most of the 1865–1980 period, racial factors were expressed as a black-white binary, but by the turn of the 21st century, the presence of large numbers of Latino immigrant workers was complicating southern labor’s historic narrative.
In the first decades of its existence, the AFL’s ambivalence toward inclusion of African Americans became clear. In 1891, the AFL convention castigated unions that “exclude from membership persons on account of race or color.” Many of its affiliated unions, however, barred blacks, either outright or indirectly, sometimes through their control of municipal licensing ordinances. One important example was the International Association of Machinists (IAM), founded in Atlanta in 1888. The IAM initially barred blacks from membership but eventually accepted a technical modification of its constitution that left the policy of racial exclusion intact. Meanwhile, the pages of the American Federationist, the AFL’s national organ, were peppered with dismissive commentary about black workers’ suitability as unionists. White-controlled railroad unions in the South were aggressive in their attacks on African Americans, often using violence and intimidation to drive black firemen out of locomotive cabs and marginalize them in the roundhouses and repair shops.
Despite long odds, biracial union activism sometimes emerged. The KOL, which flourished briefly in the mid-1880s, recruited thousands of black miners and agricultural workers. In the 1900s and 1910s, the IWW’s militant industrial unionism attracted activists of both races who built short-lived biracial organizations in southwestern mines and timberlands. In the coal mines of Alabama and in the Gulf ports, black and white workers practiced forms of biracial organization. The story in the Birmingham area, a rapidly expanding iron- and steel-producing center, however, was different and more characteristic. There, white metalworkers and smelter workers excluded blacks from their unions and insisted that they remain in subordinate job categories.
During World War I, opportunities for more equal treatment seemed at first possible. Federal agencies sometimes followed the logic of wartime mobilization to intervene on behalf of black workers in urban transport, in laundries, and on the railroads, but the sudden end of the war aborted this tendency. With the government’s backing, the brotherhoods quickly resumed efforts to drive blacks out of the operating trades.
The rise of the CIO in the 1930s and the labor demands of World War II, however, brought a more egalitarian brand of unionism to the South. Even before the birth of this federation of industrial unions in 1935, the United Mine Workers had reorganized in Alabama along biracial lines, and the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union recruited impoverished agricultural workers of both races. CIO activists appreciated the key role played by black workers in southern industries and sought to challenge the conservative political orientation of the Solid South. Communists and other radicals organized woodworkers, metalworkers, smelter workers, tobacco and food-processing workers, and others in integrated unions.
By the end of the war, the CIO could count about a quarter-million black members, perhaps half of them in the South. Even so, CIO activists found that they had to perform a balancing act in southern workplaces. Union-supported upgrading of black workers sometimes triggered violent resistance among the white majority. The textile industry, the South’s largest by far, remained lily-white, and white workers’ resistance to Communist-oriented CIO affiliates in cigarette manufacture, food processing, and metalworking remained strong.
Challenged by the rival CIO, the AFL began cautiously to address the problems faced by black workers. To be sure, during the war, affiliated unions that practiced blatant discrimination, notably in the booming shipyards and aircraft plants, flourished. Even so, AFL leaders aligned themselves verbally with the cause of racial equality. And some black workers in the South did find opportunities within segregated unions to attain leadership roles and to link their union activities to civil rights struggles in southern states and communities. By the end of the war, the AFL counted about 700,000 black members, over 400,000 of them in southern states.
After the war, both labor federations sought to increase their southern membership. In the politically conservative postwar environment, however, neither was very successful. Moreover, as the issue of Communism, both domestic and foreign, came to dominate public discourse, the leaders of the CIO distanced the industrial union body from its pro-Soviet affiliates, several of which had been in the forefront of biracial unionism.
Throughout the postwar period, the most significant developments affecting the relationship between organized labor and African American workers in the South involved the changing legal environment. Especially after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, whose Title VII outlawed racial discrimination in employment, African American membership in unions representing southern pulp and paper workers, textile workers, and other industrial, transport, and service workers expanded, owing in part to litigation brought by private parties and supported by the federal Equal Employment Opportunities Commission. In general, the national unions in these fields supported black workers’ employment rights and welcomed African American workers into the unions. In many cases, however, on the local union level, African Americans found white fellow workers, along with managerial and supervisory personnel, hostile and resentful. In some cases, black workers, deeming their unions little more than agents of white privilege, petitioned the National Labor Relations Board to terminate union representation altogether.
Just as black workers made inroads into previously all-white industries and trades, employment patterns in the South began shifting away from these very sectors. Thus, for example, in the 1960s and 1970s, African Americans made major employment gains in the textile and pulp and paper industries and began to gain entry into skilled positions on the railroads and steel mills, even as these industries began to shrink or to relocate. At the end of the century, the deindustrialization of the South accelerated, devastating southern unions in metalworking, transport, pulp and paper, and textiles and reversing employment gains African American workers had made.
African Americans in the South enjoyed somewhat more enduring success in the realm of public employment. In Memphis, in spring 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. eloquently connected the efforts of the city’s poorly paid and ill-treated sanitation workers—to gain improved conditions, recognition of their union, and respect—to the ongoing struggle for civil rights. Victory in the strike was, of course, tempered by the tragic murder of Dr. King in Memphis on 4 April. Sanitation workers in other southern cities, along with hospital and other institutional workers, boosted minority membership in such unions as the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, Hospital Workers District 1199, and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), organizations that stressed the connection between the civil rights movement and the efforts of low-skilled, poorly paid minority workers to gain both tangible improvements and greater respect on the job. The civil rights–labor connection, however, was fragile. Thus, for example, in 1977, Atlanta’s African American mayor Maynard Jackson fired striking sanitation workers wholesale, lest their rights-based activism jeopardize relations with the city’s white-owned banks and corporate investors.
By the turn of the new century, the demographic profile of the southern working class was shifting dramatically. Whole new industries such as poultry raising and processing emerged, employing thousands, many of them recent Central American migrants. In 1980, 2.5 percent of the South’s population was Hispanic; by the mid-2000s, the figure had climbed to over 8 percent. Examples of multiethnic and black-Hispanic union activism did emerge, notably in the entertainment, senior care, and institutional medical sectors. In Florida, for example, SEIU pulled together multiethnic coalitions of church and civic organizations to support organizing campaigns among low-wage native and immigrant nursing home and health care workers. At the same time, concerns about competition from immigrant workers and emotional public discourse over immigration reform highlighted perceived conflicts of interest between native black workers and their immigrant counterparts.
The history of the relationship between African Americans in the South and the American labor movement reveals a drift on the part of the latter toward ever-increasing degrees of acceptance and even cultivation. As organized labor’s presence in the South (and nationally) has continued to shrink, a labor movement once characterized by racial exclusivism has become increasingly dependent on minority workers (and female workers), especially in the expanding service sector. There is thus an irony at the heart of the story of black workers and the labor movement in the South: Even as organized labor has become more accommodating and progressive in its racial attitudes and policies, it has continued to diminish as a factor in southern life.
ROBERT H. ZIEGER
University of Florida
Michael K. Honey, Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign (2007); Timothy J. Minchin, Hiring the Black Worker: The Racial Integration of the Southern Textile Industry, 1960–1980 (1999); Robert H. Zieger, For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America since 1865 (2007).
Race has been a prominent theme in southern literature since the colonial era. It has been central to such southern literary genres as pastoral, plantation fiction, local color, and modern realism. In the 19th century, white writers generally supported white supremacy, and they used their works to create a normative assumption about the inevitability of white control and black submission. Slave narratives challenged such views, as did postbellum black writers. In the 20th century, a new critical realism came to dominate the literature of the region, exposing the ugliness of Jim Crow society. Southern writing has always been rooted in specific southern places, with racial issues tied in with local economic and social particularities varying from the Appalachian Mountains to the Tennessee hill country to the Mississippi Delta.
