The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, Volume 24: Race

Music, Recordings

Blues and country, jazz and pop, hip-hop and indie rock: it is difficult to talk about the history, the sound, and the meaning of southern music without invoking racial categories. It can appear as if the region is home to separate black and white musical traditions, reaching back across the Atlantic to Europe and Africa and continuing through the contemporary country and R&B charts. Forays across the musical color line—from Elvis’s boogie and Stevie Ray Vaughan’s blues to the country music of black artists such as Ray Charles and Charlie Pride—can appear transgressive, the exceptions that prove the rule of historical relationship between music and race in the South. Far from indelible, however, the racial music categories of the 20th century can largely be traced back to the twin emergence of southern segregation and the phonograph industry.

Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in the year of the Compromise of 1877. The commercial market for musical recordings matured alongside white southerners’ development of a legal system of racial segregation. The commercial recording industry maintained a complex relationship with Jim Crow segregation, which echoed throughout the 20th century and beyond.

Some music had developed racial connotations before the advent of sound recording, of course. People of African descent in slavery and freedom had used music—from the spirituals and the ring shout to field hollers and the additive rhythms of Congo Square in New Orleans—to forge a collective identity, to signify a common history, or to express a shared condition. White southerners likewise used music—including European-derived art music and, beginning in the 1830s, blackface minstrelsy—to express an ever-changing white identity. Yet black and white southerners never limited themselves to making or enjoying music that expressed their own racial identities, no matter how important and vibrant those traditions were. Southerners partook of the vast array of music available to them, and they did so for a variety of reasons, including to express themselves, to imagine themselves part of a larger, perhaps better world, or simply to feel pleasure. Southerners’ musical lives were never constrained by the racial categories that have come to represent them.

The advent and spread of phonograph recordings changed the ways in which many understood the relationship between music and race. Records enabled the separation of music from musicians. Disembodied sounds floated free from their source. Ultimately, this separation led many commentators and consumers to ascribe racial and regional identities to sounds themselves rather than to the people who made them. In the early years of the phonograph business, a time when black performers largely were barred from recording, this division facilitated a thriving market for white performers’ renditions of what they claimed to be “Negro” music. The industry promoted minstrel ditties, spirituals, and blues recorded by white singers as genuine black music. Black artists successfully challenged industry segregation and minstrelsy in the 1920s by insisting on the correspondence between racial sounds and racial bodies. Black music was made best by black people.

The resulting “race records” market was a boon to African American artists and consumers. For the first time, music by black Americans was widely commercially available on record. At the same time, however, the new configuration reversed previous conceptions of the relationship between race and music. Phonograph companies insisted that African American performers only record what the industry considered to be black music. This resulted in wonderful and important blues and jazz recordings, but black artists often were barred from recording other parts of their repertoires, such as pop songs, Broadway hits, classical selections, or folk songs. A similar process occurred with the marketing of white southern recording artists. Long engaged with the wide variety of music echoing through the nation, they were marketed as “hillbilly” or “old-time” singers.

The segregated marketing of “race” and “hillbilly” music did little to represent the vibrant, complex, interregional everyday world of southern music. It did, however, correspond to the new concepts of racial distance and separation that white citizens were promoting in the Jim Crow South. It also provided the template for categorizing and marketing southern music according to race for the rest of the 20th century.

KARL HAGSTROM MILLER

University of Texas at Austin

Karl Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop in the Age of Jim Crow (2010); Tony Russell, Blacks, Whites, and Blues (1970); Elijah Wald, Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues (2004).

Native American Removal, 1800–1840

When the invention of the cotton gin made upland cotton a viable cash crop for thousands of Upcountry settlers, Georgia and the territory that became the states of Mississippi and Alabama were home to 32,800 first people, 53,400 free people, and 30,000 enslaved people. By 1840, when the first postremoval censuses were taken, the same region was home to 922,000 free people and 737,000 enslaved people. Census takers failed to note any remaining Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws because nearly all of them had been expelled from the region during the previous decade.

Why would state and federal governments forcibly expel people whose ancestors had inhabited the land for millennia? President Andrew Jackson had advocated removal since his days as the commander of the Tennessee militia in the Creek Civil War and cited the threat that so-called Indians posed to settler society as well as the incompatibility of the two cultures. Rather than await what everyone expected to be their inevitable extinction, Jackson believed that the federal government had to remove the indigenous people to the West where they could perpetuate their “race.” Despite considerable opposition to the proposal in both houses, Jackson garnered enough congressional support to see the measure pass, and he signed the Indian Removal Act on 29 May 1830.

Choctaws were the first to experience removal under the auspices of the Indian Removal Act, and subsequent treaties with the Creeks in 1832, the Chickasaws in 1834, and the Cherokees in 1835 secured the removal of those nations and the cession of their land. All told, the federal and state governments expelled just more than 50,000 people from their homelands, some in chains, others at gunpoint, and acquired almost 30 million acres of land for settlement, taxation, and development. In the ongoing construction of a society whose citizens saw the world in terms of white freedom and black slavery, there was simply no place for “Indians.”

The federal government kept no systematic records of the removals, so it is difficult to ascertain how many people died. Perhaps a third of removed Choctaws perished, while the tally of 4,000 Cherokee deaths on the Trail of Tears, one quarter of the total number of Cherokees removed, is a likely estimate. Perhaps 10,000 Cherokees who would have lived or been born had removal not occurred were wiped from the face of the earth. Such death tolls must also be understood in the context of the loss of land. Indeed, for Choctaws, separation from their homeland meant for them death, and Choctaw conceptions of the West as a place where spirits were lost only compounded their misery, sense of loss, and despair for the future. One of their leaders, a man named George Washington Harkins, understood all of this. As he departed his homeland, his mother earth, on a steamer bound for Fort Smith, Ark., he mourned the total destruction of his people’s world. “We found ourselves,” he wrote from the ship’s railing, “like a benighted stranger, following false guides until surrounded by fire and water—the fire is certain destruction, and a feeble hope was left of escaping by water.”

For the Mississippi House Indian committee, however, the removals, the deaths, and the despair augured a new beginning, “the dawn of an era . . . when . . . this state would emerge from obscurity, and justifiably assume an equal character with her sister states of the Union.” Indeed, to the United States, the removals were a triumph. Land had been opened for settlement, the “Indians” had been saved, and the unrelenting expansion into the West could continue unabated. But what did the South lose with the removals? Were the removals acts of ethnic cleansing akin to what happened in the Balkans in the late 20th century? And why are not “Indians” remembered in the same way that the slaves and planters of the early 19th century South are? Is it because they were removed from our memories as well? Such questions suggest that even today we have failed to come to grips with what removal meant to the South then and what it means to the South today.

JAMES TAYLOR CARSON

Queens University

Donna Akers, American Indian Culture and Research Journal (1999); James Taylor Carson, Searching for the Bright Path: The Mississippi Choctaws from Prehistory to Removal (1999); Michael D. Green, Politics of Indian Removal: Creek Government and Society in Crisis (1982); Lucy Maddox, Removals: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Politics of Indian Affairs (1991); Ronald Satz, American Indian Policy in the Jacksonian Era (1975); Russell Thornton, in Cherokee Removal: Before and After, ed. William L. Anderson (1991).

Native Americans and African Americans

Native peoples in the South and African newcomers to North America first encountered one another at least by the early 16th century when Africans traveled through the indigenous Southeast with Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto. De Soto’s ruthless 1539–40 expedition in which he pillaged for gold and Indian slaves included more than 600 soldiers, some of whom were enslaved blacks. In the wealthy Mississippian chiefdom of Cofitachequi (present-day South Carolina), the de Soto party met a woman chief known thereafter as “the Lady of Cofitachequi.” Draped in a fine white fabric, the Lady was carried on a litter and transported in a decorative canoe by slaves from another indigenous group. De Soto and his men plundered pearls, desecrated the temple, and took the Lady captive. She escaped into the woods with a cache of recovered pearls and later encountered a group of enslaved, Spanish-speaking soldiers who had also stolen away from de Soto’s party. The Lady of Cofitachequi partnered with a black man from this group in perhaps the first recorded example of Native American and African (American) marriage. The layered context of their coupling—European invasion, greed, violence, multinational slavery, and the quest for freedom and belonging—would also influence Native American and black relations to come.

A century after this encounter, hundreds of “charter generation” Africans arrived on slave ships to labor in European colonies. When Africans first appeared at the side of Europeans on Atlantic shorelines or in newly established frontier settlements in Virginia or Carolina, speaking European languages and wearing European clothing, they would have been grouped with Europeans by Native American observers who drew lines of distinction around cultural practice rather than race. Not until the early 1700s for tribes that traded most heavily with Europeans, and the late 1700s for geographically isolated tribes, did Native people witness and absorb the organizing principle of racialized chattel slavery. As the English held a growing number of dark-skinned Africans in permanent and inheritable chattel bondage, Native people could not help but recognize race as a marker of difference that mattered.

Concurrent with the importation of black slaves was the rise of an Indian slave trade in the middle and late 1600s. Southern Indians had long taken captive members of enemy Native groups and kept those who were not adopted or ritually murdered as slaves. However, the scale and purpose of Indian slavery shifted as European colonists sought capital to finance plantations through the sale of human beings, as well as an inexpensive labor force with which to derive value from usurped Native lands. European planters incentivized and coerced Indians to sell captives taken in intertribal conflicts. In order to ensure their supply of highly valued trade goods and to protect their own communities from attack, groups like the Westos and the Chickasaws engaged in slaving raids to provide captives to the English. As the European quest for slaves mushroomed, the Indian slave trade enveloped most southern nations, catapulting them into excessive intergroup conflict, population loss, forced migration, and retrenchment as confederacies. At the same time that an African diaspora was being forged through the dispersal of enslaved blacks, an “American diaspora” was being shaped through the dispersal of enslaved Native Americans.

Many of these Indian slaves were sold to the Caribbean, Europe, and New England; some were sold to the Upper South, and the minority was retained in the Lower South. Charles Town was the main location for the sale of both black and Indian slaves, who stood on the same auction blocks and traversed the Atlantic on the same ships. As blacks and Indians were both ensnared in the changing dynamics of human slavery, the merger of lives, communities, and cultures followed. Intermarriage between blacks and American Indians took place on southern plantations, as evidenced by descriptions of mixed-race runaway slaves in colonial newspaper advertisements. In addition to intermarriage, shared circumstances of enslavement led to the exchange and re-creation of cultural forms. African concepts of place, holistic spirituality, respect for ancestors, and the oral tradition corresponded with Native American notions, thereby facilitating this process. Cultural practices that reflect black and Native comingling in the South include a corn-based Indian diet that influenced black “soul food,” the augmentation of black women’s basket-weaving skills with Native patterns and plant preferences, black men’s dugout canoe building learned from Indian companions, cross-cultural influences in Colonoware pottery recovered by archaeologists in Indian towns and on Virginia and South Carolina plantations, plant use as herbal medicines and gourd use as containers, and trickster rabbit story traditions that share character, theme, and plot connections.

Small but noteworthy numbers of free and runaway blacks moved through Native communities in the 1700s. They did so at first as cultural and familial outsiders. Because blacks lacked kinship ties, they were treated as foreigners and held at a distance until or unless they established connections. Such ties were most successfully based in kinship relationships through intermarriage or adoption into Native clans. However, Africans without demonstrable links to Native communities could face suspicion, exclusion, and harsh treatment, as did any uninvited outsider. While one “Negro Fellow” who sought to trade with the Catawbas was met with anger in the 1750s, another “free Negro . . . live[d] among the Catawbas, and [was] received by them as a Catawba, that [spoke] both their language and English, very well.” In these early years of black and Native interaction, race was not a distinguishable factor. Native people instead determined how they would relate to Africans on a case-by-case basis, depending on circumstance, cultural dictates, and mutual need. Blacks seeking free spaces and better lives would also have assessed the Native people they encountered with discernment.

Native slavery decreased after 1720 and was gradually outlawed in the southern colonies by the mid- to late 1700s. But even as the Indian slave trade faded and the importation of Africans skyrocketed, Native people remained aware of the threat of the Euro-Americans’ expanding race-based plantation regime. Witnesses to and previous victims of the brutality of chattel slavery reserved for dark-skinned peoples, Native Americans feared the continuing seizure of their lands and also being grouped with “a great ‘colored’ underclass.” The major southern tribes that survived the “shatter zone” of the Indian slave trade and consolidated their peoples—the Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws—began to draw their own color lines and practice race slavery by the turn of the 19th century.

The outcome of the American Revolutionary War, in which the major southern tribes had aided the British, placed increased pressure on these nations to adopt white American ways of life, including race slavery. As U.S. representatives pushed “civilization” and urged Indian men to give up hunting and turn to agriculture, they also modeled and encouraged black slave ownership. The first treaties negotiated with the Cherokees, Choctaws, and Chickasaws after the war took place on the Hopewell plantation of Brig. Gen. Andrew Pickens in 1785–86. With black slaves in the background presenting a cautionary contrast, Indians were assured that the Continental Congress would promote their welfare “regardless of any distinction of colour.” After the Hopewell treaties had secured large land cessions, Benjamin Hawkins, U.S. agent for southern Indian affairs, developed a model plantation complete with black slaves.

By the early 1800s, minorities within the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Creek nations held black slaves on small farms and large plantations. Native slaveholders sometimes inherited blacks from white fathers, held blacks taken in the Revolutionary War, and traded for blacks in Indian towns and southern cities. Native governments sanctioned slavery and black political exclusion, and prohibitions against intermarriage developed in the Cherokee and Creek nations in the 1820s. Nevertheless, intimate relations across the color line persisted in slaveholding Indian nations. Some of these couplings were engaged in by choice; others were coerced or forced. The experience of blacks owned by Indians differed depending on circumstance but in many ways echoed that of slaves in the white South. Blacks enslaved by Native people resisted in various ways, including escape. Those who remained in Indian bondage learned Native languages, prepared Indian foods, and wore Indian dress. Native slaveholders’ dependence on black slaves’ linguistic and interpretive skills in missionary, trading, and treaty negotiation contexts is widely documented and distinguishes black slavery in Indian locales.

Among the large slaveholding tribes, the Seminoles were exceptional. They were themselves a nation made up of survivors—runaways and refugees of various Indian groups, particularly Creek minorities. Rather than adopting chattel slavery, Seminoles created a system that borrowed from older Native chiefdom models of central and dependent towns. Aware of the uniqueness of Seminole views, black slaves fled to Florida and established towns of their own within Seminole territory. With an estimated population of 800 in 1822, Seminole maroon communities thrived, paying a required tribute in crops to powerful Seminole towns. While black Seminoles were not formally free, they lived lives characterized by relative autonomy and mobility. Interracial marriage between blacks and Seminoles occurred but was not the norm, as social life focused within rather than across the settlements. Black headmen emerged not only as leaders of black Seminole towns but also as go-betweens, and black male interpreters served in diplomatic talks between the Seminoles and the United States. In the First and Second Seminole Wars (1817–18, 1835–42), waged with the United States over Florida lands, black Seminoles fought alongside Seminoles, who in turn protected them from being returned to slavery in the states. Maj. Gen. Thomas Jesup’s warning to the secretary of war—“The two races, the negro and the Indian, are rapidly approximating; they are identified in interests and feeling”—captured the strength of the alliance as well as the anxiety it caused. The alliance faltered, however, when Jesup offered freedom to black Seminoles if they abandoned the resistance movement and immigrated to Indian Territory. After Seminole removal, bands of Seminoles and black Seminoles led by former warriors Wildcat and John Cavallo (Horse) continued the alliance and departed Indian Territory for Mexico together. However, relations as a whole deteriorated in the West, and the interdependent chiefdom system was not restored.