John Smith’s writings on Native Americans in early Virginia may lay claim to the earliest glimmers of a southern pastoral, working a dynamic between the Noble Savage in American nature and the violent heathen in the wilderness. Images of the southeastern parts of North America as a Garden of Eden early took root in promotional materials. The garden suggested biblical authority but also a pastoral tradition going back to the classical age, which projected images of innocent people in an idyllic version of nature. But the garden pastoral contained ominous premonitions of impending loss, the inevitability of displacement. Early writers offered a particularly Virginian version of this that came to characterize the developing regional pastoral—the slave was in the garden. Southern writers would have to labor to invent images of an idyllic, innocent community that was built on an exploitative slave system resting ultimately on violence. William Byrd’s Westover’s Secret Diary, 1709–1712 and Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia were early efforts to use the plantation as a setting for an emerging literature with regional focus. Jefferson created the white yeoman as an American type, a representation of Virgil’s shepherd. Jefferson’s status as a slave owner and his ambivalent views on blacks compromised his ability to define a convincing southern pastoral, a problem that would thereafter haunt southern white writers.
Plantation fiction became the defining literary genre of southern literature in the three decades before the Civil War, and its romanticized appeal would last a generation after the Civil War. It was a response to abolitionist fiction and nonfiction, which became widespread in the North in the antebellum era, attacking slavery on plantations as immoral and brutal. Slave narratives became a major African American literary form, the beginning of a long-standing literature of protest that has characterized black writing. Slave narratives portrayed cruel slave masters and mistresses and slave traders destroying black families, debunking romantic images of contented slaves. White masters would not acknowledge their mixed-race children in William Wells Brown’s Clotel; Or the President’s Daughter (1853), depicting specifically the child of Thomas Jefferson and his slave mistress. Frederick Douglass’s narrative, originally published in 1845, portrayed Douglass as longing understandably for freedom but restrained by slave owners who were barbaric. Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) presented a virtuous young slave woman trying to negotiate a system that encouraged sexual exploitation. In the 1850s, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) drew on many of the tropes of plantation fiction, and in the immediate years after its publication, white southern writers wrote more than a dozen proslavery novels defending slavery’s racial arrangements. In response to slave narratives and other abolitionist literature, white writers used the family metaphor, picturing the plantation as an idyllic scene for kind masters and contented slaves bound together in a patriarchal household. Scholars see John Pendleton Kennedy’s Swallow Barn (1832) as the first full-blown plantation novel. Its setting is a run-down but genteel James River plantation, where a northerner visits and recounts stories of singing slaves and courtly masters and belles. William Gilmore Simms was one of the best-known antebellum southern writers. He wrote a series of Revolutionary War historical novels, but he later became an aggressive defender of slavery, with Woodcraft (1852) portraying an isolated plantation with childlike slaves and a paternalistic planter family.
Race also appears as a theme in the history of Native Americans in the early 19th century in the Southeast. White land hunger led to a desire for Indian removal, at the same time that whites were increasingly imagining a South that would be defined by white racial dominance over Indians as well as black slaves. The physical removal of most southeastern Indian tribes to the West effectively removed, until recently, consideration of southern Indians as a part of southern culture, including southern literature, and left a view of the South as simply a biracial, black and white, place. Such Cherokee writers as Elias Boudinot and John Rollin Ridge wrote fiction and nonfiction that preserved the trauma of their southern experience.
Writings about the plantation and its racial patterns continued after the Civil War, its pastoral images now overlapping with a stress on picturesque elements, which appealed to the growing audience for local-color writing in the late 19th century. Such writers as Thomas Nelson Page, Sherwood Bonner, and Joel Chandler Harris were popular local-color writers in national magazines, with stories that looked back nostalgically on the time of the antebellum plantation as a golden age. The former slave became a key figure in this writing, offering fond reminiscences of the moonlight-and-magnolia plantation life and lamenting its loss. Many such stories were in dialect, including Harris’s popular Uncle Remus tales. Harris drew from African American folktales, most notably the trickster Brer Rabbit, whose subtext was always subversive of the slave regime.
Place was important to local-color writings, and one sees that significance in such Louisiana writers as George Washington Cable, Grace King, and Kate Chopin, all of whom were more critical of slavery than other southern white writers and who pictured south Louisiana’s complex racial identities. Two other southern writers, Mark Twain and Charles Chesnutt, offered the most direct response to the white racism inherent in plantation fiction. Huck Finn became a naive but insightful poor white observer of southern racial injustice, becoming a rebel against it, even if he did believe he would be condemned to hell for violating his society’s racial strictures. His slave friend, Jim, was an ironic black voice that punctured the plantation legend of a happy interracial family. The image of Huck and Jim on the raft presented the possibilities of an interracial friendship. Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894) denounced slavery and the unwillingness of whites to acknowledge mixed-race children. Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman (1899) was a collection of stories that featured a black character, Uncle Julius McAdoo, whose folksy stories taught visiting northerners that the antebellum South was far from an idyllic place and time, challenging the predominant tone of the southern pastoral with examples of slavery’s injustices. Chesnutt’s novels The House behind the Cedars (1990) and The Marrow of Tradition (1901) dealt with light-skinned blacks who passed for white and with the conditions relating to the Wilmington race riot in 1898.
Other black writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries constituted an important force in refuting demeaning stereotypes of blacks and protesting conditions in the Jim Crow South. Anna Julia Cooper’s A Voice from the South (1892) emphasized the need for black women’s education in achieving black middle-class respectability. Ida Wells-Barnett had to flee the South because of her forthright criticism of lynching, but her book Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892) continued her documentation of racial violence. James Weldon Johnson, from Florida, offered psychological insight into the life of a light-skinned African American passing for white in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923) was one of the most critically praised works on southern black life. Part one of the book paints a lyrical portrait of the southern landscape and black folk culture. The second part of the book portrays black life in the urban North, with none of the passion and beauty of southern black life but nonetheless home to increasing numbers of black migrants out of the segregated South.
The writers of the Southern Literary Renaissance, white and black, made race a major theme. Some, such as the Vanderbilt Agrarians, defended agrarian society as the defining feature of the South, virtually masking the role of race in regional life. But most writers embraced literary modernism, with its critical realism. William Faulkner was at the forefront of white writers who confronted the region’s racial realities and sketched memorable characters beyond stereotypes. Joe Christmas in Light in August (1936), Lucas Beauchamp in Intruder in the Dust (1948), and Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury represent a range of black characters centrally positioned in Faulkner’s work. The burdens of southern history preoccupied Faulkner, and he saw race relations as at the center of the region’s history. Dispossession of Indian land became the region’s original sin, and white injustice toward blacks was the recurring theme. Absalom, Absalom! presented Thomas Sutpen, a self-made planter who had come from the Appalachian Mountains, went to Haiti to make his success as a planter, and then came to the Mississippi wilderness to build his empire. Faulkner uses Sutpen to connect the South’s colonial story to that of the Caribbean Islands’ slave plantation society, and Sutpen’s refusal to acknowledge his mixed-race son critically addresses the white South’s obsession with miscegenation. Light in August (1936) presented the confused racial identity of Joe Christmas in a society determined to draw racial boundaries. Go Down, Moses (1942) explores the human interactions that laid the basis for acknowledging a biracial South.
Faulkner’s fellow Mississippian, Richard Wright, was at the forefront of a 20th-century tradition of protest against racial injustice by African American writers. Like Wright, many of these black writers were exiles from the South. Wright examined the psychological trauma of living in the Jim Crow South. His memoir Black Boy (1945) was about the aspiring artist growing up in an authoritarian society, recounting repeated experiences of daily humiliation and physical and psychological danger. Zora Neale Hurston represented a differing approach, celebrating black life in the South, seeing the rural black folk culture offering grounds for survival of racist conditions and a strong African American community. She insisted on the possibility of creativity and achievement, beyond the victimization that Jim Crow suggested. Hurston’s work looked at the private context of racially defined life, with less concern for political protest at segregation’s injustices. An anthropologist, she documented that black folk culture that her writing celebrated.
Race continues to be a central concern of southern literature in the contemporary period. Black writers like Toni Morrison in Beloved (1987) and Alice Walker in The Color Purple (1982) go back into southern history to explore the traumas and strengths of black culture. Larry Brown in Dirty Work (1990) and Madison Smarrt Bell in Soldier’s Joy (1989) write of the opportunities and limitations of interracial friendships among men wounded in the Vietnam War. Ellen Douglass’s Can’t Quit You Baby (1988) offers a rich study of two women, a black servant and a white employer, who have been linked by a lifetime of fraught interaction. Ernest Gaines’s novels, such as A Gathering of Old Men (1983), unravel the south Louisiana ethnic and racial landscapes, with interactions among African American and Cajun men. The civil rights movement has been the subject of literary production, including Alice Walker’s Meridian (1976), Mark Childress’s Crazy in Alabama (1993), and Nanci Kinkaid’s Crossing Blood (1992).
Two of the most important recent writers offering fresh perspectives on racial interaction are Natasha Trethewey and Randall Kenan. Trethewey, who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2007 and was named the nation’s poet laureate in 2012, offers through her poetry a reimagined southern history, with women and blacks as central figures. She revises a long-standing southern literary theme in her 2002 sonnet “Southern Pastoral,” which pictures her in the nonpastoral black metropolis of Atlanta, having a drink with the all-white, all-male Agrarian writers of the past. She also unravels the South’s mixed-race heritage through poems about her own family’s experience. Kenan used his childhood memories, growing up in a small North Carolina town that became the basis for his fictional Tim’s Creek, where characters recur throughout many stories. In his short story collection, Let the Dead Bury the Dead, he draws from rural black folk culture, and his magical realism stories include African lore, ghosts, and haunted memories. He writes of gay characters who often cross racial lines.
Increasingly, writers from a variety of social and ethnic perspectives are producing works that show the changing context of race in the South. Robert Olen Butler writes of Vietnamese in Louisiana in A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (1992), and Susan Choi’s The Foreign Student (1998) explores a protagonist haunted by his childhood during the Korean War, as well as his embrace of southern small town life. Cynthia Shearer’s The Celestial Jukebox (2005) presents a vibrant Mississippi Delta, with Asian, Latino, African, African American, Lebanese, and other ethnic characters suggesting a diverse cultural context. Native American writers such as LeAnne Howe (Choctaw), James Harris Guy (Chickasaw), and Diane Glancy (Cherokee) continue to write of tribal history and contemporary Native life with southern settings. Writers and scholars now see race as a socially constructed concept, and contemporary southern literature deals with race through blurred boundaries between ethnic groups beyond racial categorization.
CHARLES REAGAN WILSON
University of Mississippi
Thadious Davis, Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, and Literature (2012); Minrose Gwin, Black and White Women of the Old South: The Peculiar Sisterhood in American Literature (1985); Barbara Ladd, Nationalism and the Color Line in George W. Cable, Mark Twain, and William Faulkner (1996); Robert Stepto, From Behind the Veil: Study of Afro-American Narrative (1970); Eric Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (1993); Floyd C. Watkins, The Death of Art: Black and White in the Recent Southern Novel (1970); Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relationships in the American South since Emancipation (1980).
Lynching was arguably the most conspicuous form of a long-standing American tradition of vigilantism. In popular usage, it referred to a killing perpetrated by a group of persons working outside the law to avenge an alleged crime or to impose social order. By the 20th century, however, lynching also came to stand for racial oppression at its most horrifying, a result of the vast numbers of lynchings committed against African Americans during the Jim Crow era as a means to instill racial terror and enforce white supremacy. Even today, the term denotes an act of violence perpetrated out of racial animosity, fueled by a mob mentality that is quick to ascribe guilt outside the bounds of due process. Lynching, however, has had a long and complex history in the United States. The meaning of the term has changed considerably over time, and acts of lynching are not easily categorized.
The origin of the term has most commonly been attributed to Col. Charles Lynch of Virginia, whose extralegal “court” sentenced Tories to floggings during the American Revolution. “Lynch law” at first referred to any form of extralegal corporal punishment. By the mid-19th century, however, it came to refer primarily to lethal punishments. Hanging was the most common form of lynching, although mobs also shot their victims, dragged, beat, and tortured them, or burned them at the stake. Despite the gruesomeness of the practice, it was considered, through most of the 19th century, to be a legitimate, community-sanctioned form of violence. It was rooted in traditions of popular justice and local sovereignty, according to which a community punished crimes and established social order outside official legal institutions. In the antebellum period, lynching was not a predominantly southern practice; it was most commonly practiced in frontier regions, particularly in western states and territories. At this time, whites, Mexicans, and Native Americans were more likely to be the victims of lynchings than African Americans, although historians are uncovering more and more the extent to which slaves were subject to lynching. Lynching began to increase in the South just before the Civil War, when southern vigilantes, particularly in Louisiana and Texas, routinely inflicted death upon outlaws and on individuals suspected of plotting slave insurrections.
The Civil War and Reconstruction intensified lynching activity in southern states. Vigilantism in Texas alone during the war probably accounted for over 150 deaths. Lynching became even more widespread during Reconstruction and was directed mostly at ex-slaves as a form of political terror. The Ku Klux Klan and other vigilante groups killed hundreds of African Americans, as well as white Republicans, in what were often ritualized ceremonies that presaged the ritual and public nature of many Jim Crow lynchings. Significantly, however, these killings were not at the time called “lynchings,” since that term still connoted community sanction, and the violence of Reconstruction did not garner widespread and undisputed white support.
After a brief decline in violence just after Reconstruction, lynching rose in both intensity and frequency in the mid-1880s, peaking in 1892 and 1893, and, though on the decline after the 1890s, the practice persisted well into the 20th century. Although lynchings still took place throughout most of the United States in this period, the vast majority occurred in the southern states and involved white mobs targeting African Americans. Indeed, by the turn of the 20th century, the term came to be primarily associated with racial control and oppression, even as defenders of the practice still sought to justify it as a legitimate form of criminal vengeance. In fact, many African Americans supported the practice of lynching as a form of community vigilantism in the late 19th century, even engaging in acts of lynching themselves. Once lynching came to be seen as a tool of white supremacists to exert racial control, however, their support for the practice withered.
Lynching increased at the start of the Jim Crow era for a number of reasons. Economic stress and uncertainty provoked struggling white farmers and petty merchants to lash out at African Americans seeking political and economic advancement and impelled white planters to exert control over their black labor force. Moreover, increased urbanization and industrialization threatened traditional racial hierarchies and created a sense of social instability. In southern towns and cities, fears of black advancement and diminished white power became coupled with intense fears of black criminality—in particular the fear that black men would rape white women and thus violate white purity. In this context, lynching coincided with the institutionalization of white supremacy, in the form of segregation and disfranchisement, and served as a means to enforce new racial codes and to protect white male authority.
Efforts made to gather data on lynching across the United States did not begin until 1882. For this reason, the numbers of lynching before 1882 may be underestimated. And even this post-1882 data is not comprehensive, since many lynchings went unreported or uncounted. Nevertheless, scholars have ascertained that from 1882 through the early 1950s, by which time lynching had virtually ended, at least 4,739 persons reportedly died at the hands of lynch mobs in the United States. The likely total is probably nearer to 6,000. Over 80 percent of lynchings occurred in southern states, and almost 90 percent of those were committed by white mobs against African American men. These statistics do not include those who died in race riots; nor do they include interracial homicides. Among the southern states, Mississippi, Georgia, and Texas saw the most lynchings, although, in proportion to the African American population in each state, lynching rates were actually higher in Florida, Arkansas, and Kentucky.
Other ethnic minorities, especially Mexicans, as well as immigrant and native-born whites, were also the targets of lynch mobs in this period. The largest mass lynching in the country, which took place in 1891 in New Orleans, was committed against 11 Italian immigrants who had been indicted for the assassination of the local police chief. A mob of thousands stormed the jail where the men were detained and dragged them to the street, shooting to death 10 of them and hanging the other.
Lynchings drew more attention in the Jim Crow period, not only because of the sheer numbers but also because a good number were committed as public rituals, before crowds of hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of spectators. The spread of newswires in the late 19th century ensured that Americans across the country were more likely to learn of the most horrific lynchings. On the whole, the news media became more sensationalistic in this period, and reports of lynchings lingered over the ghastly details of mob executions. Not infrequently, local photographers, and sometimes members of the mob, snapped pictures of the violence, often making them into postcards to send to family and friends.