Following the Indian removal period of the 1830s and 1840s, Native Americans and African Americans in the South came into significant contact at Hampton Institute in Virginia. A black industrial school by design, Hampton became a biracial institution and an early site of government-funded education for Indians at the start of the boarding-school era. Indians first entered Hampton in 1878, 10 years after the school’s founding, when Capt. Richard Henry Pratt transported Plains tribes prisoners of war to study under the directorship of Hampton founder Samuel Chapman Armstrong. The goal of educating Native students at Hampton was civilizational and industrial training, as Indians were expected to learn habits of white society that would enable their cultural transformation and eventual assimilation. In 1879, when Hampton launched its Indian Program, Native students studied alongside blacks in a regimented, semisegregated setting that encouraged racial comparison and competition. School administrators imagined black students as willing workers because of the legacy of slavery, while they pictured Indians as wild, proud, and hostile to whites. Placed higher on a projected scale of civilization, black students were expected to set an example of good cheer and hard work for Indians. Notions about black and Indian students at Hampton fluctuated, however, with each group being shifted on an ideological hierarchy of races. The Hampton Indian program ended in 1922, in large part owing to the loss of congressional funding in 1912 and a growing inability to recruit Indian students to attend a predominantly black institution at a low point in African American history.

Native American and African American interrelated cultural lives have been rich, complex, and varied. Brought together in the 1500s by European exploration, colonization, and slavery, thousands of Native Americans and African Americans came into intimate contact by circumscribed choice as well as duress. They forged familial, cultural, and political connections and engaged in intergroup conflicts that continue to reverberate. Together with whites, blacks and Indians were important, if often unwilling, partners in the forging of a new southern world.

TIYA MILES

University of Michigan

Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (1998); Kathryn E. Holland Braund, Deerskins and Duffels: Creek Indian Trade with Anglo-America, 1685–1815 (1993); Jonathan Brennan, ed., When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote: African–Native American Literature (2003); Chester B. Depratter, in The Forgotten Centuries: Indians and Europeans in the American South, 1521–1704, ed. Charles Hudson and Carmen Chaves Tesser (1994); Robbie Ethridge and Sheri M. Shuck-Hall, eds., Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South (2009); Jack D. Forbes, Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples (1993); Thomas Foster, ed., The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796–1810 (2003); Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–1717 (2002), ed., Indian Slavery in Colonial America (2009); Charles Hudson, Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun: Hernando de Soto and the South’s Ancient Chiefdoms (1997), The Southeastern Indians (1976); Barbara Krauthamer, in New Studies in the History of American Slavery, ed. Edward E. Baptist and Stephanie M. H. Camp (2006); Almon Wheeler Lauber, Indian Slavery in Colonial Times within the Present Limits of the United States (1970); Donal F. Lindsey, Indians at Hampton Institute, 1877–1923 (1995); James H. Merrell, Journal of Southern History (August 1984); Tiya Miles, The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story (2010), Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (2005); Patrick Minges, Black Indian Slave Narratives (2004); Kevin Mulroy, Freedom on the Border: The Seminole Maroons in Florida, the Indian Territory, Coahuila, and Texas (1993); Celia Naylor, African Cherokees in Indian Territory: From Chattel to Citizens (2007); Greg O’Brien, ed., Pre-removal Choctaw History: Exploring New Paths (2008); Theda Perdue, Ethnohistory (Fall 2004), Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540–1866 (1979); Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green, eds., The Columbia Guide to American Indians of the Southeast (2001); Kenneth W. Porter, The Black Seminoles: History of a Freedom-Seeking People (1996); Claudio Saunt, Black, White, and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family (2005), in Confounding the Color Line: The Indian-Black Experience in North America, ed. James F. Brooks (2002); Claudio Saunt et al., Ethnohistory (Spring 2006); Theresa A. Singleton, ed., I, Too, Am America: Archaeological Studies of African-American Life (1999); Christina Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (2010); Gabrielle Tayac, in Documents of United States Indian Policy, ed. Francis Paul Prucha (1975; 1990), ed., IndiVisible: African–Native American Lives (2009); Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (1974); J. Leitch Wright, The Only Land They Knew: The Tragic Story of the American Indians in the Old South (1981); Gary Zellar, African Creeks: Estelvste and the Creek Nation (2007).

Pacific Worlds and the South

Often depicted as isolated and xenophobic, at least in relation to other parts of the United States, the American South at first glance appears to have little relevance to lands and peoples across the Pacific. But the South’s transpacific connections run deep. And it is through those connections forged by empire and capital that Asians have arrived in the South (and the Americas in general). Indeed, within the field of Asian American Studies, the South is where that history first took root. When the Spanish claimed the Americas and the Philippines in the 16th century, they envisioned and pursued an imperial world of mercantile capitalism, including the galleon trade plying between Manila and Acapulco. It was not uncommon for Filipino sailors, who had been impressed to work on the galleons, to jump ship in Mexico. Possibly as early as the 1760s, when the Spanish Crown ruled over Louisiana, some of these sailors sought refuge in St. Bernard Parish, establishing perhaps the oldest Asian American community in the present United States.

As the example of Louisiana’s Manilamen, as they would be called, suggests, the South was not always what it has become (or, more precisely, what it has come to represent)—a region within the United States, usually defined by its distinctly biracial (black-white) history. The Spanish, French, British, and American empires have laid claims to different parts of southeastern North America, making it, at varying points, the northern, eastern, western, or southern node in wider imperial formations. (Our geohistorical groundings would become more unsettled if we were to include the perspectives of American Indians.) Exploring how and why Asians have come to call the South home, if only temporarily at times, compels us to contend with these larger histories, to see the South’s imbrication in national and global developments that were never simply black and white, North and South, or West and East.

New Orleans, the Old South’s leading port city, and the surrounding sugar parishes constituted the southern hub of ideas and movements concerning Asia and Asians in the 19th century. For proslavery ideologues like J. D. B. De Bow, Asia and Asians were very much at the heart of struggles over American slavery. Observing the transport of thousands of indentured Asian workers to British, Spanish, and French colonies of the Caribbean in the 1840s and 1850s, the influential journalist of New Orleans denounced what he saw as the hypocrisy of abolitionism. “The civilized and powerful races of the earth have discovered that the degraded, barbarous, and weak races may be induced voluntarily to reduce themselves to a slavery more cruel than any that has yet disgraced the earth,” De Bow concluded, “and that humanity may compound with its conscience, by pleading that the act is one of free will.” If condemning their Caribbean neighbors’ resort to Asian workers helped to justify American slavery, the Civil War and its aftermath drew southern planters’ eyes increasingly to Asia and the Caribbean. “Those pent-up millions of Asia want room, want food, want the opportunity to work,” a southern champion of Chinese labor argued in 1868; “we, in the Valley of the Mississippi, want labor; we must have it; we have farms for millions, work for tens of millions.”

With the onset of Radical Reconstruction, southern planters’ fascination with Asian workers as a potential alternative to black labor reached a feverish pitch, enough to generate a mass regional convention in Memphis, Tenn., in July 1869. In both the South and the Caribbean, a leading organizer of the meeting stated, “experience taught that the great staples could not be produced by voluntary labor, but under coerced labor systematized and overlooked by intelligence . . . labor that the owner of the soil can control.” He and many of the delegates clamored openly for a new form of slavery, labor “which you can control and manage to some extent as of old.” With discussions on labor conditions in the Caribbean, Hawaii, California, and elsewhere, the Memphis convention also conveyed the New South’s worldly (and imperial) ambitions. Its delegates resolved to form the Mississippi Valley Immigration Labor Company to bring “into the country the largest number of Chinese agricultural laborers in the shortest possible time,” with an invitation to “capitalists and planters” everywhere to purchase stocks. It was a resolution and a movement simultaneously to revive slavery and to modernize the South.

Such brash talk of recruiting “coerced” workers from Asia generated vehement opposition from two seemingly dissimilar sources, reflective of intensifying battles over Reconstruction and Chinese migration. Fearful of southern white designs to thwart recent political advances, prominent abolitionists and Republicans objected to what Frederick Douglass called “the selfish inventions and dreams of men!” Immediately after the Memphis convention, Secretary of the Treasury George S. Boutwell instructed the New Orleans collector of customs “to use all vigilance in the suppression of this new modification of the Slave Trade.” The growing ranks of dispossessed whites in the South likewise rejected the prospect of Asian workers flooding the region, not for humanity’s sake but for their own salvation. “We will have again a fat and pampered aristocracy, worse than it ever was, and far more haughty and overbearing,” an antiplanter editorial declared. “It will then be ‘how many Coolies does he work?’ instead of ‘how many negroes does he own?’ so commonly used ante bellum.” Echoing anti-Chinese rancor on the Pacific Coast, many southern whites articulated and translated their critique of monopoly capital in racial terms.

These local, national, and global forces firmly linked Asian workers with slavery in American culture and, in turn, steered thousands of Chinese migrants to the South, especially Louisiana, in the 1860s and 1870s. Largely restricted to the richest planters, who could afford the high costs of recruitment and shipment, a coterie of southerners, targets of fanfare and optimism as much as of chagrin and scorn, pursued Chinese workers on imperial routes crisscrossing the globe—from Cuba, China, Martinique, and, increasingly after the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, California. “Physically they are fine specimens, bright and intelligent,” the New Orleans Times rejoiced, “and coming, as they do, from the low districts of China, within the tropics, there is nothing to be apprehended on the score of climate.” But Chinese migrants failed to solve planters’ labor “problems,” for they behaved no differently than black workers. Planter after planter drew the same conclusion—the Chinese were “fond of changing about, run away worse than negroes, and . . . leave as soon as anybody offers them higher wages,” as a newspaper put it—even as they ironically and continually lured Chinese workers away from their neighbors’ estates, with the hope of stabilizing their labor force.

As Chinese workers ran away to various plantations, to small towns and larger cities, and to California and elsewhere, they seemed to vanish from the South as fast as they had appeared. Outside the public eye, however, many Chinese migrants formed families and communities, with one another and with local peoples. They made the South their home. In Natchitoches Parish, La., for example, Chinese men established families with black, white, Creole, and American Indian women, whose progeny have continued to recognize (and at times vehemently deny) their Chinese ancestry for generations. U.S. census records failed to capture their diverse histories though. In 1880, the multiracial children of Chinese migrants were categorized as “Chinese,” but within two decades, amid the onslaught of Jim Crow laws, those same individuals were reclassified as either “black” or “white.” Later on, some embraced their “Mexican” identity, a classification that enabled them to straddle the hardening color line. In contrast to their forebears, who were in demand as plantation workers precisely because they were neither black nor white, most descendants of Chinese migrants were compelled to identify as either black or white in the 20th century.

As in other regions of the United States, Asian Americans in general had no choice in racial matters. The state decided for them. Born and raised in the segregated world of Mississippi, Martha Lum and her parents attempted to enroll her in the all-white Rosedale Consolidated High School in 1924. Readily admitting that their client was not white, Lum’s lawyers simultaneously insisted that she was not “colored,” which, they argued, had been defined historically as persons with “negro blood.” Placing the “Mongolian” apart from the “colored” and next to the “Caucasian,” Lum’s appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court rested on doubling (and troubling) claims of racial discrimination. “The white race may not legally expose the yellow race to a danger that the dominant race recognizes and, by the same laws, guards itself against,” Lum’s lawyers pleaded. “This is discrimination.” The highest courts of Mississippi and then the United States disagreed. Upholding Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and other legal precedents on racial exclusion and segregation, they ruled that Lum “may attend the colored public schools of her district, or, if she does not so desire, she may go to a private school.” She was indeed “colored.”

U.S. military campaigns across the Pacific, which began in the 19th century and proliferated in the 20th century, have driven new waves of Asians to the South. In the wake of U.S. entry into World War II, the federal government rounded up Japanese Americans living along the Pacific Coast and ordered them at gunpoint to embark on a trail of dispossession and misery eastward. Tens of thousands of them ended up in the South, incarcerated in concentration camps (in Rohwer and Jerome) in Arkansas and internment camps in Texas and Louisiana and inducted into a segregated military unit in Mississippi. “Being at Rohwer was just a lonely feeling that I can’t explain,” recalled Miyo Senzaki. “You couldn’t run anywhere. It was scary because there was no end to it. You could run and run and run but where are you to go? . . . We felt like prisoners.” Though victims of segregation before World War II, for many Japanese Americans, including the legendary activist Yuri Kochiyama, it was in Arkansas and Mississippi that they awakened to a new political consciousness, a new awareness of white supremacy’s reach and depth. Jim Crow in the concentrations camps, in the military, and in the surrounding southern landscape ruled their lives.

Three decades later, U.S. military intervention in Southeast Asia drove thousands of refugees to the South, a flow of Asian migrations created by the colossal U.S. military industrial complex and the living legacies of Spanish, Portuguese, and French colonialisms. Among the first to arrive in 1975 were Vietnamese Catholics, whose religious lineage dates back to Spanish and Portuguese colonizers of the 16th century and French colonial rule beginning in the 19th century. Deemed collaborators of French rule and then of the U.S. military by the Communist leaders of Vietnam, Vietnamese Catholics sought refuge for decades, first in southern Vietnam (after the decisive defeat of French troops in 1954) and then in the United States and elsewhere (upon the “fall” of Saigon in 1975). These refugees were first flown to Guam and the Philippines and then to four military bases on the U.S. mainland, including Camp Chafee in Arkansas and Elgin Air Force Base in Florida, from which volunteer organizations sponsored them for resettlement across the United States. Thousands of Vietnamese refugees accepted an open invitation from the head of the New Orleans archdiocese, finding a refuge, a new home, in a Catholic city, not far from where the Manilamen had landed two centuries earlier.

Vietnamese refugees and their families were among those devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, a storm that pushed race to the fore of U.S. politics, albeit framed almost universally in black and white. Largely below the media radar, racial dynamics in the Village de L’Est neighborhood of New Orleans were radically different. With mass white flight since the 1960s, it was a neighborhood made up almost completely of blacks and Vietnamese. In Katrina’s aftermath, both Vietnamese and black residents returned much earlier and in larger numbers than anticipated or desired by city, state, and federal officials. Almost immediately upon their return, they encountered a new threat nearby, in the form of a makeshift landfill ordered into existence by Mayor C. Ray Nagin. With support from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Martin Luther King Jr.’s organization, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and other civil rights groups, local residents mobilized successfully to shut it down. “The landfill struggle, everything we’re fighting for out here—this is about the Vietnamese and the blacks together,” a Vietnamese American organizer stated. Village de L’Est is a neighborhood not devoid of racial tensions and conflicts, but, like many rural and urban pockets across the South today, it is a place of complex memories and histories, a place that growing numbers of Asian Americans are calling home.

MOON-HO JUNG

University of Washington

Leslie Bow, Partly Colored: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South (2010); Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (1991); Lucy M. Cohen, Chinese in the Post–Civil War South: A People without a History (1984); Marina E. Espina, Filipinos in Louisiana (1988); Diane C. Fujino, Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama (2005); Gong Lum et al. v. Rice et al., 275 U.S. 78 (1927); Moon-Ho Jung, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (2006); Karen J. Leong et al., Journal of American History (December 2007); Gary Y. Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture (1994); Rice et al. v. Gong Lum et al., 139 Mississippi 760 (1925); Eric Tang, American Quarterly (March 2011); John Tateishi, ed., And Justice for All: An Oral History of Japanese American Detention Camps (1999).

Racial Terror and Citizenship

“There is a perfect reign of terror existing in the several counties, so much so that I cannot do justice to the subject,” wrote an official with the U.S. Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands in 1866. The phrase this superintendent chose to characterize the late-night home invasions, plunder, murder, and rape being carried out by a vigilante gang of white men against former slaves in his region of Tennessee—“a perfect reign of terror”—appeared repeatedly in official descriptions of similar white-on-black violence that occurred across the South after the Civil War. This violence was generally well planned and carried a clear political message: regardless of their new status as free people, African Americans would not be permitted to exercise the rights of citizenship. It also initiated patterns of racial and political violence that endured across the South well into the 20th century.