The 1899 lynching of Sam Hose in Newnan, Ga., was one such sensationalized and gruesome event, which garnered national attention after news of the lynching spread across the wires. Hose was a black farm laborer, accused of murdering his white employer and raping his wife. A mob tortured and mutilated Hose before burning him to death. Crowds swarmed the town to witness the lynching, and excursion trains brought spectators in from Atlanta. Hose’s body parts were distributed and sold afterward, and a photographer advertised the sale of photographs of the lynching in the local newspaper. That lynching set off a series of lynchings throughout the countryside around Newnan, as local whites feared a black conspiracy to attack and kill white citizens.
The lynching of Sam Hose was atypical in its excess, but most lynchings received the same kind of widespread community sanction. Lynch mobs are not easily categorized since they were made up of men from all strata of society. Lynching is most associated with the poorest members of white society, those who might have been in direct economic competition with African Americans. But that stereotype is only true of a segment of lynchings. Many mobs were made up of yeoman farmers as well as solid working-class and lower-middle-class townspeople. Mobs also operated with the tacit, and at times vocal, approval of wealthy planters, civic and business leaders, ministers, judges, lawyers, and newspaper editors. Very few participants in lynch mobs were prosecuted in any state, and prior to World War II almost none ever served time in prison.
Lynching especially garnered public support when the target of the mob was accused of sexually violating a white woman. Those lynchings that resulted from accusations of rape were also more likely to be public and sadistic. Ridding society of “black brutes” who violated white women was indeed the most common justification for lynching. South Carolina governor Cole Blease echoed the sentiments of many white southerners when he declared in one infamous speech: “Whenever the Constitution comes between me and the virtue of the white women of South Carolina, then I say ‘to hell with the Constitution.’” In fact, however, only about one-third of all lynching victims were suspected of rape or attempted rape. Murder or attempted murder was more often the alleged crime. Others who died at the hands of lynch mobs were accused of transgressions of descending importance, such as arson, burglary, slapping a white person, stealing chickens, chronic impudence, or simply being “vagrant and lewd.” Whatever the supposed crime, most southern whites considered lynching to be a significant deterrent to black criminality. In cases in which they felt white authority or white purity to be threatened, many southern whites believed that the law was too slow and that it bestowed too many rights upon criminals; some crimes, they believed, simply stood beyond the purview of man’s law—they required a form of justice that was swifter and more severe.
Although white southerners largely defended the practice until the 1930s, lynching rates decreased with each decade in the 20th century, except for brief flare-ups just after World War I and at the start of the Great Depression. This decline was due to a number of factors. As southern blacks increasingly migrated to the North and West in the 1910s and 1920s, white elites were less likely to condone the violence. Local police departments, meanwhile, were professionalizing and thus took greater pains to protect potential lynching victims. Moreover, antilynching activists, both inside and outside the South, were increasingly successful at publicizing the atrocity of lynching. And in light of the NAACP’s campaign for federal antilynching legislation, local and state officials grew more willing to arrest and indict alleged mob members, if only to keep federal involvement at bay. Over time then, public attitudes toward lynching shifted, and by the start of World War II white southerners for the most part had come to disdain the practice. Lynchings still occurred in the 1940s and into the civil rights era, but they were, significantly, not committed publicly.
The public presentation of lynching photographs and postcards in the past decade has focused renewed attention on lynching, and a spate of academic studies reflects the growing interest in lynching and its role in southern culture. This recent attention to lynching led to a U.S. Senate resolution in 2005 that officially apologized for the Senate’s repeated failure to pass antilynching legislation in the 1920s and 1930s.
WILLIAM I. HAIR
Georgia College
AMY LOUISE WOOD
Illinois State University
Edwin T. Arnold, What Virtue There Is in Fire: Cultural Memory and the Lynching of Sam Hose (2009); Edward L. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the 19th-Century American South (1984); Bruce E. Baker, This Mob Will Surely Take My Life: Lynchings in the Carolinas, 1871–1947 (2008); Ray Stannard Baker, Following the Color Line (1908; reprint 1969); Richard Maxwell Brown, Strain of Violence: Historical Studies of American Violence and Vigilantism (1975); W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (1992); William Carrigan, The Making of Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas, 1836–1916 (2004); James H. Chadbourn, Lynching and the Law (1933); James E. Cutler, Lynch-Law: An Investigation into the History of Lynching in the United States (1905); Phillip Dray, At the Hands of the Unknown: Lynching of Black America (2002); Michael J. Pfeifer, Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874–1947 (2004); Arthur F. Raper, The Tragedy of Lynching (1933); Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck, Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882–1930 (1995); Christopher Waldrep, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Extralegal Violence and Punishment in America (2002); Walter White, Rope and Faggot (1929); Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940 (2009); George C. Wright, Racial Violence in Kentucky, 1865–1940: Lynchings, Mob Rule, and “Legal Lynchings” (1990).
In the antebellum South, Americans were vulnerable to many diseases and conditions that scientific and medical knowledge have rendered rare in the present-day United States. Without antibiotics, advanced surgical techniques, understandings of infection, or vaccines or effective sewage systems, antebellum Americans suffered from postpartum infection, tuberculosis, and a host of other problems. But African Americans, particularly southern slaves, had health issues that sprang directly from their enslavement. Among these were malnutrition, parasites, tuberculosis, and childbirth complications. Whippings, which were carried out across the South from the colonial era through the Civil War, injured skin, muscle, and occasionally internal organs. Slaves’ labor was also frequently physically dangerous. Domestic work such as cooking and laundry carried risks of burns and other injuries. Agricultural labor exposed slaves to injuries from machinery and livestock.
Most African American slaves moved between two parallel medical systems. Over the years, slave communities developed their own system of medical treatments and understandings of health and illness. Slave practitioners who were largely illiterate received medical training from other slaves. Their treatments tended to rely heavily on local flora. For these healers, curing the body often intersected with the patient’s spiritual and emotional health as well as the patient’s relationship to family and community. Largely divorced from concerns of the market and labor production that informed white doctors’ treatment, African American medicine was a key component of slave community and spiritual life.
Slave owners, on the other hand, wanted healthy slaves who would be able to labor productively or bring a high price on the market. Often masters relied on a mixture of patent medicines, homeopathy, and their own medical skill or an overseer’s to treat a wide variety of chronic and acute conditions. Many masters, particularly when dealing with slaves “in their prime,” spent considerable resources treating illness. Many called in white doctors, paid for medicines and surgeries, and asked one another and professionals for advice on keeping slaves healthy.
White doctors’ interest in slaves extended beyond desires to cure them for humanitarian or financial interest. White physicians in the South often used slave patients as research subjects and the remains of deceased slaves for autopsies and educational purposes. While some of these experiments and procedures attempted to locate the physical essences and implications of racial difference, most focused on treatments that they hoped would apply to white patients. Unsurprisingly, white doctors almost never asked slaves or their next of kin for permission to use dead bodies or to perform research on the living. White doctors could hire slaves with specific conditions to serve as research subjects.
The most well-known of these projects is the work of Dr. J. Marion Sims of Alabama. Sims performed 30 vaginal surgeries on three slave women suffering from vesicovaginal fistula, a debilitating and humiliating condition, between 1845 and 1849. Sims used no anesthetic during these operations and eventually perfected a surgical technique and invented instruments that became standard for vaginal exams and surgeries. Sims’s work, and indeed most medical practice under slavery, was predicated on slavery’s central tenet—that a person could own another person’s body, as opposed to just their labor. When the Civil War and emancipation put an end to bodily ownership, the systems of medical care that had developed under slavery changed as well. In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Militia Act, which allowed black men, regardless of their status, to enlist in the Union army. Black men who served in the military received an initial physical exam from an army physician. These records reveal a great deal about the general health of African American men (northern and southern) in the mid-19th century. African American soldiers, both those who had been slaves and those who enlisted as free men, suffered higher mortality rates and received less care than their white counterparts, as the army assigned few trained physicians to African American regiments. Since proportionally fewer of them served in combat roles, their rate of battle wounds was lower than that of white soldiers. The reasons for their high mortality rates converge around a number of factors. For example, many rural African Americans had not been exposed to childhood contagious diseases and were vulnerable to these in the close military quarters. In addition, African American troops performed much of the army’s dangerous and physically taxing labor, such as digging fortifications and clearing land. The poor quality of many of the African American troops’ uniforms and rations also weakened their defenses against illness.