During Reconstruction, former slaves seized opportunities for political participation, while the federal government—through legislation and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments—recognized them as citizens and guaranteed the right to vote without regard to race. Active black citizenship, though, upended a southern antebellum political culture wherein a voice in public affairs had been the exclusive privilege of white men. Black male suffrage threatened not only white men’s control over politics but also the significance of their whiteness, which had previously depended on a clear distinction between white “freemen” and black slaves. Violent white reactions to the challenges posed by emancipation began immediately after the war, when bands of white men roamed rural areas of the South, disarming black Union soldiers, stealing freedpeople’s property, and threatening and often killing black community leaders. The “reign of terror” also included “riots”—in fact, premeditated massacres of freedpeople—in cities such as Memphis and New Orleans. It was repeated scenes of such violence in the former Confederacy that convinced many northern white Republicans to support federal protection of black rights in the South, and specifically suffrage. Yet as the resultant federal law took effect in the late 1860s, white-on-black violence only spread into widening realms.

At this time, vigilante gangs began wearing disguises and calling themselves the Ku Klux Klan. The Reconstruction-era Klan, though, was far less a centralized organization than a label used by disparate white gangs across the South who sought the anonymity offered by Klan-style practices. Attacks by these disguised bands followed a common pattern. Late at night, masked men surrounded freedpeople’s homes, dragged their victims outside, plundered their belongings, and stripped, beat, whipped, raped, or murdered them. White vigilantes also subjected many to scenes of racial and sexual submission. Through their words and deeds, assailants compelled their victims to enact a return to a pre-emancipation racial order, that is, one in which black men were rendered incapable of protecting their families and black women were obliged to provide white men with sex on demand. In effect, assailants attempted to impose upon black men and women their putative unsuitability for citizenship by forcing them to perform dishonorable masculine and feminine roles.

Many African Americans responded to Klanlike attacks by participating in local militias to protect their communities from violence. Especially in rural areas where African Americans were in the minority, though, the power of terrorist gangs frequently overwhelmed local law enforcement. Indeed, some gangs included police officials as members. Some Reconstruction-era governors imposed martial law to put down the Klan, but in most states only federal action was effective in stopping the violence. In 1870–71, the Enforcement Acts made violence or intimidation with the intent of impeding voting a federal offense, allowing the federal government to oversee elections and to arrest Klan members. Under these acts, hundreds were prosecuted. Although few served significant jail time, Klanlike vigilante terrorist groups were effectively ended for the time being. Suppressing the violence led to an impressive expansion of black political participation between 1872 and 1874.

This high point in black political power, though, also marked the beginning of the next round of terrorist violence in the South, as armed auxiliaries of the Democratic Party mounted new campaigns to push African Americans out of the political process. African Americans organized in self-defense but were usually out-armed and out-numbered, and hundreds were killed in clashes during the mid-1870s. In summer 1876, a federal official again used the familiar phrase “a perfect reign of terror” to describe the violence in one region of South Carolina. But this time attackers operated in the open, emboldened by an apparent federal retreat from backing African Americans’ rights in the South. This retreat was evident when, in United States v. Cruikshank et al. (1876), the Supreme Court overturned convictions under the Enforcement Acts, arguing that the federal government had authority only over actions taken by states, not individuals. Thereafter, the power to police vigilante violence returned to state governments, which were now all under Democratic control and often complicit in terror.

With the alliance between African Americans and northern white political leaders that had made possible the Reconstruction era’s dramatic revolution in citizenship now ended, the threat of violence rather than the force of law would regulate the exercise of political power in the South for decades to come. Not until the 1960s did renewed federal attention drive white terror underground, from where assailants nonetheless carried out plans to bomb black churches and to kidnap and murder civil rights activists. White violence thus effectively barred African Americans from the citizenship they had sought, and had momentarily enjoyed, after emancipation until the civil rights movement’s successes a century later.

HANNAH ROSEN

University of Michigan

Jane Dailey, Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia (2000); Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution (1988); Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (1996); Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (2003); Stephen Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (2000); Hannah Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South (2009); Allen W. Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction (1971).

Racial Uplift

Racial uplift is an African American ideology that had its greatest impact in response to the increasing oppression blacks faced between 1880 and World War I. Earlier versions of its concern for achieving social respectability in the eyes of whites appeared in the North before the Civil War, among free blacks trying to claim their rights. The end of slavery and the gaining of freedom for southern slaves led to an optimistic period for African Americans during Reconstruction. But the frustration that came afterward with Jim Crow segregation laws, disfranchisement, economic marginalization, bigoted and crude representations in American culture, and racial violence led to a variety of efforts to counter white racism, with leaders advocating for public protest, migration, industrial education, or higher education. In this context, the black middle class embraced the idea of uplift, a belief that advocates who called themselves the “better classes” should nurture black respectability as a way toward social advancement. This outlook called for black elites to assume responsibility for working with the black masses to encourage them to follow middle-class values of temperance, hard work, thrift, perseverance, and Victorian-era sexual self-restraint. The expectation was that as most blacks came to practice middle-class virtues, they would earn the esteem of white America.

The ideology countered antiblack stereotypes by stressing class differences among African Americans, with black elites the symbols of racial progress. Its advocates demanded recognition by white elites of the role of black elites as torchbearers for “civilization” and “progress.” This approach encouraged intraracial class tensions and overlooked the deeply racialized categories of civilization and progress in the age of empire and the “white man’s burden.” By endorsing the idea of backward black masses, racial uplift ironically seemed to endorse the white racist representations of blacks. In the realm of culture, racial uplift endorsed Western European forms of music. The Fisk Jubilee Singers, for example, converted the folk spirituals of slavery into a choral style that would appeal to white audiences as they toured the nation and Europe itself. Black middle classes disliked, in turn, the raw emotions of blues music and black gospel music, seeing them as survivals from a primitive age of black culture. Black elites did not appreciate ways that black folk culture offered individual psychological resources and communal social class cohesion to counter the trauma of white racism.

The ideology was firmly patriarchal in its assumption that male-headed families should be the norm, with male authority sometimes taken for granted, although black women leaders often challenged this latter assumption. African American women, in fact, were among the chief advocates for racial uplift and were responsible for some of its greatest achievements. The black Baptist Women’s Convention Movement drew from an emergent middle class in the late 19th century of school administrators, journalists, businesswomen, and social reformers that served an all-black community in the age of Jim Crow. Black religious women promoted bourgeois ideals as missionaries, teachers, and sometimes just as influential wives of ministers, all of which made them conveyers of culture to the larger black community. They also vocally attacked the nation’s failure to live up to its ideals. One of the most prominent Black Baptist women leaders was Nannie Burroughs, who was the first president of the National Baptist Convention’s National Training School for Women and Girls. She had introduced the idea for the school to the Women’s Convention and stoked enthusiasm for it. “This is going to be the ‘national dream’ realized,” she wrote, insisting that “a million women in our churches will make us have it.” The convention’s interest in the welfare of the working poor and its interest in employment possibilities after graduation led to founding the institution as an industrial school rather than a liberal arts college. Its motto was “Work. Support thyself. To thine own powers appeal.” The school’s founders saw productive labor as contributing to individual self-help and responsibility, but it also encouraged “race work,” pride in racial identity and responsibility for the collective black community.

The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) became a prime organizational context for African American women to promote the middle-class ideals of uplift. The image of the drunken husband and father had no innate racial component, but black women reformers saw how whites often represented that figure as a black man. They argued that alcohol had a pernicious effect not only on families but on the black community in general. They used the WCTU to show that black leaders were witnessing for temperance with dignity and industriousness, and that not all blacks failed to achieve this particular middle-class ideal. Working for temperance brought black women uplifters into collaborative work with white women, in a conspicuous example of interracial cooperation for the time period. White women saw black women, though, as junior partners in the collaboration, working in a segregated institution and reporting to white women. At a time when some African Americans were still able to vote, white women recognized the potential for recruiting black voters in temperance elections, encouraging this cross–racial line cooperation. Black women reformers had long worked through churches for temperance reform and resented the often-patronizing attitudes of white women. Still, black women saw in the WCTU the opportunity to build a Christian community that might serve as a model for interracial cooperation on other fronts, which could aid very tangibly the social needs of the black masses.

Black ministers were also among the most important and successful advocates for racial uplift. The ideology had roots in the communal religious activities of the slave community before the Civil War, and the New Testament ideal of community offered a specifically religious theology supporting the concept. The Christian image of the shepherd inspired black ministers as they rose in denominational hierarchies, and they affirmed the need to care for less-fortunate blacks and to inculcate the Protestant work ethic as an illustration of racial uplift ideals. The National Baptist Convention (NBC) supported both industrial education and higher education as vehicles for middle-class black aspirations, and both Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois were often in attendance at the convention’s activities. Black religious leadership of the era often reflected a Gilded Age success formula. Thomas Fuller, for example, the minister of a large Nashville congregation at the turn of the 20th century, preached a popular sermon, “Work Is the Law of Life,” which projected an optimistic, self-help philosophy encouraging his hearers to success through hard work. Another black minister, Elias Camp Morris, was the first president of the NBC, beginning in 1895, and remained its leader for a quarter of a century. He urged blacks to support “the business side of the race” by patronizing black-owned businesses. He urged that there be no let-up “of our efforts to become taxpayers, owners of homes, and constructive builders of our own fortunes.”

Although the racial uplift ideology had its limitations, it counted many solid achievements in terms of social improvements for African Americans at a time regarded as the nadir for black life in the South and the nation. Advocates worked through schools and colleges, civic and fraternal organizations, Social Gospel churches, settlement houses, newspapers, and trade unions to improve the life of black communities. The ideology failed, though, in its assumption that embracing middle-class values would overcome the disadvantages from American society’s racist structures that stacked the deck against those very middle-class aspirations of African Americans.

CHARLES REAGAN WILSON

University of Mississippi

Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Middle-Class Ideology and Leadership in the United States since 1890 (1996); Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (1994); Angela Hornsby-Gutting, Black Manhood and Community Building in North Carolina, 1900–1930 (2009); Karen Ann Johnson, Uplifting the Women and the Race: The Educational Philosophies and Social Activism of Anna Julia Cooper and Nannie Helen Burroughs (2000); Edward Wheeler, Uplifting the Race: The Black Minister in the New South, 1865–1920 (1986).

Religion, Black

The religious life of the majority of black southerners originated in both traditional African religions and Anglo-Protestant evangelicalism. The influence of Africa was more muted in the United States than in Latin America, where African-derived theology and ritual were institutionalized in the communities of Brazilian Candomblé, Haitian Voodoo, and Cuban Santeria. Nevertheless, in the United States, as in Latin America, slaves did transmit to their descendants styles of worship, funeral customs, magical ritual, and medicinal practice based upon the religious systems of West and Central African societies.

Although some slaves in Maryland and Louisiana were baptized as Catholics, most had no contact with Catholicism and were first converted to Christianity in large numbers under the preaching of Baptist and Methodist revivalists in the late 18th century. The attractiveness of the evangelical revivals for slaves was due to several factors: the emotional behavior of revivalists encouraged the type of religious ecstasy similar to the danced religions of Africa; the antislavery stance taken by some Baptists and Methodists encouraged slaves to identify evangelicalism with emancipation; blacks actively participated in evangelical meetings and cofounded churches with white evangelicals; and evangelical churches licensed black men to preach.

By the 1780s, pioneer black preachers had already begun to minister to their own people in the South, and as time went on, black congregations, mainly Baptist in denomination, increased in size and in number, despite occasional harassment and proscription by the authorities. However, the majority of slaves in the antebellum South attended church, if at all, with whites.

Institutional church life was not the whole of religion for slaves. An “invisible institution” of secret and often forbidden religious meetings thrived in the slave quarters. Here slaves countered the slaveholding gospel of the master class with their own version of Christianity in which slavery and slaveholding stood condemned by God. Slaves took the biblical story of Exodus and applied it to their own history, asserting that they, like the children of Israel, would be liberated from bondage. In the experience of conversion, individual slaves affirmed their personal dignity and self-worth. In the ministry, black men exercised authority and achieved status nowhere else available to them. Melding African and Western European traditions, the slaves created a religion of great vitality.

Complementing Christianity in the quarters was conjure, a sophisticated combination of African herbal medicine and magic. Based on the belief that illness and misfortune have personal as well as impersonal causes, conjure offered frequently successful therapy for the mental and physical ills of generations of African Americans and simultaneously served as a system for venting social tension and resolving conflict.

The Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction wrought an institutional transformation of black churches in the South. Northern denominations—black as well as white—sent aid to the freedmen and missionaries to educate and bring them to church. Freedmen, eager to learn to read and write, flocked to schools set up by the American Missionary Association and other freedmen’s aid societies. These freedmen’s schools laid the foundation for major black colleges and universities such as Fisk, Morehouse, Dillard, and others. Eager to exercise autonomy, freedmen swarmed out of white churches and organized their own. Some affiliated with black denominations of northern origin; others formed their own southern associations.

Black ministers actively campaigned in Reconstruction politics and in some cases were elected to positions of influence and power. Richard H. Cain, for example, was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from North Carolina and Hiram R. Revels was elected to the Senate from Mississippi. With the failure of Reconstruction and the disfranchisement of black southerners, the church once again became the sole forum for black politics, as well as the economic, social, and educational center of black communities across the South.

By the end of the century, black church membership stood at an astounding 2.7 million out of a population of 8.3 million. Most numerous were the Baptists, who succeeded in 1895 in creating a National Baptist Convention, followed numerically by the black Methodists, as institutionalized in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, both founded in the North early in the century, and the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, formed by an amicable withdrawal from the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in 1870.

Though too poor to mount a full-fledged missionary campaign, the black churches turned to evangelization of Africa as a challenge to Afro-American Christian identity. The first black missionaries, David George and George Liele, had sailed during the Revolution, George to Nova Scotia and then to Sierra Leone, Liele to Jamaica. Daniel Coker followed in 1820 and Lott Carey and Colin Teague in 1821. But in the 1870s and 1880s, the mission to Africa seemed all the more urgent. As race relations worsened, as lynching mounted in frequency, as racism was legislated in Jim Crow statutes, emigration appeared to black clergy like Henry McNeal Turner to be the only solution. Others saw the redemption of Africa as the divinely appointed destiny of black Americans, God’s plan for drawing good out of the evil of slavery and oppression.

Connections between southern black churches and northern ones developed as blacks from the South migrated or escaped north and as northern missionaries came to the South after the Civil War. Several southern blacks assumed positions of leadership in northern churches. Josiah Bishop, a Baptist preacher from Virginia, became pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York, and Daniel Alexander Payne and Morris Brown, both of Charleston, became bishops of the AME Church. Beginning in the 1890s and increasing after the turn of the century, rural southern blacks migrated in larger and larger numbers to the cities of the North. Frequently, their ministers traveled with them and transplanted, often in storefront or house churches, congregations from the South.

In the cities, southern as well as northern, black migrants encountered new religious options that attracted some adherents from the traditional churches. Catholicism, through the influence of parochial schools, began attracting significant numbers of blacks in the 20th century. Black Muslims and Jews developed new religioracial identities for African Americans disillusioned with Christianity. The Holiness and Pentecostal churches stressed the experiential and ecstatic dimensions of worship while preaching the necessity of sanctification and the blessings of the Spirit. They also facilitated the development of gospel music by allowing the use of instruments and secular tunes in church services.

Though urbanization and secularization led to criticism of black religion as accommodationist and compensatory, the church remained the most important and effective public institution in southern black life. The religious culture of the black folk was celebrated by intellectuals like W. E. B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson, who acclaimed the artistry of the slave spirituals and black preaching.

In the late 1950s and 1960s, the civil rights movement drew heavily upon the institutional and ethical resources of the black churches across the South. Martin Luther King Jr. brought to the attention of the nation and the world the moral tradition of black religion. Today, black religion is more pluralistic than ever. Most African Americans continue to worship in predominantly black denominations, although they also form identifiable caucuses with biracial denominations. Black liberation theology associated with southern-born writers like James Cone and Pauli Murray has been an influence on some of the faithful for decades. Roman Catholics and Muslims include significant communities of African Americans in the South. Black religious leaders and laypeople continue to work for racial justice and to cooperate in racial reconciliation efforts in the South. Churches remain important political organizing sites and encourage political participation among their members. Although the church is no longer the only institution that blacks control, it still exerts considerable power in black communities.