In addition to African American men on active duty in the military, thousands of African Americans—men, women, and children—escaped plantations and fled to refugee camps administered by the Union army. These people often arrived in poor health and found that the crowded conditions, poor sanitation, and scarcity of food and shelter rendered them vulnerable. They sought out medical treatment from Union army doctors and the volunteers and employees of freedmen’s aid organizations who staffed the camps.
After emancipation, the federal government created the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands. The bureau did provide various forms of relief for freedpeople, as did a number of private agencies, but from its inception it resisted providing free and complete medical care to African Americans. Despite this practice, the bureau established a number of hospitals and dispensaries across the South. A number of Freedmen’s hospitals provided leadership roles for African Americans. For example, Alexander Augusta, a black physician who had trained in Canada and served as a Union army surgeon, worked at the Freedmen’s Hospital in Georgia and later at the Freedmen’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. This hospital, which was largely funded by African Americans, grew into part of Howard University’s medical school.
Many African Americans were unable or unwilling to rely on Freedmen’s Bureau hospitals and instead tried to negotiate medical care into their labor contracts with employers. Still others formed mutual aid societies that negotiated with physicians as a group to provide benefits for their members. Many of these groups engaged in philanthropy as well, providing medical care for indigent black people in their communities.
During Reconstruction and through the turn of the century, black and white philanthropists invested in black schools throughout the South. As part of this movement, religious groups, preexisting colleges, philanthropists, and even entrepreneurs founded a number of medical and nursing schools. Medical education was largely unregulated during this time, and like institutions that catered to white students, African American medical schools were wildly uneven in terms of curriculum and quality. In 1909, in a major step toward regulating medical education and creating national standards, Abraham Flexner was commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation to make a tour of medical colleges in the United States and Canada to evaluate their quality. Flexner assigned a grade to each school and occasionally explicitly recommended that a school close. Even before state and medical board authorities put in formal regulation measures, a low mark from Flexner effectively crippled a school’s attempt to raise funds and recruit students. Flexner gave low marks to all but three African American medical schools: Howard University Medical School in Washington, D.C., Meharry Medical College in Nashville, and Leonard Medical School in Raleigh. While the Flexner Report did shut down substandard medical schools, these schools had provided a basic medical education to African Americans who then went on to serve black patients. White medical schools that survived the Flexner Report did not admit black students, and the American Medical Association remained segregated. In response to these conditions, a group of African American medical professionals formed the National Medical Association, which is ongoing.
In the midst of these developments in African American medical education and institution building, experimentation on African Americans’ bodies continued. The Public Health Service organized and funded the most notorious of these experiments. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study took place in Macon County, Ala., home of the Tuskegee Institute. In this study, which ran from 1932 until 1972, African American men who had tested positive for syphilis were followed and studied for years. The aims of the study were to learn the effects of untreated latent stage syphilis, more specifically on black men. Over the years, under the direction of both black and white doctors and one black nurse, the men received what they thought was treatment but in fact was aspirin and iron tonics. Men in the study were discouraged from seeking out legitimate syphilis treatment and remained ineligible for the draft during World War II since the military demanded testing and treatment for syphilis for all inductees. After providing data for 12 academic papers in medical journals, the study ended in 1972 amid a flurry of bad publicity. President Clinton issued a formal apology for the study in 1997.
In 1946, 14 years into the Tuskegee study, the U.S. Congress passed the Hill-Burton Act, originally named the Hospital Survey and Construction Act, which provided grants and loans for underserved areas to build medical infrastructure, mainly hospitals and nursing homes. Institutions that accepted the funds were obligated to provide a “reasonable volume” of services to people unable to pay. The Hill-Burton Act funded the construction of hospitals all over the South, and although the original language in the bill stipulated that projects that the initiative funded could not discriminate on the basis of race, the funding of separate-but-equal facilities continued until 1963.
The years since 1963 have seen increasing desegregation of medical schools, nursing schools, and hospitals. However, demographic patterns and access still translate into racial imbalances in many institutions and medical specialties. African Americans in the 21st century still suffer disproportionately high rates of asthma, obesity, type-2 diabetes, infant mortality, and HIV infection. These statistics emerge from a constellation of causes. Poverty, lack of health insurance, lack of access to primary care, poor nutrition, and environmental factors all play a role in the illnesses that African Americans get, how those illnesses are treated, and the outcomes of that treatment. A marked disparity between the health of African Americans and white people has persisted since before the nation’s founding and continues today.
GRETCHEN LONG
Williams College
Sharla Fett, Working Cures: Healing Health and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (2002); Margaret Humphreys, Intensely Human: The Health of the Black Soldier in the American Civil War (2008); Susan Reverby, Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy (2009); Todd L. Savitt, Medicine and Slavery: The Diseases and Health Care of Blacks in Antebellum Virginia (1978), Race and Medicine in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century America (2007); Maria Schwarz, Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South (2006); Karen Kruse Thomas, Journal of Southern History (November 2006).
Slavery in the American South presented a unique catalyst for growing questions and concerns about race within the practice of medicine. The arrival of the first Africans in Jamestown, Va., in 1619 laid the foundation for future medical preoccupations with physical differences between blacks and whites. Ideas governing disease causation remained closely tied to the relationship between region, climate, and physical constitution and the South’s distinctive ecology. Hot and humid summers and frequent spells of yellow fever led to pervasive beliefs that the southern climate was too harsh for the constitutions of white laborers but perfectly suited for Africans. Southern physicians made broad assessments about morbidity and mortality along racial lines. Most notable was the enduring belief that African Americans were immune to yellow and malarial fevers.
Whites saw black skin as both a biological advantage and a mark of degeneracy because although it offered protection from the ill effects of the climate it was also viewed as a sign of primitiveness. In Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson lamented that “Negroes” were too different from whites for equal coexistence because their physical differences were “fixed in nature.” In the 1850s, Josiah C. Nott, a respected and outspoken southern physician, cited black features as evidence of separate origins of the races of mankind—a controversial theory known as polygenesis. Polygenesis remained the hallmark of Nott’s race theories and the cornerstone of his beliefs in black biological inferiority.
Even as white physicians claimed that African Americans were biologically different from whites, they relied on African American bodies for dissections, experiments, and anatomical demonstrations. In Charleston, S.C., the medical college made no secret of its use of “anatomical material” taken from the “colored population.” Southern physician J. Marion Sims, a pioneer in surgical techniques and “father of gynecology,” used three female slaves, Lucy, Betsy, and Anarcha, to find a treatment for vesicovaginal fistulas. Despite his success, and the relief his new treatment offered to women of all races, his rise to fame rested upon experimental surgeries performed on enslaved African American women.
Bold claims about black inferiority gained momentum in the decades leading up to the Civil War. Proslavery medical thought worked in tandem with “Herrenvolk democracy” to justify attitudes of white supremacy. Southern physicians fashioned themselves as experts on slave health, and antebellum medical articles on “distinctive Negro” physiology proliferated in medical journals. Samuel A. Cartwright, onetime chairman of the Medical Association of Louisiana, authored “A Report on the Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race,” published in 1851 in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal and later reprinted in De Bow’s Review. Cartwright’s report was more of a political invective interspersed with spurious medical claims than a medical overview of Negro diseases, and in it he infamously coined the term “drapetomania”—the disease causing slaves to run away.
The Reconstruction era brought new trends in medical ideas about race as well as views of slavery, which were more nostalgic than accurate. Whites argued that, prior to the Civil War, slaves’ health was guaranteed by their benevolent masters and that the troubles that freed African Americans faced after emancipation were consequences of their inability to look after their own welfare. Physicians pathologized freedom and published articles on increases in the rates of tuberculosis and insanity among African Americans in the South. At the Alabama Insane Hospital, freedom was cited as a cause of insanity among African American patients. The traits of African Americans, before seen as advantages for laboring in the South, became the loci of their postbellum health complaints. Social Darwinists claimed that African Americans would become extinct because they could not compete in society at the same level as whites. In the aftermath of slavery, African Americans continued to face challenges in gaining control over their health care as a result of deliberate and institutionalized neglect caused by Jim Crow policies at the turn of the century.
RANA ASALI HOGARTH
Yale University
George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (1987); John S. Haller Jr., Medical History (July 1972); Reginald Horsman, Josiah Nott of Mobile: Southerner, Physician, and Racial Theorist (1987); John S. Hughes, Journal of Southern History (August 1992); Kenneth Merrill Lynch, Medical Schooling in South Carolina, 1823–1969 (1970); Gary Puckrein, Journal of American Studies (August 1979); Todd L. Savitt, Journal of Southern History (August 1982), Medicine and Slavery: The Disease and Health Care of Blacks in Antebellum Virginia (1978); Alden T. Vaughan, William and Mary Quarterly (July 1972); John Harley Warner, in Science and Medicine in the Old South, ed. Ronald L. Numbers and Todd L. Savitt (1989); Christian Warren, Journal of Southern History (February 1997).
To black southerners, migration has symbolized both the limitations and the opportunities of American life. As slaves, many suffered forced migrations with the attendant heartbreaks of separation from family and community. As freedmen and freedwomen, they seized upon spatial mobility as one of the most meaningful manifestations of their newly won emancipation. Subsequently, black southerners sought to better their conditions by moving within the rural South, to southern cities, and finally to northern cities, in a frustrating quest for equality and opportunity. Simultaneously, white southerners acted to restrict such movement because, until the mechanization of cotton culture, black geographic mobility—like black social and economic mobility—threatened the racial assumptions and labor relations upon which the southern economy and society rested.
The first significant migration of black southerners followed the American Revolution and the subsequent opening of the trans-Appalachian West to settlement by slaveholders. The enormous expansion of cotton cultivation in the early 19th century, combined with the closing of the foreign slave trade (1808), soon transformed a forced migration dominated by planters carrying their own slaves westward to one increasingly characterized by the professional slave trader. Although the Chesapeake remained the major source for the interstate slave trade, after 1830 North and South Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, and eventually Georgia also became “exporters” of slaves. The plantations of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, Arkansas, and Texas were worked largely by these early black “migrants” and their children. Although it is difficult to determine the volume of the domestic slave trade, one historian has recently estimated that over 1 million black southerners were forcibly relocated between 1790 and 1860.
The forced migrations of the antebellum South were complemented by barriers against voluntary movement. Although each year hundreds of slaves escaped, they represented but a fraction of the southern black population. Even free black southerners were hemmed in, and by the 1830s their movement across state lines was either restricted or prohibited.
During the Civil War, white fears and black hopes generated opposing migration streams. Many slave owners responded to the approach of Union troops by taking their slaves west, either to the western, Upcountry areas of the eastern states, or from the Deep South to Texas and Arkansas. Thousands of slaves, on the other hand, fled toward the advancing army.
Ex-slaves continued to move away from plantations after the war ended. For many, like Ernest J. Gaines’s fictional Miss Jane Pittman, the act of moving constituted a test of the meaning of emancipation. Others sought to reunite with family separated by antebellum forced migration. Much of the movement grew out of a search for favorable social, political, and economic conditions, especially the chance for “independence,” which was closely associated with landownership. The flurry of migration generally involved short distances, often merely to the next plantation or a nearby town or city.
Southern cities offered ex-slaves the protection of the Freedmen’s Bureau and the Union army, higher wages, black institutions, political activity, and freedmen’s schools. But under pressure from whites—and often faced with the prospect of starvation—many of the thousands who moved cityward soon returned to the plantations. Urban whites considered the black city dweller a threat to social order, and planters sought to stabilize and reassert dominance over their labor forces. Vagrancy laws provided a temporary mechanism, and even after the legislative reforms during Reconstruction, the economic structure of the cities limited the urbanization of the black population. Few jobs outside the service sector were available to blacks, and black men especially found that survival was easier in the countryside. Black southerners continued to migrate to cities in modest numbers; by 1910, less than one-fourth lived in communities larger than 2,500. Some people moved back and forth, mainly between farm and small town, following seasonal labor patterns. This kind of mobility also characterized rural nonfarm labor and established what one historian has called a “migration dynamic,” which later facilitated movement to northern cities.
Most black southerners who migrated longer distances in the 19th century headed for rural destinations, generally toward the south and west. During the 1870s and 1880s, rumors and labor agents drew blacks living in the Carolinas and Georgia to the Mississippi Delta and other areas in the Gulf states with promises of higher wages and better living conditions. Usually, migrants found social and economic relations similar to what they had left behind. The search for “independence” continued, with black southerners trying Kansas in the 1870s and then Arkansas and Oklahoma between 1890 and 1910. Movement became as central to southern black life as it has been to the American experience in general. Because blacks for so long had been unable to move freely, however, it acquired a special mystique manifested as a major theme in black music and symbolized by the recurrent image of the railroad as a symbol of the freedom to move and start life anew. By the 1890s, one black southerner in twelve would cross state lines during the decade in search of the still-unfulfilled promise of emancipation. Local moves remained even more frequent.
The direction and historical impact of black migration shifted dramatically during World War I. Northern industrialists, previously reluctant to hire blacks when they could draw upon the continuing influx of white immigrants, turned their attention southward as immigration ceased and production orders began pouring in. Some sent labor agents into the South, but news about opportunities and conditions in the North traveled more often via an emerging black communications network comprising letters from earlier migrants, northern newspapers (especially the Chicago Defender), and railroad workers. Observers and subsequent scholars offered various catalogs of “economic” and “social” factors that “pushed” migrants from the South and “pulled” them toward the North. Floods, boll weevil infestations, and credit contractions contributed to the urge to move to northern cities offering higher wages than those available to black southerners. Jim Crow, lynching, disfranchisement, and discrimination in the legal and educational systems contrasted with seemingly more equitable and flexible race relations in the North. Most migrants left because of a combination of motivations, which they often summarized as “bettering my condition.” For the first time, however, thousands of black southerners looked to industrial work, rather than landownership, in their hopes to enjoy the prerogatives of American citizenship.
Nearly half a million black southerners headed north between 1916 and 1920, setting off a long-term demographic shift, which would leave only 53 percent of black Americans in the South by 1970, compared with 89 percent in 1910. Nearly all of these migrants went to cities, first in the Northeast and Midwest and later in the West. Most followed the longitudinal routes of the major railroads, although by World War II California was drawing thousands of migrants from Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana. At the same time, black southerners moved to southern cities, which by 1970 contained two-thirds of the region’s black population. Even the massive urban unemployment of the Great Depression only moderately slowed the continuing flow northward, and movement accelerated to unprecedented levels during World War II and the following decades.
Many white southerners initially responded to this “Great Migration” by continuing the tradition of constructing barriers in the paths of black migrants. As always, landlords and employers feared the diminution of the labor supply, a threat that in the 19th century had stimulated the enacting of legislation designed to limit labor mobility. As a social movement and a series of individual decisions, however, the Great Migration also constituted a direct—although unacknowledged—threat to the fiber of social and economic relations in the South. The system rested upon the assumption that blacks were by nature docile, dependent, and unambitious. The decision to migrate and the evolution of a “movement” suggested dissatisfaction, ambition, and aggressive action. As they had in the past, white southerners tended to blame the movement on “outside forces” (in this case, labor agents), and localities ineffectively sought to stem the tide by tightening “enticement” laws and forcibly preventing blacks from leaving.
The Great Migration transformed American urban society and African American society, as migrants adapted to urban life while retaining much of their southern and rural culture. It was not unusual for southern communities to reconstitute themselves and their institutions in northern cities. Frequent visiting back and forth between relatives from the South and the North has contributed to this interchange between regional cultures, and the South is still “down home” to some northern black urbanites.
The 1970s saw a return of blacks to the South, a reverse migration that escalated in the 1990s. According to Census 2000 figures, the non-Hispanic black population of the South surged in the 1990s by 3,575,211 persons, more than in the Northeast, Midwest, and West combined, doubling the black population that the South had attracted in the 1980s (1.7 million). Southern cities, especially Atlanta, attracted most of these African American migrants in the late 1990s, at the same time that such major urban areas as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco experienced the largest out-migration of blacks.
Demographers have attributed the dramatic reversal of the Great Migration north during the early 20th century to the South’s economic development, its improved race relations, the growth of a black middle class in southern cities, and historic, cultural, and family ties to the South.