ALBERT J. RABOTEAU

Princeton University

Hans A. Baer, The Black Spiritual Movement: A Religious Response to Racism (1984); Yvonne Chireau, Black Magic: Dimensions of the Supernatural in African American Religion (2000); James Cone, For My People: Black Theology and the Black Church (1984); W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903); Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (1998); Samuel S. Hill, ed., Religion in the Southern States: A Historical Study (1983); C. Eric Lincoln, ed., The Black Experience in Religion (1974); Donald G. Mathews, Religion in the Old South (1977); William E. Montgomery, Under Their Own Vine and Fig Tree: The African American Church in the South, 1865–1900 (1993); Albert J. Raboteau, Canaan Land: A Religious History of African Americans (1999), Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (1978); Clarence Walker, A Rock in a Weary Land: The African Methodist Episcopal Church during the Civil War and Reconstruction (1982); James M. Washington, Frustrated Fellowship: The Black Baptist Quest for Social Power (1986); Joseph R. Washington, Black Religion: The Negro and Christianity in the United States (1964).

Religion, Latino

Specific forms of Latino Catholicism have a long historical trajectory in the geographic extremes of the South, but in the past decade Latino religion has become increasingly pervasive and varied throughout the region. Tejano (Mexican Texan) religion dates back to Mexico’s ceding of Texas to the United States, which was completed with the Compromise of 1850. In the late 19th century, mestizos in the region, whose indigenous ancestors had been evangelized by Franciscans during Spanish military expeditions, identified as Catholic but had tenuous ties to the institutional church. As the U.S. Catholic Church assumed ecclesiastical control of the region, many factors hindered Tejano participation in the church: only a handful of functioning parishes already existed in the region; Tejanos had a long history of anticlericalism, which resulted from the Catholic Church’s alignment with Spain against Mexican independence; and as Anglo-American clergy arrived in Texas, most brought with them a strong bias against Mexican Texans, with a few notable exceptions (such as the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, who worked extensively with Tejanos in the south Texas borderlands). Nevertheless, many Tejanos practiced a vibrant home-centered religion that revolved around devotions to Mary and the saints, as well as a range of syncretic practices such as curanderismo, a blend of Catholicism with ancient Mesoamerican healing rites that continues to thrive among Mexicans in the South.

Between 1910 and 1940, Tejanos were joined by hundreds of thousands of Mexican immigrants, who had been pushed from the interior of Mexico by the Mexican Revolution (1910–19) and the Cristero Rebellion (1926–29). The new Mexican government’s persecution of the Catholic Church and popular revolts in support of the clergy resulted in the exile of Catholic faithful, nuns, and priests. Once in Texas, these exiles worked together to build their own churches, parochial schools, and service centers. Nevertheless, many remained underserved by Catholic diocesan structures, which remained focused on “Anglo” (non-Mexican) Catholics. In some regions of Texas, religious (order) priests were given the responsibility of ministering to Mexicans in separate churches. In 1954, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate constructed a large shrine in the Lower Rio Grande Valley to honor the Virgin of San Juan, to whom many Mexican immigrants in the area had a powerful devotion. Currently, almost 1 million visitors pass through the doors of the Shrine of Our Lady of San Juan del Valle annually, making it the most visited Catholic pilgrimage destination in the United States.

As Texas was beginning its secession from Mexico, another form of Latino popular religiosity was establishing a presence in the South: that of Cuban immigrants to Florida. The first Florida Cuban communities formed in Key West in 1831 and Ybor City, Tampa, in 1886. Both of these communities were made up of cigar makers and their families, who were supporters of Cuban independence from Spain and of José Martí’s Partido Revolucionario Cubano. As in Mexico, support of the revolution was generally accompanied by a strong dose of anticlericalism, since the Cuban Catholic Church aligned with Spanish colonial powers. Nevertheless, Ybor City’s first Catholic church was established by a Jesuit priest in 1890, and a second Cuban parish opened in 1922. Although the Catholic Church was widely regarded as a weak and relatively insignificant institution in Ybor City, some evidence exists that home-based popular religiosity and African-based syncretic religious practices thrived there.

In 1961, as a result of the Cuban Revolution, two-thirds of the Catholic clergy of Cuba were evicted, and they were accompanied by almost 80,000 anti-Communist exiles. These exiles, and hundreds of thousands more in the years to come, took refuge in the primarily Protestant, typically southern city of Miami. With the help of exiled clergy, they quickly set about re-creating some of their religious institutions, including numerous Catholic schools and student associations, in Miami. Unlike their Mexican counterparts in Texas earlier in the century, they also encountered a Catholic diocese that was eager to assist them, provided a wide range of material resources, and expected them to rapidly and fully assimilate into already existing “American” parishes. In 1966, perhaps to temper well-documented Cuban Catholic resistance to this plan for assimilation, the bishop of Miami established a shrine for Our Lady of Charity, Cuba’s patroness. This sacred site annually attracts hundreds of thousands of pilgrims, making it the sixth-largest Catholic pilgrimage site in the United States.

Currently, the south Florida Shrine of Our Lady of Charity and the south Texas Shrine of Our Lady of San Juan del Valle anchor Latino religion in the South. Both popular pilgrimage destinations juxtapose Cuban or Mexican nationalism with tensions between heterodox and orthodox Catholicism, since they are inevitably sites for practices associated with Santeria and curanderismo, respectively. Santeria has steadily grown in popularity in Miami as a result of both the Mariel boatlift in the early 1980s, which brought proportionally more practitioners of Afro-Cuban religions than earlier migrations, and U.S. Supreme Court proceedings of 1993, which increased the status and publicity of Santeria in the United States. Such practices receive strong disapproval and are often dismissed as “superstition” or worse by the Catholic hierarchy, which uses the popular shrines to evangelize Latinos, encouraging them to practice a more orthodox and church-centered Catholicism.

In the past decade, the exponential growth of the Latino population in the traditional Bible Belt has meant that Latino religion is no longer confined to the South’s geographic extremes. According to the 2000 U.S. Census, six of the seven states that have experienced a more than 200 percent increase in Hispanic population since 1990 are located in the historically “Baptist South” (North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas). Two of the states in which this increase has been most profound are Georgia and North Carolina, where the foreign-born population has exploded as a result of changing migration patterns of Mexicans and the increasing presence of immigrants from throughout Central and South America, particularly Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia, and Peru. What constitutes contemporary “Latino religion” in these states is, in fact, the religion of very recent Latin American immigrants, most of whom are young, mobile, and undocumented residents of the United States. Many can also be characterized as transmigrants, because they maintain close ties to their places of origin. Such ties are often religiously mediated through Catholic activities like feast-day celebrations for local, regional, and national saints or through the connections that evangelical and Pentecostal churches have to parent organizations in their members’ places of origin.

As they reshape the religious contours of these southern states, new immigrants radically impact the presence and role of the Catholic Church, change the traditional mission fields for established Protestant churches, and introduce a range of new religious practices and organizations. Georgia and North Carolina are home to four of the six Catholic dioceses in the United States with the fastest-growing Hispanic membership (Charlotte, Atlanta, Raleigh, and Savannah). Currently, 46 percent of the churches in the Archdiocese of Atlanta offer Spanish masses, and the Diocese of Raleigh offers such masses in 61 percent of its churches. Beyond offering mass, the Catholic Church is struggling to respond appropriately to these newcomers and defend against what it perceives to be the dangerous lure of Pentecostal and evangelical churches. The most popular strategies used by the Catholic Church to be more inviting to Latinos and counteract the appeal of Protestant churches are to offer a broad range of social services and to establish charismatic worship groups.

There are two primary sources of Latino Protestant congregations in the South. The first, and less prevalent, type results from a perceptible shift in the home mission field of well-established denominations. An association of Hispanic Baptists in Georgia, for instance, now includes more than 70 congregations, many of which are associated with the Southern Baptist Convention. In Georgia and North Carolina, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Methodists, and Presbyterians have all worked to establish Latino congregations, often recruiting Latino clergy from other parts of the United States, but they have been less successful than their Baptist counterparts. Baptist churches offer less arduous routes to both ordination and the formation of new congregations, and non-Catholic Latino churches in the South appear more likely to thrive when they are independent and pastored by Latino newcomers. The second, and more prevalent, type of Latino Protestant congregation in the region is an extremely heterogeneous collection of small evangelical and Pentecostal groups that are unaffiliated with an established denomination in the region and pastored by Latin American immigrants. Interestingly, some such churches, such as Iglesia de Cristo Ministerios Elim, or La Luz del Mundo, have been brought with migrants from Guatemala and Mexico, respectively, to the South.

MARIE FRIEDMANN MARQUARDT

Emory University

Gilberto M. Hinojosa, in Mexican Americans and the Catholic Church, 1900–1965, ed. Jay P. Dolan and Gilberto M. Hinojosa (1994); James Talmadge Moore, Through Fire and Flood: The Catholic Church in Frontier Texas, 1836–1900 (1992); Lisandro Pérez, in Puerto Rican and Cuban Catholics in the U.S., 1900–1965, ed. Jay P. Dolan and Jaime R. Vidal (1994); Thomas A. Tweed, Our Lady of the Exile: Diasporic Religion at a Cuban Catholic Shrine in Miami (1997), Southern Cultures (Summer 2002); Manuel A. Vasquez and Marie Friedmann Marquardt, Globalizing the Sacred: Religion across the Americas (2003); Martha Woodson Rees and T. Danyael Miller, Quienes Somos? Que Necesitamos? Needs Assessment of Hispanics in the Archdiocese of Atlanta (25 March 2002).

Religion, Native American

For millennia, religious practices enabled Native Americans in the Southeast to maintain or restore vital balances disrupted by human action or the actions of other living beings. Across the Southeast, Native Americans perceived spiritual values and meanings in a wide range of activities, events, and phenomena. They found holiness in a comet’s sweep across the sky, the earth’s rumbling in a quake, turbulence in a river, and the flight of a bird. Their dreams foretold the future, warning of impending sickness and death, or, more auspiciously, a successful hunt. Their systems of belief and morality shaped how they understood weather, birth, courtship, healing, death, horticulture, warfare, and diplomacy. Their pottery, baskets, clothing, jewelry, stories, place-names, art, and architecture invoked creation stories, mythic beings, and cosmic symbols. Their sacred sites, holy times, and festivals embodied their distinctive spiritual orientations toward the world.

Embedded so deeply in daily life and diffused so widely across so many activities, Native American religions were very influential, but ironically, they were to some extent invisible as religion. Many Native peoples did not think of religion as a separate thing or coin a word to name it. On the other hand, if there was not a well-bounded or tightly circumscribed phenomenon called “religion” in ancestral Native America, there were among many peoples special ceremonies, sacred buildings, and ritual specialists that stood out, possessed special names, and evoked extraordinary treatment. This was especially the case in nonegalitarian social formations, such as the Mississippian society that flourished 1,000 years ago along that river and to the east.

Mississippian society (900–1550 C.E.) consisted of chiefdoms, alliances of a village and outlying farmsteads dominated by particular chiefly lineages that exacted tribute from or waged war with other chiefdoms. Although remarkably unstable, these polities produced some monumental architecture, most notably, large, flat-topped earthen mounds that served as political and spiritual foci. Some of the most spectacular of these were located at Moundville, Ala. These ceremonial mounds, although constructed over many years by communal labor, were not open to the general public. On these square-topped platforms, priests and chiefs performed vital ceremonies to pay homage to the chiefly lineage, to gather power for warfare against other chiefdoms, and to orchestrate the community’s agricultural activities. Centuries later, these mounds, in spite of a lack of care and in the face of serious threats posed by modern development, still represent the largest religious structures ever built in the Southeast. Their silent monumentality belies the dynamism of the societies that constructed them.

Long before contact with Europeans and well before the Mississippian period, Native men and women changed their traditions in many ways, some local and almost invisible, others far more dramatic, systemic, and public. Because Native traditions were holistically connected to the rest of life, any significant change in one aspect of life could produce profound religious repercussions. When corn moved from Mexico to the American Southwest and then later to the Southeast, it arrived not simply as a plant, but as an embedded part of a distinctive and highly spiritualized cultural tradition. Symbols and rituals, gods and ceremonies accompanied the plant, as a cultus came with the corn. Corn gave rise to the Mississippian religiopolitical system and other maize-centered religious practices, stories, and sacrifices. Corn changed in fundamental ways how people lived, related, and believed. All of this occurred long before Columbus.

After contact with non–Native Americans, mound building declined significantly. Disease epidemics brought by Europeans and the violence of conquistador armies caused the greatest loss of life ever experienced in the Southeast and severely disrupted Mississippian society and its religious system. Nevertheless, although mound building declined, many Mississippian beliefs, values, and practices survived and helped shape the traditions of post-Mississippian groups such as the Muskogee (Creek), Choctaw, and Cherokee Indians. Hunters did not forget to offer pieces of meat to the fire, and women took care to sequester themselves during their menses. And everyone kept tending corn and, in annual communal ceremonies, celebrated its significance as a gift from self-sacrificing sacred beings.

With the spread of Spanish missions in La Florida during the 16th and 17th centuries, many southeastern Indians learned the rites and tenets of Catholicism. But missionized Indians continued to hold onto some precontact traditions. They also occasionally revolted against priestly authority. Over time, a complex, hybridized world—part Spanish, part Indian—emerged in these missions. It did not last. At the beginning of the 18th century, English-led armies from South Carolina destroyed all of the missions and enslaved and/or deported the Christianized Indians. For the next century, few missionaries of any sort sought to convert southeastern Indians, but Christianity, especially Protestant Christianity, continued to percolate into Indian country, brought by traders, settlers, agents, and runaway slaves. They shared stories from the Bible.

Different Native American groups in the Southeast responded differently to Protestant Christianity. The Creek Muskogees, for example, expressed a very low tolerance for Christian preaching and harassed Protestant missionaries when they arrived in the early 19th century. Indeed, among the Creeks, anticolonial American Indian prophets found a receptive audience. These prophets rejected the economic dependency associated with the deerskin trade and decried class divisions emerging among southeastern Indians. In 1811, a significant faction of Creeks, known as the Redsticks, launched a dramatic movement to restore the symbolic boundaries between Indians and whites. Political revolt became a sacred cause involving 9,000 Muskogee men, women, and children, but American armies and their Choctaw, Cherokee, and Creek allies crushed this revolt decisively, destroying dozens of villages in the process and changing the future of the region and all of its peoples.

In the wake of the Creeks’ defeat, all southeastern Indians faced intensified threats to their political and cultural sovereignty. Having witnessed the Creeks’ defeat and recalling other earlier defeats experienced by Cherokees and others, southeastern Indians knew that overt revolt against the invasion of their lands was hopeless. Rising white racism in the era had further marginalized the Native tribes. Some left, moving west. Others, especially among the Choctaws and Cherokees, began welcoming Protestant missionaries into their midst, attending their schools, translating hymns, and converting to Christianity in small numbers. Missionaries condemned, initially to no avail, popular practices, including the ball playing, traditional medicine practices, conjure, and all-night dances. Methodist and Baptist itinerants soon outnumbered the missionaries from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and from the Moravian Church, and in the long run, most southeastern Indians joined these evangelical branches of Christianity, modifying them in the process in ways that have yet to be fully studied or appreciated. Enduring Indian Removal in the late 1830s and the Civil War, southeastern Indians somehow survived in the region and also in Oklahoma. By the end of the 19th century, most of them had become Protestants. Baptists predominated among the Native peoples of Virginia as they did elsewhere. Methodists also abounded among many southeastern Indian groups, but Mormons won the hearts of Catawbas. Regardless of the denomination, in the era of Jim Crow individual churches served as important symbolic centers for rural Indian communities and helped them negotiate the challenges of living in a rigidly biracial society that had little room for peoples who were not black or white.

Protestantism continues to prevail among southeastern Indians today. Most are conservative Christians, not unlike their non-Native neighbors, with whom they have often intermarried. Some Native men and women consider their Christian confession to be at odds with ancestral traditions, or, at the very least, think religions exist on parallel paths and should not be mixed. Among Creeks in Oklahoma, one is expected to affiliate either with a church or with a ceremonial square ground, but not both at the same time. In contrast, eastern Cherokees connect being truly Cherokee with being truly Christian. To win the highest respect among the eastern Cherokees, one needs to be able to read the Cherokee New Testament or sing Cherokee hymns. In the past, the syllabary was also used by individual conjurers to scribble down formulas related to matters of witchcraft and sorcery. While this esoteric knowledge might also be considered part of Cherokee religion, it is occult, secretive, and not shared in public. The knowledge recorded in those writings is feared, not revered like the Cherokee translation of John or the Cherokee version of “Amazing Grace.”

After centuries of struggle just to survive as distinct peoples, some southeastern tribes today are thriving economically, thanks to their own entrepreneurial talents. Now possessing the economic and political means to exercise much fuller self-determination, several tribes have created formalized educational programs and institutions to revitalize ancestral language, arts, and culture. Poarch Creeks hired an Oklahoma medicine man to teach their young in Alabama the Muskogee language. Eastern Cherokees have sought to buy back lost lands, to protect sacred sites, and to establish positive ties with the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma, symbolically healing the long-standing breach between east and west.

Old challenges still exist, and new ones will no doubt emerge that will directly or indirectly affect Native American religions. Mass communications, electronic media, improved transportation systems, and increased exposure to tourists make it more difficult to revitalize distinctive cultures and indigenous languages. The good news, however, is that in spite of terrible travails—epidemic diseases, invasion and loss of most of their lands, forced removal from their sacred ancestral landscapes and geographical separation from their kin, racial subjugation, transgenerational poverty, and social marginalization—some southeastern Indian peoples have finally regained some security in the Southeast. It is as if the world of southeastern Indians, long imbalanced, has finally begun to be righted.

JOEL MARTIN

University of California at Riverside

Margaret Bender, Signs of Cherokee Culture: Sequoyah’s Syllabary in Eastern Cherokee Life (2002); Vernon Knight Jr., American Antiquity 514 (1986); Joel W. Martin, in Native Religions and Cultures of North America, ed. Lawrence E. Sullivan (2000), Sacred Revolt: The Muskogees’ Struggle for a New World (1991); Bonnie G. McEwan, ed., The Spanish Missions of La Florida (1993); William G. McLoughlin, Cherokees and Missionaries, 1789–1839 (1984); J. Anthony Paredes, ed., Indians of the Southeastern United States in the Late Twentieth Century (1992).

Religion, White Supremacist

White supremacist racial thought emerged early in the modern world. It fatally shaped interactions between Europeans and Africans from the 15th century forward. Religious divisions drawn by Europeans between those of Christ and those in the heathen world became part of defining what race meant. “European” or “English” meant “Christian,” and in future centuries that also came to mean “white.” “African” meant “heathen.” Thus, from early in southern history, religion created race, and race thereafter shaped religion.

Early colonizers in the Americas faced first the question of whether Christianity would apply to Indians and black slaves at all. The answer required, in part, deciding on whether Native peoples in North America, Africans, and African Americans were fully human—a debate that raged for several centuries and indeed continued on into the post–Civil War era of scientific racism. Once slavery took root in the Americas, it virtually was inevitable that religious authorities would decree that if slavery existed, God must have a reason for it—and that reason must be in the Bible. But slavery in the Americas was specifically a racial form of bondage. This was in contrast to traditional forms of slavery found worldwide, which were not “racial” in the modern sense. This religious justification of slavery would have to clarify God’s providence in having one race of people enslave another. In this way, Euro-Americans developed some of the meanings of “race” in the modern sense. They began to define what constituted whiteness and blackness, categories that would long outlive slavery itself. And those categories were, at least initially, fundamentally religious ones.

When some Africans converted to Christianity and claimed their freedom as a result, colonial assemblies in Maryland (1664) and Virginia (1667) responded by dissociating baptism from freedom. From that point forward, Christianity and slavery were not antithetical. Children born of slave women, even Christian slave women, would be bondpeople for life. A few decades later, the plantation complex in the Chesapeake took off, resulting in the importation of large numbers of Africans. By the 1730s, in Virginia as in South Carolina, very few planters evinced any interest in imparting Christianity to the slaves. Those missionaries who made it their task to do so generally met resistance by the slave owners and indifference among the slaves.

Yet the inescapable fact remained that white southerners somehow had to fit black people into God’s providence. Passages from the Old Testament, especially Genesis 9:18–27, outlined the curse on Canaan, son of Ham, who had originally espied Noah’s naked drunkenness and thereafter was consigned to slavery. “A servant of servants shall he be,” the verse proclaimed. Once properly exposed to exegesis, it provided at least a start at a religiomythical grounding for modern racial meanings, and a long-lived one. The passage was still being cited in segregationist literature of the 1950s and remains an ideological part of certain fringe groups, such as the so-called Christian Identity Movement, down to the present day. Respectable theologians often skirted the son of Ham story, as it smacked more of folklore than “high” theology. Moreover, as the historian Colin Kidd has argued, the major thrust of Christian theology weighed in against the varieties of racism that cast particular groups out of the category of humanity. That being said, the fable of Ham deeply penetrated the religious consciousness of white southerners, who were for the most part biblical literalists.

The son of Ham saga served well in the sense that it seemed to explain how black people could be free Christians and unfree slaves at the same time. But the curse on Ham was at best a shaky foundation for religioracial mythologizing, for the passage invoked was simply too short, mysterious, and fablelike to bear up under the full weight of the interpretations imposed upon it. More respectable proslavery theologians worked feverishly through the antebellum era (1800–1860) to enunciate a Christian proslavery apologetic, one that would preserve boundaries of whiteness/blackness while also supporting their efforts to Christianize the slaves. Contrary to views in the 17th and 18th centuries, which often set in dichotomous relief whiteness and Christian freedom versus blackness and unchristian unfreedom, by the 19th century the missions to the slaves had been successful enough that many whites came to see “black” religion as peculiarly fervent and reassuringly orthodox. Later in these years, the development and full-fledged exposition of a proslavery argument explained away the obvious contradictions of slaveholding in a free republic and justified the daily repression required to enforce enslavement even in the midst of the rapid Christian evangelization of the South.

White supremacy was an ideology of power that enveloped white southerners in an imagined community. Southern whites inherited a theological regime grounded in conservative notions of hierarchy; and 19th-century white southern theologies of class and blood (sometimes expressed formally, more often disseminated in everyday speech, Sunday sermons, and self-published tracts and pamphlets) buttressed white southern practice. Southern theological figures preached that God ordained inequality.

The Civil War fundamentally challenged and shook up the supposedly secure southern racial hierarchy. The postwar years saw a growing bitterness and desire for separation among white believers who previously had declared slaves part of their “family.” The term “Redemption,” used by historians to describe the end of Reconstruction in the mid-1870s, assumed an especially powerful meaning for white southern believers. Redemption signified individual salvation as well as the deliverance of society from “cursed rulers.”

As would be the case a century later during the civil rights movement, white Democratic politicians during Reconstruction employed an evangelical language of sin and redemption combined with measures of political organization and extralegal violence. When some African American men exercised rights of political citizenship, it appeared to white conservatives as an overturning of a divinely ordered hierarchy. Southern Redemptionists battled to restore a white supremacist order and claimed, without any consciousness of hypocrisy, that their churches were undefiled by the politics that disgraced northern and black religious organizations. White southern Christians viewed their Redemptionist activity as essentially religious, an extension of the cosmic struggle between order and disorder, civilization and barbarism, white and black.

To do its work in a devout society, the ideology of racism required Christian underpinnings for the brutal exercise of power. The proslavery argument filled this void. Post–Civil War southern theologians responded to defeat in the Civil War by emphasizing human weakness, fallibility, and dependence on God. For many white southern theologians, defeat in the Civil War also shored up orthodoxies of race and place. The Negro—as a beast, a burden, or a brother—was there to be dealt with by whites, who were the actors in the racial dramas. By using the term “Redemption,” white southerners expressed a deeply religious understanding. The divinely ordained social/racial hierarchy had been restored by southern martyrs, and the South atoned, renewed.

Once again, the southern white consensus on race and hierarchy was challenged during the civil rights years. A certain stratum of religious moderates and a few liberals moved toward some support for civil rights. The major southern denominations, for example, came out in favor of following the dictates of the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. However, the bulk of white southern believers distrusted the official pronouncements put out by denominational authorities and clung to arguments based on connecting whiteness with purity and godliness. During the civil rights era, white believers throughout the South connected the preservation of race purity with the fear of miscegenation and defense of southern social customs. Most arguments employed some form of received wisdom and familiar folklore—the immutable “nature” of the Negro, the “impurity” that would inevitably accompany integration, or time-honored scriptural staples such as the Old Testament story of Noah and his progeny. Denominational ethicists and theologians consistently showed how the ancient and cryptic Old Testament stories in no way buttressed the specific 20th-century social system of segregation. But this biblical jousting was beside the point, for the theoreticians of Jim Crow were by definition suspicious of officially sanctioned modes of scriptural interpretation.

After World War II, the American creed of democracy and equality effectively put white southern religious conservatives on the defensive. To justify inequality, they resorted to constitutional arguments (“interposition”), appeals to tradition, outright demagoguery, and obscurantist renderings of Old Testament passages. At that point, however, the raw exercise of power that white supremacy entailed appeared naked, without any compelling theological justification. God-ordained racial inequality crumbled in the hypocrisy of endorsing equality while practicing racism.

By the 1970s, many white southern believers accommodated themselves to the demise of legal segregation. Thus, in the recent controversies within southern church organizations, race has been one of the very few items usually not in dispute. Since the 1960s, southern religious conservatives, for the most part, have repudiated the white supremacist views of their predecessors, as seen in the 1995 Southern Baptist Church resolution officially apologizing for the evangelical and denominational role in slavery and segregation.

Yet the standard biblical arguments against racial equality, now looked upon as an embarrassment from a bygone age, have found their way rather easily into the contemporary religious right’s stance on gender. A theology that sanctifies gendered hierarchy has become for the post–civil rights generation what whiteness was to earlier generations of believers. For religious conservatives generally, patriarchy has supplanted race as the defining first principle of God-ordained inequality.

PAUL HARVEY

University of Colorado

David Chappell, Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (2004); Erskine Clarke, Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic (2005); Paul Harvey, Freedom’s Coming: Religious Cultures and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era (2005); Paul Harvey and Edward Blum, Jesus in Red, White, and Black (2012); Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (1968); Colin Kidd, The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000 (2006); Michael Pasquier, Fathers on the Frontier: French Missionaries and the Roman Catholic Priesthood in the United States, 1789–1860 (2010); Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause (1980).

Segregation, Desegregation, and Resegregation

Segregation is the practice of physically separating categories of individuals on the basis of socially determined ethnic, gender, racial, or religious attributes. Segregation can be voluntary or involuntary, sanctioned by law (de jure) and by custom (de facto). Desegregation is the process of undoing the different legal, social, economic, and political practices supporting segregation; resegregation refers to reverting to segregation practices, though sometimes in different ways. In the South, the segregation of blacks was woven into the entire scope and scale of the community. Desegregation attempted to end segregation by challenging it through particular institutions deemed egregious—schools, lunch counters, public transportation. Through the flight of better-educated and wealthier people—white and black—from communities in recent decades, the remaining poor (and usually black) residents have been subject to a resegregation perhaps more pernicious than the previous forms of segregation.

Social practices arising around segregation are usually justified by an ideology of one group’s superiority over another. In the South, the justification for segregation was the belief in white supremacy, that whites were inherently better—morally, physically, and intellectually—than blacks (the principles of white supremacy continue to permeate the American consciousness today, particularly in white opposition to immigration). Though voluntary segregation was more likely in the North, involuntary physical separation of blacks from whites was the predominant structure of segregation in the South.

Slaves had no choice but to live in close proximity to their masters in rural areas. The few free blacks in the South had a tenuous status and lived in designated sections of towns, barred from most public accommodations. Yet during this period, free blacks created their own separate community by forming their own religious, fraternal, and benevolence institutions. These segregated institutions helped to sustain a distinct black identity in the face of white hostility and widespread discrimination.

During the antebellum period and continuing just after the Civil War, the status of blacks was defined by Black Codes or laws enacted by all states in the Deep South. These statutes defined the near-absolute power slave owners had over their slaves, including over their sexual relationships and offspring. Though these codes prohibited slaves from marrying anyone, particularly whites, they also contributed to an ideology of white racial purity, which was given form through appeal to white women. The belief in an inviolate white womanhood or rape myth provided a ready excuse for lynching blacks who were too “uppity,” serving to maintain strict racial boundaries separating whites and blacks.

After the Civil War, the Thirteenth Amendment (1865) abolished slavery; blacks were granted citizenship with equal rights, and black males were then granted voting rights (Fourteenth Amendment, 1868). The Fifteenth Amendment (1870) prohibited racial discrimination in voting. These and other federal laws initially protected blacks’ civil liberties and civil rights during Reconstruction. But after the withdrawal of federal troops in 1877, the less-frequent interventions in the South by Congress and the tightening of local control by white elites allowed the reinstating of exclusionary social practices toward blacks.

Between 1890 and 1965, southern states sponsored a system of racial segregation, colloquially termed “Jim Crow.” Jim Crow laws covered the segregation of public schools, public places and public transportation, and restrooms and restaurants for whites and blacks. Segregated institutions were established to circumscribe racial mixing in every conceivable facet of social life, covering churches, libraries, schools, theaters, and restaurants. This then followed the pattern of segregation, desegregation, and resegregation: segregation by Black Codes, desegregation by the federal government during Reconstruction, and resegregation by Jim Crow laws.

Toward the end of the 19th century, industrialization and urbanization fueled growth and demand for more housing and public transportation. In response to the demands, and under pressure from whites uncomfortable with the changes occurring, southern states responded by sanctioning further segregation of the races in political parties, housing, unions, and other private businesses—even to the extent of prohibiting shopping or working in certain stores and working at certain trades. For example, “restricted covenants” barred the sale of homes to blacks (or Jews or Asians), thus ensuring that neighborhoods remained racially segregated. These policies had particular impact in urban areas.

As the 19th century came to a close, several state and local laws were enacted sanctioning discriminatory practices and extending segregation to dictating where someone sat in a railroad car. One challenge to Louisiana’s segregated railroad cars eventually made its way to the Supreme Court as Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). This case deemed segregation constitutional in public accommodations as long as both races received equal treatment in public. In response, after 1896, all public facilities, including public schools, were subject to segregation, putting an end to informal, sporadic patterns of integration for other nonwhite racial and ethnic groups. (The introduction of public conveniences such as drinking fountains, restrooms, and phone booths resulted in additional Jim Crow laws.)

In Rice v. Gong Lum (1927), the Mississippi Supreme Court maintained that white children must be segregated from all other races, including Asians. Originally brought in to displace black laborers after the Civil War, Chinese immigrants thought they were well liked by the local townspeople until they tried to send their children to white schools. Racial segregation in the South did not allow for any ambiguity in terms of defining who was white.

Over the next 50 years, between 1896 and 1956, black leaders responded to the systematic exclusion of blacks in the South in two ways: accommodation or protest. One prominent black leader, Booker T. Washington, argued on the side of accommodation in a speech he delivered in 1895. In the “Atlanta Compromise” speech, he argued that blacks and whites should be like the separate fingers of the same hand. This image reinforced the basic premise of segregation but also allowed for a notion of racial equality within separate institutions. The rising new middle class of black professionals (ministers, teachers, business owners) began to have a vested interest in segregated businesses and was inclined to be conservative by subscribing to the accommodation viewpoint, largely due to this economic self-interest.