As a historical process, black migration within and from the South suggests some important continuities suffusing much of southern history: the coercive implications of white dependence on black labor; the refusal of blacks to accept their “place” as defined by whites; and the search for identity and opportunity, articulated by black writer Richard Wright, whose personal migration experience began with the hope that “I might learn who I was, what I might be.”
JAMES R. GROSSMAN
University of Chicago
William H. Frey, in Immigration and Opportunity, ed. Frank D. Bean and Stephanie Bell-Rose (1999), Population Today (May/June 2001); James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Black Migration (1989); Florette Henri, Black Migration: Movement North, 1900–1920 (1975); Allan Kulikoff, in Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution, ed. Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman (1983); Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Migration and How It Changed America (1991); Larry Long, Migration and Residential Mobility in the United States (1987); Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (1976); Arvarh Strickland, Missouri Historical Review (July 1975); Carter G. Woodson, A Century of Negro Migration (1918).
During the last two decades of the 20th century, Latino immigration represented a key demographic transformation across most of the South. Previously, the New South was a frontier to Latinos, with two exceptions, Texas and Florida. In 1980, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that the South was home to approximately 4.3 million Hispanics, with nearly 90 percent concentrated in parts of Florida and more broadly settled in Texas. By 2000, over 11 million Hispanics were counted by the Census Bureau, with the 2009 population estimates for the South revealing a 47.9 percent increase, to nearly 16.4 million Hispanics.
While the absolute increase in nuevo southerners is dramatic, the greater impact is related to the spreading of Latino newcomers outside of the former settlement zones. Consider that between 2000 and 2009 the number of Hispanics living outside of Texas and Florida nearly doubled, growing from 1.7 to 3.3 million residents. At the community level, this means that urban and rural places across the region, long bypassed by ethnic immigrants, are receiving streams of Latino newcomers from other parts of the United States and international locations.
In turn, the arrival of these newcomers has complicated social relations and class structures attached to the black-white binary. In a region where skin color situates a person’s class position, brown means “in-between” and quickly labels one as an outsider. As a result, Latinos risk discrimination from blacks and whites alike.
Although Latinos share roots of Iberian colonization and are overwhelmingly Spanish speaking, they come from disparate nations and cultural groups. Moreover, their settlement experiences in the South vary widely. When Latinos settle in places like south Florida or the Texas Metroplex, they connect into existing social frameworks that ease stresses and enable newcomers to settle in more quickly. In contrast, Latinos arriving in large parts of the Deep South, Appalachia, or Coastal Plains are often viewed as outsiders. And social infrastructure—family, church, and community—are absent.
Historically, temporary immigrant labor has been a key production tool in southern agriculture and forestry industries. Seasonally, waves of international laborers with temporary work permits augmented domestic farmworkers across the South’s agricultural landscapes—planting, pruning, or picking crops as needed. Since the middle of the last century, Latino workers have been a growing segment of this invisible agricultural workforce. These sojourners filled critical labor needs during labor-intensive phases in the production process and then moved on to the next work site.
More recently, Sunbelt cities in metropolitan areas like northern Virginia, Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville, Raleigh, Greenville-Spartanburg, Orlando, and Greensboro have attracted large streams of Latino laborers, drawn by the rapid growth in low-wage service-sector jobs. During the earliest stages of the immigration process, the urban migrants often fit a “pioneer profile,” that is, young male workers, absent families, expecting to live in the United States temporarily and then return home. With maturing immigration streams, the single male prototype has been replaced by families establishing homes, building communities, and connecting to local place.
As Latino immigrants have moved from temporarily occupying places toward establishing lives in urban neighborhoods and rural landscapes, nativists and xenophobes have resisted the newcomers. For them, ethnic immigration challenges the vestiges of racial and class privilege. Often, the hostility directed toward Latinos by right-wing groups is expressed through the invocation of place, represented by defense of community and culture. Public discourse around Latino immigrants uses metaphors like “invaders” or even “animals” to demonize Latino immigrants. The late Sen. Jesse Helms referred to Latinos as burglars breaking into a home (the country) to steal law-abiding citizens’ property. Increasingly, the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups have shifted their hate speech toward brown-skinned Latino immigrants.
Where local and state governments are drawn into efforts to defend their communities against Latino settlers, the processes and ordinances are more sophisticated but carry similar themes. Across the South, some municipalities and counties have actively sought to discourage Latino settlement or control immigrant place-making activities. The range of government actions includes bans on Spanish-language signage, requiring the speaking of English on job sites, restricting the location of loncheras (food vending trucks) along city streets, rewriting zoning rules to forbid multiple-family housing (presumably favored by Latinos), and outlawing day-labor hiring sites. In similar fashion, state governments have put in place legislation to restrict the issuance of drivers’ licenses, deny access to public services and/or higher education, and punish employers hiring undocumented labor. The recent publicity surrounding the Arizona anti-immigrant legislation has attracted legislative supporters.
Although Latinos face strong hostility from conservatives in the public arena, southern business interests have been strong supporters of northward labor migration under the H-2A guest-worker program and the North American Free Trade Agreement. During the economic boom of the last decades of the 20th century, Latino labor built the southern cities and sustained the rural industrial and agricultural economies. Throughout the region, employers view Latinos as hardworking bodies who are easily disciplined and controlled. In many instances, they are preferred over local African American workers. Limited or prejudiced views of brown-skinned newcomers lead to “work ethic” myths. Not unexpectedly, the overwhelming majority of international Latino migrants moving to the South come from working-class backgrounds and fill jobs in the blue-collar labor market. In urban North Carolina, for example, Latinos dominate the trade and landscaping sectors.
The competition for construction, manufacturing, and service jobs between African Americans, who have traditionally dominated these job categories, and Latinos has created tensions between the communities. Some black leaders and scholars contend that Latino immigrants have displaced African American workers and kept wage levels low for all workers. As early as 1979, Ebony magazine warned that undocumented Mexican immigrants in Florida and North Carolina posed “a big threat to black workers.” Many labor market researchers offer an alternative explanation. They report that Latinos are not displacing African Americans in low-wage jobs. Rather, immigrants are filling “replacement” jobs. In other words, immigrants are taking jobs that African Americans have bypassed because they pay the lowest wages and are the most dangerous or dirty.
The color line inextricably undergirds class status in the South and frames belonging and place. Among Latino immigrants, the importance of skin color is not entirely new. Ethnographic research finds that racializing or skin-color stereotypes affect attitudes even within the Latino community. For example, South American migrants look down upon Mexican and Central American migrants as being less intelligent, submissive, and better suited to physical labor. Ethnic origin, reflected in skin tone and physical appearance, is broadly stigmatized. Darker skin color and physical features are associated with Indo-Latino (Latinos with indigenous ancestry) or Afro-Latino (Latinos with African heritage) groups and are viewed by light-skinned Latinos as having a lower class status.
Recent Latino immigrants, especially those with darker skin color, perceive greater discrimination from whites. Research comparing first-generation immigrant parents and U.S.-born children shows that the two groups view race and race relations differently. The first-generation perspective finds greater discrimination from white southerners and more favorable attitudes toward African Americans. In contrast, their children report less-positive relations with African Americans. Other research has found that white-Latino relations are comparatively more positive than white-black relationships. These data suggest that Latinos are making faster gains toward achieving the privileges of whiteness. In turn, the economic and social advantages of whiteness provide even stronger incentives for Latinos to create social distance from African Americans.
Social justice issues for Latinos are very different from the traditional agenda of the South’s civil rights movement. Among Latino activists, skin color or racial identification is far less significant for explaining discrimination or unequal treatment in the South than national origin or legal-immigration status. Consequently, Latino immigration-rights advocates appeal for solidarity based upon the underlying principle that we are “a nation of immigrants.” But for many in the African American community, the implication that citizenship bestows privilege is unacceptable. They remind Latinos that the black experience in the South is indelibly linked to racism and oppression.
Efforts to bridge the divides between Latino and native southerners are often built along three lines. The first, collaborations of color, is structured around bringing together black southerners and Latinos based upon discrimination and their common experiences as people of color. Racial profiling by law enforcement, housing or employment discrimination based upon skin color, hate speech, or violent targeting by racist groups are examples of the issues that foster activist coalitions between black and brown southerners.