African American man going in “colored” entrance of movie house on a Saturday afternoon, Belzoni, Mississippi Delta, Miss., ca. 1939 (Marion Post Wolcott, photographer, Library of Congress [LC-USF331-030577-M2], Washington, D.C.)

Those blacks who did want to protest against segregation did so, in sporadic challenges—against a railroad company, grocery store, or restaurant—usually in response to a personal instance of exclusion. Unlike the mass mobilizations of the 1950s and 1960s, these types of protest sought to create small, individual openings within the existing system of race relations. Early civil rights protests objected to racial segregation as perpetuating racial prejudice and validating the treatment of blacks and other nonwhites as inferior. These initial, almost tentative, dissents did not stem the incremental growth in segregation but did help to question the morality of such a system in a supposedly democratic society.

By the early 20th century, creating and maintaining “separate-but-equal” facilities became increasingly costly for southern states and cities, particularly as the increasingly urbanized South tried to keep up with the demand for more public schools and other services. Funding for black schools fell ever further behind that of white schools, and many southern states were no longer able to sustain even a pretense of separate-but-equal. Recognizing the economy of scale lost in maintaining separate school systems, along with a range of other public facilities, black attorneys formulated challenges to segregation demanding that states actually provide and maintain equal separate institutions as required by Plessy.

There had been some advances on that front: the Supreme Court began to overturn Jim Crow laws on constitutional grounds, starting with a ruling overturning a Kentucky law requiring residential segregation (Buchanan v. Warley, 1917), and more generally in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), in which it held that “restrictive covenants” were unconstitutional. The Supreme Court also no longer permitted segregation in interstate transportation (Irene Morgan v. Virginia, 1946).

A series of cases aimed at equalizing higher education and black teachers’ salaries were initiated in the 1930s by the NAACP and later by NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. In Missouri ex rel Gaines v. Canada (1936), the black plaintiff was denied access to the University of Missouri Law School, even though the state of Missouri did not provide a separate-but-equal accommodation. Small victories against segregation were claimed whenever state or lower federal courts ruled in favor of black plaintiffs who sought equalization of resources.

After World War II, there was a shift in strategy from trying to achieve equalization of facilities to directly challenging the constitutionality of segregation. The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case argued that even when black institutions and white institutions were allotted equal resources, as they were in Topeka, Kans., separate-but-equal institutions forever imprinted a “badge of inferiority” on black children. The court held that all separate facilities were inherently unequal in the area of public schools, effectively overturning Plessy v. Ferguson and outlawing Jim Crow in other areas of society as well. This landmark case included complaints filed in two southern states, South Carolina (Briggs v. Elliott) and Virginia (Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County), along with Delaware (Gebhart v. Belton) and Washington, D.C. (Spottswode Bolling v. C. Melvin Sharpe).

In the South, the Brown decision was met with massive resistance at both the state and the local level. Many southern white congressional members signed the “Southern Manifesto,” providing justification for a doctrine of states’ rights, declaring the federal court illegitimate and its decisions null. Brown caused southerners to re-revisit the role of the national government in regulating local issues. Century-old arguments, reminiscent of the debates over slavery, were revived to defend the primacy of states’ rights over federal jurisdiction. Words like “interposition” and “nullification”—the same language used to defend slavery—were heard again in defense of segregation. Brown also revived fears of miscegenation as a threat to white supremacy. These fears were realized when Loving v. Virginia (1967) ended all race-based legal restrictions on marriage.

In conjunction with the massive resistance to Brown, public protests against segregation intensified in the South. Partially in response to this increased activism and to circumvent further school desegregation, the White Citizens’ Council (WCC) was formed in Mississippi and quickly expanded to other southern states. Some communities simply closed their public schools, while others reopened their public schools as private “council schools” for white children only and sponsored by the WCC. In Prince Edward County, Va., all public schools were closed for a decade after the Brown decision in an attempt to avoid desegregation. These tactics to prevent desegregation were largely successful—by 1964, 10 years after Brown, only 2.3 percent of southern black children attended desegregated schools.

The southern mass mobilizations of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s were successful in raising awareness of racial segregation as undemocratic at home and abroad. This appeal to American core values of fairness and equality increased the likelihood of federal intervention when desegregation was blocked. Additional pressure from the federal government was placed on southern political leaders, as images of southern police brutality in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963, for example, were beamed around the world and used to fuel anti-American propaganda by the Soviet Union and other undemocratic regimes. In a largely symbolic protest against desegregation, Alabama governor George Wallace became famous for his “Stand at the Schoolhouse Door” in June 1963, in which he attempted to bar the enrollment of black students Vivian Malone and James Hood at the University of Alabama.

Resistance to desegregation led to numerous state and federal lawsuits. In 1968, the Greene v. County School Board case of Virginia reaffirmed school desegregation as a means to build a color-blind society: no longer would dual school systems be tolerated. In order to achieve racial parity, desegregation would now be force-remedied through a variety of means, including extensive busing of students. A few years later, in North Carolina, the Supreme Court upheld busing as a means to desegregate the South (Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education [1971]).

Though Greene and Swann sought to circumvent attempts to avoid school desegregation, they could not address the economic, political, and social factors working against the implementation of integrated schools. In the South, long-established residential housing patterns of racially isolated neighborhoods contributed to the continuance of dual school systems for many years after Brown. Using busing to integrate schools contributed to the virtual abandonment of public education by white and black elites to lower-class whites and blacks in many southern communities. Desegregation had thereby stripped public schools of the upper economic strata of society, creating institutions that were resegregated, on the basis of economic resources rather than race.

In Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 et al. (2007), the Supreme Court ordered that race could no longer be a factor in assigning students to schools. In a 5–4 decision striking down public school choice plans in Seattle, Wash., and Louisville, Ky., Chief Justice John Roberts argued that in keeping with the goal of a color-blind society, using race to assign students to schools was unconstitutional. But, as Justice Breyer remarked in his dissent, this redefinition of a color-blind society gave all races equal weight and ignored any past injustices created by racial segregation. The Parents opinion obliquely referenced resegregation in the South by distinguishing between de jure segregation as being created by school systems and de facto segregation as a result of individual choice in terms of buying homes in more affluent, segregated areas.

Resegregation is evident in residential housing patterns and school board policies, and today southern neighborhoods are as much segregated by social class as they are by race. In the absence of racially explicit laws, de jure discrimination is ever present, underpinning the legality of resegregation in the present context.

JEAN VAN DELINDER

Oklahoma State University

Michael J. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (2004); Jean Van Delinder, Struggles before Brown: Early Civil Rights Protests and Their Significance Today (2008); C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1974).

Segregationists’ Use of Media

Many of the most enduring media images generated during the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s feature segregationists. Crucially, however, the vast majority of those images were not made on segregationists’ terms; rather, they were products of the increasingly sophisticated media strategies developed by their civil rights opponents, most notably the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Decades of historical research have led to a nuanced understanding of the use of media by civil rights proponents, but, despite Hodding Carter III’s contemporaneous reference to a segregationist “offensive by duplicating machine” and Numan Bartley’s 1969 formulation of a “southern informational offensive,” no similar appreciation yet exists for the strategies of segregationists. This continuing gap in historians’ collective knowledge is the product of a number of interrelated issues: a paucity of relevant archival sources, with incomplete print runs of segregationist magazines and newspapers, and piecemeal recordings of broadcasts; a mixture of changing societal views on race; the politics of historical commemoration and patterns of popular memory that ensure greater investigation of proponents of civil rights than their opponents; and, ultimately, desegregationists’ sharper and more complete understanding of the power of the media than their segregationist adversaries.

Segregationists attempted to use various forms of media to promote and defend their way of life, particularly when their racial mores were under sustained attack from both civil rights activists and the federal government in the decades after World War II. The multifaceted ways in which they attempted to do so reflect their own heterogeneity, their lack of a clearly defined overarching strategy, and the unevenness of the arguments that they sought to disseminate. In quantitative terms, the ease with which written newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, and cartoons could be produced ensured that print was segregationists’ most commonly used medium, although imaginative use was also made of local radio broadcasts. Forays into television were rare by comparison but on occasion offered access to a national audience that was otherwise all too often unobtainable. All such outputs were intended either to shore up the resolve of white southerners to resist desegregation or (in far fewer cases) to win sympathy from a national audience for the segregationist cause.

The most prolific disseminators of printed matter devoted to the segregationist cause were the Citizens’ Councils and affiliated white supremacist groups around which active segregationists organized themselves from the mid-1950s onward. Many councils produced their own newspapers, such as the White Citizens’ Council of Arkansas’s Arkansas Faith, the Montgomery Citizens’ Council’s States’ Rights Advocate, and the Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberty’s Defenders’ News and Views. Although their production values varied considerably, their shared aims were reflected in an inevitability of content as each publication attempted to bolster the morale of local segregationists with a mixture of editorials, opinion pieces, reprinted speeches, and crude cartoons. Collectively, the groups’ printings were never widely read beyond their own membership bases, with the exception of the Citizens’ Council, a tabloid newspaper produced by two groups from the Magnolia State, the Mississippi Association of Citizens’ Councils and the Citizens’ Councils of America. Printed in Jackson under the editorship of William J. Simmons, it made inflated boasts of a circulation of 40,000 to 60,000. Redesigned in 1961, it reemerged in magazine format as Citizen, with a circulation estimated to be closer to 3,000. Both publications sought to add a sheen of respectability to the base racism of grassroots white supremacist rhetoric by highlighting the intellectual credentials of their contributors and concentrating on such ideas as the primacy of states’ rights, biblical justifications for segregation, the historical separation of the races, and a subversive presence lurking behind the civil rights movement. Citizens’ Councils and their affiliated groups were also prodigious disseminators of reprinted speeches, government reports, treatises, broadsides, and pamphlets, two of the most significant being Mississippi judge Tom P. Brady’s Black Monday and The Congressional Committee Report on What Happened When Schools Were Integrated in Washington D.C.

The vast majority of southern newspapers and editors supported the segregationist line; indeed, it is easier to identify those few who opposed the segregationist position, such as the Atlanta Constitution’s Ralph McGill or the Arkansas Gazette’s Harry Ashmore, than those who offered routine support. At times, southern newspapers provided crucial forums for the development of segregationist ideology, most notably when the Richmond News Leader’s James Jackson “Jack” Kilpatrick used a series of editorials in November 1955 to resurrect arguments for legal “interposition.” Similarly, segregationists were capable of using local newspapers to help wage political campaigns. In Louisiana, for example, state senator William M. “Willie” Rainach’s Joint Legislative Committee to Maintain Segregation (JLC) paid for an advertisement in the New Orleans Times-Picayune in November 1954 as part of a final bid to ensure a strong turnout—and to send a virulent antidesegregation message—in a referendum to legalize the use of police powers to maintain separate schools in the Pelican State.

In one sense, segregationists were forced into producing their own material, for they were routinely denied a forum for their views in newspapers and magazines that boasted national circulations. Access to these venues, in fact, was extremely limited: Clifford Dowdey of Richmond, Va., penned his thoughts in the Saturday Review in 1954; Thomas R. Waring managed to put “The Southern Case against Desegregation” to readers of Harper’s Magazine in 1956; in the same year, James F. “Jimmy” Byrnes argued that “The Supreme Court Must Be Curbed” in U.S. News and World Report; Herbert Ravenel Sass wrote on “Mixed Schools and Mixed Blood” in the Atlantic Monthly; and Perry Morgan made “The Case for the White Southerner” in Esquire in January 1962. Publishing houses gave segregationist tracts similarly short shrift, although there were again notable exceptions, including William D. Workman Jr.’s The Case for the South, published by Devin-Adair of New York in 1960, and Kilpatrick’s own The Southern Case for School Segregation, published in Richmond by Crowell-Collier in 1962.

As a result, devoted segregationist agencies changed tactics. In 1956, Rainach and the JLC secured northern coverage by paying for a full-page advertisement in the New York Herald Tribune. Written in the form of an open letter “To the People of New York City,” it represented an attempt to portray Jim Crow as a friend of the whole nation, given that racial strife was, in the JLC’s words, heading northward as southern black migration continued. Most imaginatively, the state-sponsored Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission (MSSC), which was established on 29 March 1956 to “give the South’s side” to a national audience, invited 21 New England newspaper editors to experience Mississippi life firsthand, in the belief that direct experience would overturn their antisegregationist prejudices. The MSSC’s public relations director, Hal C. DeCell, crafted a carefully organized itinerary for the junket, but it failed to have the desired effect on the visitors.

The Mississippi legislature’s decision to bankroll the MSSC’s activities removed many of the financial constraints that continued to hamstring the majority of privately organized segregationist groups and allowed the organization to extend its propaganda activities across all media. It was, for example, involved in various capacities in the production of three documentary films. DeCell was a surprising collaborator with the Fund for the Republic’s Newsfilm Project in the making of director George M. Martin Jr.’s Segregation and the South. Originally entitled Crisis in the South before DeCell’s intervention, it was broadcast by ABC in June 1957. In 1960, the MSSC released its own 35-mm propaganda film, The Message from Mississippi, which cobbled together interviews and newsreel footage to extol states’ rights and segregation. Made by the Dobbs-Maynard Advertising Company in Jackson, the 27-minute film cost triple its original estimate, at nearly $30,000. Finally, MSSC supporters Gov. Ross R. Barnett and Lt. Gov. Paul B. Johnson filmed interviews for a 43-minute film, Oxford USA, made by Dallas’s Patrick M. Sims, which sought to highlight the brutality of federal marshals during the 1962 rioting that accompanied James Meredith’s attempted enrollment at the University of Mississippi.

Unknown to the vast majority of both contemporary segregationists and Mississippi taxpayers, the MSSC became central to the funding of the Citizens’ Council Forum, the only regularly televised segregationist propaganda show in the nation. Anchored by the Association of Citizens’ Councils of America’s public relations director, Richard “Dick” Morphew, Forum began airing in 1955 on WLBT as a series of 15-minute studio-based interviews with segregation’s apologists. Production values improved markedly in the spring of 1958, when, at the invitation of John Bell Williams and James O. Eastland, filming of the show moved to U.S. government studios in Washington, D.C. Morphew announced in 1961 that the program was going “coast to coast” for the first time, but commentators have long questioned the breadth of its appeal and the scope of its transmission. Having recently retired from the MSSC, in 1961, DeCell openly ridiculed Forum producer William J. Simmons’s claims to a “vast audience” across all states, and local investigative reporter Robert Pittman concluded that, in fact, only eight stations—all southern—regularly carried the show. Only when the MSSC’s sealed archives were opened in 1998 did it emerge that the MSSC had spent nearly $200,000 in state funds to underwrite Forum’s production. Although payments were ended in December 1964, production limped on until 1966.

On the local level, support for segregation was staunch. The largest television station in Jackson, Miss., the Fred Beard–owned NBC affiliate WLBT, for example, had its broadcasting license revoked in 1969 for what was diplomatically termed “perceived discrimination”—in reality the replacement of the station’s daily broadcast of the national anthem with “Dixie” and repeated announcements urging viewers to join the Citizens’ Council. Exposure on nationally syndicated telecasts, however, remained extremely limited: the producers of NBC’s long-running current affairs show Comment deemed Jack Kilpatrick sufficiently erudite and eloquent to be invited onto the program to debate segregation in summer 1958; two years later, it was again the Richmond-based newspaperman who was invited on the air by the network, this time to debate Martin Luther King Jr. face-to-face on The Nation’s Future.

If the MSSC held a near monopoly on segregationist interest in filmmaking and television production, its work in promoting radio transmissions was matched by others. By the end of 1964, the producers of the Citizens’ Council Forum claimed to have sent out 6,668 radio tapes to local radio stations, although most scholars believe this number to be vastly inflated. By contrast, archival sources verify that North Carolina’s Jesse Helms was responsible for writing and delivering 2,732 radio editorials for Raleigh station WRAL, many of which reflected his deep conservatism, support for segregationist political candidates, and defense of Jim Crow. Indeed, local radio stations offered a relatively cheap transmission means for segregationists, and they were regularly used to broadcast propaganda, such as Virginia’s Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberty’s bulletins on “The Southern Manifesto” and “Mixed Blood and Mixed Schools,” and, more dramatically, to urge white southerners to defy federally mandated desegregation, most notably when Gen. Edwin A. Walker attempted to rouse segregationists into joining the angry crowds at Ole Miss in 1962 with a demagogic speech on KWKH in Shreveport.

GEORGE LEWIS

University of Leicester

Numan V. Bartley, The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South during the 1950s (1969); Erle Johnston, Mississippi’s Defiant Years, 1953–1973 (1990); Yasuhiro Katagiri, The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission: Civil Rights and States’ Rights (2001); George Lewis, Massive Resistance: The White Response to the Civil Rights Movement (2006); Neil R. McMillen, The Citizens’ Councils: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction, 1954–1964 (1994).

Slavery and Emancipation

The topics of slavery and emancipation trouble southern culture, raising issues that make many, regardless of race, uncomfortable. Slavery and emancipation combine as stories of liberation and loss, of identities gained and identities shattered, a history that places conflict and domination at the center of the region’s past. Representing the promise of freedom and equality on one hand and the broken dream of plantation slavery on the other, the transition from slavery to freedom is above all else a shared history of conflict. Yet where does a revolution—one that pitted southerner against southerner—fit in the construction of a common southern identity or a shared southern culture? This dilemma so challenges the South that this history has been quieted and domesticated in the myths of the region.

The dominant white southern parable of emancipation transforms the moment of freedom from a political act to a personal one. Freedom, according to this story, left African Americans bereft, compelled to return home to their white folks. In The Unvanquished, William Faulkner recounted the tales of his youth, writing that those “who had followed the Yankees away . . . [had scattered] into the hills [to] live in caves and hollow trees like animals I suppose, not only with no one to depend on but with no one depending on them, caring whether they returned or not or lived or died or not.” Noble white southerners, such as the Sartorises, took African Americans back in, both the faithful Ringo, who had never left, and the unfaithful Loosh, who had walked off declaring, “I going. I done been freed . . .; I dont belong to John Sartoris now; I belongs to me and God.” According to Faulkner and his peers, whether African Americans claimed freedom or not, the end result was the same: former slaves returned to the plantation household.

Our national narrative recognizes the political significance of emancipation by emphasizing that Abraham Lincoln waged a four-year bloody civil war to free the slaves. Yet this story elides the fact that it was not Lincoln, the U.S. military, or the federal government that freed the slaves. The push for emancipation began in the South.

Enslaved black southerners freed themselves during the Civil War, altering the course of the war and the nation. In what historian Steven Hahn writes was “the most sweeping revolution of the 19th century, [slaves] shifted the social and political course of the Atlantic world.” Because of their actions, the U.S. Congress adopted the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, abolishing slavery across the nation. Emancipation, therefore, is largely a southern story defining a region and a people.

At the outset of the Civil War, slaves identified Pres. Abraham Lincoln and the Union army as their allies in the struggle for freedom. Yet the Lincoln administration was a reluctant partner. As Lincoln stated in 1862, “My paramount objective in this struggle is to save the Union and is not to either save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union.” Southern institutions, including slavery, would be respected in order to bring the South back into the nation.

As early as May 1861, African Americans declared themselves free by running away and entering Union army camps. As the Union army invaded Virginia, South Carolina, and the Mississippi Valley, slaves stood ready to run for freedom. The land of liberty suddenly lay within reach as the Civil War brought the North into the South.

Making policy as they waged war, Union generals responded to the freedpeople’s exodus in a number of ways. Gen. John C. Frémont simply freed every slave who came within his lines. Outraged, Lincoln removed him from his command. Gen. Benjamin Butler decided to keep former slaves within his lines not as free people but as “the contraband of war.” Slaves, he reasoned, were valuable property—instruments of war—that could be used to assist either the Confederacy or the Union. From Butler’s perspective, it was better to have slaves serve the Union than the enemy. As word spread that Butler permitted the black southerners to stay and work within his lines, hundreds of slaves began to make their way to Union lines across the South. They liberated themselves. Eventually, over 400,000 slaves freed themselves by walking across Union lines. Subsequently, Lincoln legitimized these actions through the Emancipation Proclamation on 1 January 1863, which abolished slavery in the Confederacy.

While the national narrative embraces the political significance of emancipation, it is slower to recognize that slavery is a national story as well. Slavery disturbs core American ideals: the belief in freedom, equality, and democracy. Therefore, we locate slavery in the South to set it apart from mainstream American history. This evasion ignores the fact that slavery existed north and south, east and west, in our early republic. More important, slavery is deeply (and paradoxically) intertwined with the nation’s early history and founding institutions. As historian Edmund Morgan reminds us, American slavery created American concepts of freedom. To unravel this, we turn to the South to help explain our origins.

Slavery was a foreign institution to English settlers. From 1607 (when the first successful English colony was established in Jamestown) to 1691 (when legal codes hardened race-based slavery), colonial governments struggled with the concept of modern slavery. It took four generations for European Americans to accept and institutionalize “the peculiar institution” that (1) turned people into property, (2) made that status inheritable, and (3) justified dehumanization based upon an emerging concept—race.

American slavery rested on the distinction that people could be separated into “black” and “white.” As such, these categories had to be made and maintained. Indeed, the construction of the new category of “white men”—not Englishmen, Scottish, Dutch—proved essential to the institution. To keep slavery intact required the combined self-interest of the new group of people—free white men. Before slavery, any concept that all white men might share a common interest was absurd. Class divided masters from servants, ladies from wenches, gentlemen from farmers. These tensions continued, but the legal code began to blur differences by granting white people a set of common civil rights. One of the first legal expressions of whiteness appeared in the 1691 Virginia legal codes, which stated that all white men (regardless of whether that white man owned enslaved people or not) shared the right to regulate, detain, and punish any black person. Race-based slavery, therefore, provided a foundation for nascent American democracy by declaring a certain kind of equality between all white men regardless of class, religion, nationality, or station in life.

The special rights accorded to those who could prove their whiteness established the founding template for race in the United States. Americans can forget the place of slavery and race in the founding of the nation because the words “slavery” and “slave” do not appear in the U.S. Constitution. Instead, slavery is obliquely referred to by its opposite: “free persons.” Who is fully free, however, still rests on “race,” as more and more Americans discover (Latinos, Asians, and American Indians, among others). A “nonwhite” status undermines access to full civil rights and equal opportunity.

Emancipation established by the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment (abolishing slavery), the Fourteenth Amendment (establishing federal citizenship rights for black and white Americans), and the Fifteenth Amendment (granting African American men the right to vote) disrupted the correlation between whiteness and citizenship. Moving into politics, the marketplace, and the public square, African Americans challenged white people’s concept of themselves and their nation.

In the South, African Americans claimed freedom as southerners. Liberty, for most, rested on family, land, and the crop because each of these promised a kind of self-sufficiency and independence from outsiders. Black southerners and white southerners shared these values, and this fact brought them into direct conflict.

Many, but not all, white southerners refused to share public space or political power with black southerners. Viewing emancipation as a zero-sum game, planters felt that their freedom would be sacrificed if African Americans became fully free. Many whites would not acknowledge African American claims because land, family, and the crop (not to mention the political and civil rights that accompanied them) were integral to white identity and power. To grant African Americans rights threatened an erasure of white manhood.

Emancipation exposed the fiction of white men’s independence. Planter men found themselves “dependent” on free labor, “dependent” on their women for financial support, and, in the case of the wounded, literally “dependent” on others for mobility. More profound, as black southerners took up arms and asserted their claims, they challenged what the white man saw as his household—his land, his crops, and his workers. As plantation slavery dissolved, mastery, whiteness, and manhood all lost their moorings.

White southerners fought back, limiting black southerners’ access to voting rights, civil rights, and the public sphere and freedom from fear. Each limitation took a toll on the public remembrance of emancipation. Immediately following the war and up to the turn of the century, black southerners celebrated Emancipation Day with parades and speeches, retelling the story of how they won their freedom. As each southern state imposed segregation (and turned a blind eye to lynching), violence disrupted and finally stopped these celebrations across much of the South. States filled the silence created in the absence of Emancipation Day ceremonies with newly minted histories that defamed Reconstruction, credited the Yankees with emancipation, and depicted black southerners as either bestial or childlike. Black southerners—Carter Woodson, Pauli Murray, Susie King Taylor, and Anna Julia Cooper, to name just a few—responded with histories of their own. The history of emancipation became a segregated history—and, in many ways, it still is. The history of emancipation tends to be written either as an African American freedom struggle (the study of “Emancipation” and “Reconstruction”) or as the study of whites’ loss, mourning, and nostalgia for an invented past (the study of “the Lost Cause”).

Yet slavery and emancipation are a shared history, one that reminds us how brutal, contested, and revolutionary sharing has been. If southern culture emphasizes stasis, tradition, and a common identity, then the transition from slavery to freedom represents its opposite—the struggle between white and black, slave and free, rights and privilege. This truth disturbs southern myth by exposing the fact that each of these histories is dependent on the others. Far from being opposed, southern culture and emancipation are contingent upon one another. Southern culture, in large part, is the act of forgetting emancipation and its implications. Manners, congeniality, and honor work to paper over conflict and to refuse to speak of southerners’ unpleasantness to southerners. Slavery and emancipation, therefore, are an unspoken referent, a hidden heart, of southern culture.

NANCY BERCAW

Smithsonian Institution

David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001); Elsa Barkley Brown, The Black Public Sphere: A Public Culture Book (1995); Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (1996); W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (1935); Barbara J. Fields, in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James McPherson (1982); Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (2008); Larry J. Griffin and Don H. Doyle, eds., The South as an American Problem (1995); Ariela Julie Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America (2008); Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (2003); Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Race in the Twenty-first Century (2000); Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (1968); Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the CivilWar South (2010); Tiya Miles, Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (2005); Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (1975); Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (2004).

Southern Indians and the Problem of Race

Native southerners only gradually and incompletely adopted the concept of race as inherent, immutable, and transgenerational differences grounded in phenotype. When Europeans first arrived in the South in the 16th century, indigenous people were members of extended kin groups and subjects of powerful chiefs who exercised secular and religious authority. Chiefdoms warred with each other, enslaved captives, reduced lesser polities to tributary status, and periodically reconfigured the population into new polities. As chiefdoms collapsed after the European invasion, kinship alone came to define political relationships, and individuals were either kin or enemies. By the 18th century, southern Indian tribes began to adopt as well as enslave Europeans and Africans as well as enemy Indians. Slaves had no rights, but Indians did not distinguish between members born into tribes and adoptees, regardless of their physical appearance.

As Indians acquired the racial attitudes of southern whites, they increasingly held only people of African descent in bondage. By the late 18th century, they regarded blacks and whites as distinct from each other and from the large, diverse group called “Indian.” But “Indian” contributed far less to their identity than did their nations. In an 1826 address, for example, Cherokee Elias Boudinot sought to counter “repelling and degrading” stereotypes of his “race” by chronicling the accomplishments of his own people. Being “Indian” meant being a citizen of an Indian nation.

Contemporaries tended to use “tribe” and “nation” interchangeably, as do modern scholars and southern Indians. By the 1820s, the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Creeks had the defined territories, laws, and delegated political power that made “nation” more accurate. At the same time, citizenship and kinship intertwined, as they do in “tribal” societies. Southern Indians continued to consider a range of people whose ancestry included Africans and Europeans to be tribal citizens and, therefore, “Indian.” In addition to adoptees and their descendants, the offspring of intermarried whites and blacks were considered Indian, especially if their mothers belonged to the clans that formed the basis of a matrilineal kin network. These people were not “mixed blood” from a Native perspective: either they were Indian by virtue of tribal membership or they were not. Having kin conveyed both a tribal and a racial identity.

Some colonial officials had promoted the intermarriage of whites and Indians as the solution to the Indian problem because they assumed that the offspring would become a part of Euro-American society. In fact, the opposite occurred, and by the 1820s intermarriage had produced many of the leaders in the large southern nations that held land in common. As Native resistance to forced removal from the South mounted in the late 1820s, politicians increasingly disparaged tribal leaders who had white ancestry as charlatans who pretended to be Indians. As far as the Indian nations were concerned, these men were Indians.

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the federal government developed a policy to “civilize” Indians, whom they thought of collectively even while they dealt with them tribally through the negotiation of treaties. Grounded in Enlightenment ideas, the “civilization” policy sought to make Indians culturally indistinguishable from Euro-Americans in order to assimilate them into white society. The Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles selectively adopted aspects of the policy, and their success at cultural transformation earned them the designation “Five Civilized Tribes,” a term that scholars no longer use. The accomplishments of these tribes did not protect them from the consequences of a shift in racial attitudes in the early 19th century. Increasingly, policy makers rejected ideas behind the “civilization” program and came to believe that Indians were an inherently inferior race that must be expelled from the South. Federal commissioners negotiated fraudulent treaties with the five tribes and forced them into what is today eastern Oklahoma. By 1842, most of their citizens were west of the Mississippi.

No tribal governments recognized by treaty remained in the South. The absence of polities readily identifiable as Indian tribes or nations rendered racial categorization more difficult and haphazard. The Choctaw removal treaty made those Choctaws who chose to remain in Mississippi legally white, and the Georgia and Alabama legislatures declared a handful of Creeks and Cherokees white. But the vast majority of southern Indians—both remnants of removed tribes and members of tribes never slated for removal—remained in legal limbo. Over the next century, the Cherokees, Choctaws, and Seminoles managed to secure federal recognition as tribes, but other southern Indian communities struggled to create nations that outsiders would recognize. Following the Civil War, it became even more difficult for Indians to carve out a place in a legal system that normally provided for only two races.

Having federally recognized tribal governments did not necessarily mean that the three tribes escaped the discrimination inherent in Jim Crow. White schools in western North Carolina, for example, denied admission to Cherokee students in the 1890s. The white school in Indiantown, Fla., expelled the four or five Seminoles who had enrolled in 1916 because local whites objected, and as late as the 1950s Mississippi Choctaws were “generally treated as colored,” despite the treaty provision that made them white. When the federal government tried to intervene on their behalf, state and local authorities insisted that “colored” facilities were available to these Indians. The other southern tribes that received federal services in the age of Jim Crow—the Chitimachas and Coushattas in Louisiana and the Catawbas in South Carolina—often found themselves on the other side of the color line from whites and suffered discrimination in education, social services, employment, and public accommodations.

Whites considered “Indian” to be a race, but both they and Native peoples recognized enormous diversity that undermined tendencies to essentialize Indians. Some state legislation applied to “Indians” generally, but other acts named specific tribes. Not all tribes were the same. The University of North Carolina, for example, officially admitted Cherokees, but by the 1930s it had closed the door to Lumbees. The reason was the perception that Lumbees had African American ancestry and Cherokees did not. Indeed, tainted blood became a familiar explanation for discrimination against Indians. An attorney involved in an attempt to dispossess Chitimachas explained: “We call them Indians out of respect for the aboriginal red skin from whom they are only remote descendants. They have intermarried with negroes and with rare exceptions with white persons, so that there is not now a full-blooded Indian upon the property.” Therefore, Indians began to assert the purity of their “blood.” A Coushatta wrote the Office of Indian Affairs: “We are not Choctaw and not Chittimache. We all belong full blood of Coushatta Indians.” Some tribes, especially those with federal recognition, instituted “blood quantum,” or ancestry, requirements for membership in the 20th century.

The omnipresence of white racism prompted tribes to police their racial borders. In 1921, for example, the North Carolina legislature created a “blood” committee, composed of Lumbees, that determined whom to admit to Lumbee schools, and in 1954 the Poarch Creeks in Alabama insisted that an Indian woman whose children had an African American father withdraw the youngsters from their state-funded Indian school. Tribes also evaluated the racial purity of each other. In 1946, the Cherokee chief and the agency superintendent visited the Pamunkeys in Virginia to determine whether or not the boarding school at Cherokee would admit them. The concern was the “good deal of negro blood apparent among some of these eastern remnants of tribes,” and the decision was that Pamunkeys as well as “children of similar appearance” could enroll. Southern Indians could not divorce themselves from racism.