A second form of collaboration arises from seemingly race-neutral issues. However, there are often racial undertones related to de facto discrimination and white privilege when access or equity of public resources is examined. Among the issues that bring together these coalitions are concerns arising from public school quality, inadequate health care, or environmental racism. A final bridging framework is traditional class-based community organizing. Commonly associated with workplace conditions or labor organizing, working-class southerners will put aside racial or ethnic prejudices to address shop-floor working conditions or the benefits of workers. Recent union efforts to organize meat- and food-processing workers in parts of the region reflect this pan-ethnic activity.
OWEN J. FURUSETH
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Fran Ansley and Jon Shefner, eds., Global Connections, Local Receptions: New Latino Immigration to the Southeastern United States (2009); Karen D. Johnson-Webb, Recruiting Hispanic Labor: Immigrants in Nontraditional Areas (2003); William Kandel and John Cromartie, New Patterns of Hispanic Settlement in Rural America (2004); Raymond A. Mohl, in Globalization and the American South, ed. James C. Cobb and William Stueck (2005); Mary E. Odem and Elaine Lacy, eds., Latino Immigrants and the Transformation of the U.S. South (2009); Debra J. Schleef and H. B. Cavalcanti, Latinos in Dixie: Class and Assimilation in Richmond, Virginia (2009); Barbara Ellen Smith and Jamie Winders, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (January 2008); Heather A. Smith and Owen J. Furuseth, eds., Latinos in the New South: Transformations of Place (2006); Roberto Suro and Audrey Singer, Latino Growth in Metropolitan America: Changing Patterns, New Locations (2002).
In the first several hundred years of settlement of the U.S. South, white southerners migrated west from the Atlantic Coast and helped form the characteristic features of an Upland South and a Lowland South. In the 19th century, they took their cultures farther west, forming yeoman and plantation cultures that mixed in varying degrees with African American and Native American cultures. In the 20th century, the South’s economic problems and the appeal of other American places promoted a massive out-migration that took forms of white southern culture north and west.
In the 1700s, between 130,000 and 250,000 Scots-Irish and 200,000 German settlers migrated to the American colonies, many coming through Philadelphia and down the Shenandoah Valley and then westward across the Appalachian Mountains. These settlers sought out similar landscapes they had known in Europe, mostly as small farmers and herdsmen. Their mountain and hill country settlements combined European folk culture with Native American culture in the areas they spread across. In the early 19th century, white settlers from the Atlantic Coast and Piedmont areas moved into what became the Deep South, after the removal of Native American tribes in the 1830s, establishing the Cotton Kingdom. White migrants came with their slaves and established plantation cultures in places like the Alabama Black Belt and the Mississippi Delta.
Throughout the 19th century, white southerners went west. Virginians, for example, settled farmlands north of the Ohio River, in Indiana and Illinois, flowing into Missouri and Kansas and later into Colorado and New Mexico, seeking quick wealth in western gold rushes. They entered into the borderlands guerrilla warfare in the 1850s for control of the West against northerners. White southerners originally from South Carolina and North Carolina spread westward, pushing the frontier settlement into the Southwest. The end of the Civil War brought a new kind of migration, as white southerners who feared northern rule in Reconstruction or who sought greater economic opportunities than the impoverished postwar South could offer left the region. Between 4,000 and 6,000 former Confederates moved to Central America, with most settling in small colonies in Mexico. Matthew Fontaine Maury, Confederate general and a distinguished oceanographer, served as commissioner of immigration for Mexico after the war, as the Mexican government promoted the settlement. Other former Confederates went to Honduras and the Caribbean Islands. Thousands of white southerners went to Brazil in the five years after the war, attracted by a government that offered them cheap land and immigration assistance in the hope that former southern planters would help develop that nation’s plantation districts. Most of these postwar migrants returned to the South after 1870, but many became permanent residents in Brazil.
The American West attracted, however, more white southerners after the war than did Central America. “Gone to Texas” was a common sentiment in the 1870s South, as white southerners joined freedpeople in moving west for a fresh start in that state’s postwar cattle industry. Such northern cities as Philadelphia, Boston, and especially New York City attracted the most white southerners after the war, as mostly young, well-educated whites went north to seek economic opportunities. Southern landowners who had fallen on hard times, professionals, and businesspeople all made the trip. By the end of the 19th century, almost 40,000 white southerners lived in New York City, establishing a network of southern heritage associations and Confederate veterans groups. They preserved relics from the antebellum South and promoted intersectional commercial relations.
Historian James N. Gregory, the closest student of white southern migration, estimates that during the 20th century, 20 million white southerners left the region, migrating in two distinct phases. The first began in the first decade of the 20th century and peaked in the 1920s. White migrants had left the South during the 19th century for farming opportunities, but World War I saw many white southerners leave to work in northern industries in need of labor with the end of European immigration to the United States. Most who left had been raised on farms, so the adjustment to migration included accommodation to city life and factory work demands. This first wave also included southern well-educated whites and those with particular skills, such as salespeople and professionals who saw greater opportunity in northern commercial centers than in the South. Better-off southern farmers became investors and developers of agricultural fields in Texas and California in the 1910s and 1920s. Writers and artists left to tap the greater institutional framework in the North for certain kinds of creativity.
As with black migration, white migration generally dropped off during the Great Depression, and an unknown number of former southerners returned home, plugging back into home places and kin who had not left. In one dramatic example, a special census in 1934 showed that the southern-born population of Flint, Mich., had decreased by 35 percent since 1930. The Depression did see one particular example of increased white migration, though, as southern farmers fled the environmental and economic devastation of the Dust Bowl in the Southwest. By 1940, California had added more than 300,000 white southerners to its population.
A second wave of migration began with World War II and lasted until the 1970s. Increased military and defense industry production created millions of new jobs, sometimes drawing rural and small-town southern whites (as well as blacks) to new coastal industrial centers and sometimes attracting them to booming economic locations outside the South. Migration rates of white Appalachians, in particular, increased, as they were drawn to automobile production sites in the industrial Midwest. They were among the most visible white southern migrants, as the image of “hillbilly bars” in Detroit, Chicago, and Cleveland became a new symbol of white southern migration. The 1970s saw an end to white migration; with improving economic opportunities through economic diversification and economic development, more formerly exiled southern whites returned.
The story of white southern migration mirrored that of the Great Migration of African Americans out of the South in the 20th century, but there were differences as well. In contrast to African American migration, one characteristic of white southern migration was the high rate of return to the South by migrants. In most five-year periods, the return rate was 10 percent or higher. In the 1950s, for every 100 white southerners leaving the South, 54 came home. Less than half of the 20 million whites who migrated out of the South thus left permanently. The largest numbers of white migrants went to the Great Lakes states, as was true for African American migrants, but the Middle Atlantic states were much less a destination for whites than for blacks. The exception to this generalization was New York City—that economic and cultural capital lured southerners of both races. California was also a popular area of white southern settlement, with more than 1.6 million white southerners there in 1970. Popular culture stereotyped the white migration to California through the 1960s television series The Beverly Hillbillies. White migrants did not achieve the levels of unity and political organization that black southerners who left the region did. Despite the stereotype of the hillbilly bar, they typically did not cluster together in white southern enclaves. Middle-class white migrants often did not feel common cause or social connectedness with working-class white southern migrants, thus limiting the opportunities for institution building and political organization. On the other hand, white migrants from the South did spread conservative evangelical Protestantism into the Midwest and West, and the nationalization of country music can be traced to white southern migrants who wanted the comforts of regional music even in places far away from the southern places that had given birth to the music.
CHARLES REAGAN WILSON
University of Mississippi
Chad Berry, Southern Migrants, Northern Exiles (2000); David Hackett Fischer and James C. Kelley, Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement (2000); Neil Fligstein, Going North: Migration of Blacks and Whites from the South, 1900–1950 (1981); James N. Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (1989), The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (2005); Eugene C. Harter, The Lost Colony of the Confederacy (1985); Jack Temple Kirby, Journal of Southern History (November 1983); Phillip J. Obermiller, Thomas E. Wagner, and Bruce Tucker, eds., Appalachian Odyssey: Historical Perspectives on the Great Migration (2000); Daniel E. Sutherland, The Confederate Carpetbaggers (1988).