Dennis Wolfe, a full-blooded Cherokee, in Cherokee, N.C., ca. 1980–90 (Carol M. Highsmith, photographer, Library of Congress [LC-HS503-3028], Washington, D.C.)

The federal government had a constitutionally sanctioned relationship with tribes, not individuals, and the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) tried with little success to mitigate the impact of Jim Crow on recognized tribes. In 1934, the Indian Reorganization Act extended OIA responsibility to individuals of “one-half or more Indian blood.” As a result, bureaucrats obsessed over the ancestry of Indians who were not federally recognized. They combed official records, interviewed local whites, consulted anthropologists, and made fact-finding tours. Since the colonial period, there had been so much intermarriage among many peoples in the South that quantifiable evidence of ancestry eluded them, so the OIA turned to anthropometry. In 1936, in an effort to determine if the Lumbees of North Carolina were Indian, a physical anthropologist measured, plucked, scratched, and photographed 209 of them. The conclusion that 22 were at least one-half Indian and that others had predominantly African and European ancestry led to questions about the racial authenticity of Lumbees. Though not based on “scientific” study, similar questions arose about other southern Indians.

In one sense, a tribal identity separated Indians from race, and nationhood provided Indians a platform for political engagement. Consequently, most southern Indian peoples have sought recognition of their tribal sovereignty rather than individual civil rights. A primary attribute of sovereignty is the right to determine membership, and criteria for membership vary from tribe to tribe. Although some southern tribes require a specific fraction of tribal ancestry, others have decided that demonstrable descent is sufficient for enrollment. Southern Indians, therefore, have found it difficult to be a “race” when their conception of themselves is as tribal nations.

THEDA PERDUE

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Malinda Maynor Lowery, Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation (2010); Theda Perdue, in The Culture of Jim Crow: Rethinking the Segregated South, ed. Stephanie Cole and Natalie Ring (2011); Christina Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (2010).

Southern Politics and Race

Race is the single biggest divider in southern politics, education, and culture. Today the South is still home to the nation’s largest African American population. According to the 2000 U.S. Census, roughly 54 percent of all American blacks live in the South, about 15.8 million of the 30 million in total. Political schisms based on race are not a new phenomenon for the South. Largely because of slavery and race, southern political history includes war, Reconstruction, and a long era of second-class citizenship.

Black southern political history fits into six distinct epochs: slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the post–Reconstruction Jim Crow era, the civil rights movement, and the post–civil rights era. Slavery was the most apolitical time for southern blacks, as bondage prevented them from even the most rudimentary political participation. While by and large blacks were not actually political participants, their presence was the great political issue. The slavery question framed the concepts of states’ rights and federalism and debates about admission of states into the Union.

The Civil War was fought largely over slavery, and race was also central to Reconstruction, a period from 1866 to 1877. Because of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the Radical Republican–led ratification in the U.S. Congress of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, blacks mostly voted Republican. The Thirteenth Amendment declared an end to slavery throughout the United States. The Fourteenth Amendment provided for equal protection and due process and clarified citizenship, overturning the notorious Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) decision, which said that the framers of the Constitution had not intended for blacks to be citizens. The Fifteenth Amendment declared that the right to vote shall not be abridged on account of race.

Reconstruction witnessed unprecedented black political growth in the South. Largely because of armed Union troops protecting voters and candidates from violence and intimidation, African Americans voted with unprecedented strength and fielded candidates for all levels of political office. At this time, blacks, the majority population in Mississippi and South Carolina, were able to use this numerical advantage to elect their own to the U.S. Congress, including Sen. Hiram Revels of Mississippi in 1870.

Yet this political surge ended almost as quickly as it began. Following the Compromise of 1877, white southern elites, known as Bourbon Democrats, used the conclusion of Reconstruction to their advantage. These plantation elites instituted a series of laws and regulations that served the purpose of removing blacks from political power and placing a whole host of day-to-day humiliations on the black population. The Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) provided national sanction to the doctrine of separate-but-equal in public transportation.

Jim Crow quickly dissolved the political progress made by blacks during Reconstruction. There were several Jim Crow political restrictions—most harmful and pernicious were those that limited the vote. American states generally could impose restrictions on the vote because judicial interpretation of the U.S. Constitution at the time regarded voting as a “reserved” power belonging to the states, not a fundamental right belonging to all American citizens.

Many states instituted literacy tests, which the Supreme Court found legal in Williams v. Mississippi (1898). Written in a race-neutral manner but mostly applied to blacks and very poor whites, these tests required voters to interpret a legal statute or clause of the state constitution. Whites were often exempted from the rigors of these tests through an “understanding clause,” which gave the voting registrar wide discretion to decide who was fit to vote on an individual basis. Particularly good at nullifying the vote was the poll tax. This tax charged a fee to vote and, since most blacks during the Jim Crow era were in the economic underclass, thus served the purpose of encouraging blacks not to vote. The grandfather clause dictated that unless your grandfather was eligible to vote, you were not eligible to vote, although Guinn v. United States (1915) declared this particular practice unconstitutional. State legislators often wrote these laws in a race-neutral manner, but rarely were they applied as such.

A cartoon published on 9 April 1870 showing Jefferson Davis looking over his shoulder at Hiram Revels seated in the U.S. Senate. (Thomas Nast, Library of Congress [LC-USZ62-108004], Washington, D.C.)

An additional form of voting discrimination was the white primary. The period 1876–1944 saw one-party voting, in which the Democratic Party dominated in local, state, and national elections. As a result of the ineffectiveness of the Republican Party in the era, general elections were largely irrelevant because the Democratic primary was the real election. To exclude black voters, the Democratic Party declared itself a private organization that could limit participation in its internal affairs, resulting in the white primary. This lasted until Smith v. Allwright (1944), when the Supreme Court declared that the Democratic Party was not actually private.

Nonetheless, Jim Crow persisted throughout the first half of the 20th century. Characteristic of the legal struggle for equality during this time was the failure of the Dyer Antilynching Bill, which died in the U.S. Senate in 1918. Southern senators were able to kill legislation making lynching—mob punishment—a federal crime. Southern congressmen were generally successful at keeping the federal government out of civil rights and out of the South until the civil rights movement prompted federal intervention.

Eradication of Jim Crow segregation and political restrictions was the larger goal of black protest. To that end, the civil rights movement, a large-scale effort led by southern blacks emphasizing nonviolent resistance, affected all Americans. Southern blacks who played a particular role include Ralph Abernathy, Medgar Evers, James Farmer, Martin Luther King Jr., John C. Lewis, James Meredith, and Rosa Parks. The NAACP, the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Little Rock Nine, the Greensboro Four, and countless other individuals and groups combined to end Jim Crow in the South.

The first successful moments of the civil rights movement came from the Legal Defense Fund of the NAACP. Based in New York City and led by Charles Hamilton Houston and later Thurgood Marshall, these legal eagles sued to end Jim Crow racial discrimination in public accommodations, public transportation, and voting. Arguably the most important case was Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which declared separate-but-equal in public education unconstitutional.

Of the many notable events of the civil rights movement, five are particularly significant, along with the numerous individuals who sacrificed time, energy, money, and, in some instances, their lives. On 1 December 1955, in Montgomery, Ala., police arrested Rosa Parks for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man and violating the city’s law requiring segregation on its buses. Casting him into a role of national prominence, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. helped lead a 381-day boycott of the Montgomery bus system. Eventually, the courts held segregation on intrastate public transportation unconstitutional and ended the boycott.

In 1957, the Little Rock, Ark., school board voted to integrate the school system, but segregationist governor Orval Faubus thwarted the plan. The integration plan was relatively tame, as the school board permitted just nine students to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School. This form of token integration was common in the South following the Supreme Court’s 1955 order to desegregate with “all deliberate speed.” Governor Faubus’s actions, including withdrawing protection for the nine students, prompted a constitutional crisis, and President Dwight Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne Division to protect the students from mob violence.

Countless incidents similar to Little Rock played out throughout the South in the ensuing years as blacks tried to integrate local schools. Many whites were laissez-faire, yet many more, perhaps emboldened by the Strom Thurmond–penned Southern Manifesto, fiercely resisted. The White Citizens’ Council best epitomizes this massive resistance. Formed in Indianola, Miss., in 1954, members resisted efforts to integrate public life in the South.

Nonetheless, blacks and white liberals persistently attacked southern Jim Crow. The Freedom Riders, in 1961, an integrated collection of northern college students, attempted to ride public buses from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans. Beaten, bloodied, and arrested in Alabama and Mississippi, the riders did not reach Louisiana. In 1963, during Freedom Summer, northerners attempted to register black Mississippians to vote. The murder of three of these civil rights workers cast a pall over the effort. However, these events stigmatized the South while also encouraging moderate whites in Congress eventually to take decisive action.

Prompted by Police Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor’s 1963 unleashing of police dogs on civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham, Ala., the 1964 Civil Rights Act protected individuals against arbitrary discrimination. Passage of this legislation was not easy. Enacted after the longest filibuster (83 days) in Senate history, the 1964 Civil Rights Act outlawed discrimination in hotels, motels, restaurants, theaters, and all other public accommodations engaged in interstate commerce; guaranteed equal protection for blacks in federally funded programs by prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race; banned discrimination in employment in any business on the basis of race; and established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Following passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, advocates still sought legislation protecting the franchise for blacks. Despite the Fifteenth Amendment outlawing the abridgement of voting based on race, southern states in particular used numerous tactics to discourage blacks from voting, including literacy tests, poll taxes, and intimidation. The weakness of the Civil Rights Act of 1957 was evident by the paucity of black voters in the South. The 1965 Voting Rights Act became the single most important piece of legislation for increasing political participation of southern blacks. Between March 1965 and November 1988, the black-white gap in registration closed almost to nothing.

As written, the Voting Rights Act allowed federal registrars in areas where less than 50 percent of eligible voters were actually registered. These so-called covered jurisdictions must obtain preclearance from the Justice Department before they change, or implement any changes in, their voting practices, in order to prevent any return to discriminatory practices. The fear is that jurisdictions might approve a policy that suffers from retrogression.

The increase in black voter registration and office holding during the 1960s altered the South’s political scene. In 1960, 1,414,052, or 28 percent, of eligible black adults voted. By the end of the decade, 64.3 percent participated in the electoral process. Tennessee (92.1 percent), Arkansas (77.9 percent), and Texas (73.1 percent) were the southern states with the highest numbers of registered black voters.

In 1975, the number of black elected public officials in the South stood at 1,600. Within five years, the number had jumped to nearly 2,500, and by January 1985 there were 3,233 black elected officials in the South. By 1993, there were 4,924 African Americans holding office in the South, representing 60 percent of such officials in the nation. In 2001, there were 6,179 black elected officials in the South, representing 68 percent of the nation’s total.

In the post–civil rights era, southern black partisanship has been reliably Democratic. Since President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act into law, southern blacks have voted Democratic, with 1964 serving as a realigning election. Republican nominee Barry Goldwater, famous for his opposition of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, won only five states, his home state of Arizona and the four Deep South states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina.

Even so, for most white southerners the move from Democratic to Republican partisanship was gradual. An important distinction is the ideological difference between southern and national Democrats. Until the 1994 congressional elections, southern Democrats were considerably more conservative than their national counterparts in Washington, D.C., which enabled white southerners to vote in a bipartisan manner yet consistently vote for the conservative candidate. Not until the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan did Republicans attract conservative southern candidates at the state and local levels. Nonetheless, while the Republican Party is the dominant party in the South today, Republican hegemony in the South is not nearly as complete as Democratic hegemony was during the Solid South era. For instance, Democrats still controlled the Mississippi House until 2012, although it remained a reliably conservative legislative body.

In the post–civil rights era, two issues are particularly relevant to southern black politics—affirmative action in education and criminal justice. Affirmative action policies are designed to correct past discrimination against racial minorities. Two Supreme Court cases provide guidelines on affirmative action as it relates to higher education. First, in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), the Court declared a special admissions program for minorities unconstitutional and specified that quotas violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. To justify affirmative action as a remedy, a plaintiff had to show that an institution had engaged in past discrimination. However, universities can use race as a plus factor along with other factors. More recently, in Gratz v. Bollinger (2003), the Supreme Court affirmed a university’s right to use race as a plus factor in admissions to obtain a “critical mass” of minority students, because diversity in higher education is a compelling governmental interest as long as the program is “narrowly tailored” to achieve that end. In a companion case, Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), the Court stated that the Constitution “does not prohibit the law schools’ narrowly tailored use of race in admissions decisions to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body.” Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote, however, that universities should not allow affirmative action a permanent status, working instead to implement a “color-blind” policy.

The penal system, the death penalty in particular, has hit African American males particularly hard. Roughly 10.4 percent of all black males between the ages of 25 and 29 are either incarcerated, paroled, or on probation. Out of the 1,066 executions in America since 1976, 363, or 34.1 percent, have been black defendants; blacks now make up 41.8 percent of death row inmates. The death penalty is most prevalent in the South. Out of the 1,066 total executions since 1976, 749, or 70.3 percent, took place in the South, and out of the 363 black executions, 275, or 75.8 percent, took place in the South. This is particularly significant given the large number of exonerations, although southern states are slow to embrace the moratorium movement currently sweeping the nation.

Today, the issue of race and politics in the South is more than just black and white. The South is a dynamic and changing environment, as recently exemplified by the sizable number of recent immigrants to the region from Mexico and beyond. This influx will likely be the next great challenge to the South.

MARVIN P. KING JR.

University of Mississippi

Numan V. Bartley, The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South during the 1950s (1969); Merle Black and Earl Black, The Rise of Southern Republicans (2002); David A. Bositis, Black Elected Officials: A Statistical Survey (2001); Dan T. Carter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution (1996); Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (2007); Robert A. Goldwin, A Nation of States: Essays on the American Federal System (1961); Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (2005); V. O. Key, Southern Politics in State and Nation (1949).

Sports and Segregation/Integration

Many sports historians have argued that sports have been a reflection of American culture, particularly when it comes to race. That institutional racism prevented the participation of minorities in specific sports just as it prevented their participation politically, economically, and socially in American society. However, an argument can be made that sport is more than a mere reflection of society; it also has the ability to shape individuals, opinions about race, and opportunity. Without question, the laboratory that has conducted the most racial experiments has been the American South. Individual states that were vehemently committed to slavery, lynching, and segregation are now just as committed to having successful football teams, on which the majority of the players are African American. The integration of many schools in the South took Supreme Court decisions, and today these same institutions spend millions of dollars recruiting the best African American athletes to enroll and play various sports.

In 1962, it took U.S. marshals and the U.S. Army to enroll James Meredith at the University of Mississippi; in 1997, this same institution gave Deuce McAllister a football scholarship and welcomed him with open arms. Meredith needed U.S. marshals to attend class, eat in the cafeteria, and sleep in the dormitory. McAllister was embraced by University of Mississippi fans as he walked through the Grove before games, was a part of a marketing campaign aimed at helping him to win the Heisman trophy, and would finish his career as arguably the greatest running back in the history of football at the University of Mississippi.

During the 20th century, several individuals and events shaped sports long before black players like McAllister were allowed to play college football. The first black heavyweight boxing champion, Jack Johnson, challenged notions of black inferiority, particularly in the rigidly segregated South. Johnson challenged white ideas of black inferiority when he became champion in 1908 by easily defeating Tommy Burns, and he openly dated white women at a time when black men were routinely lynched for being accused of looking at white women. Although he did not view himself as a role model for African Americans, they clearly viewed him as such and with great pride and admiration embraced his achievements in the ring. Blacks and whites alike recognized that during this era his habit of whipping white men in the ring was a political act of far-reaching dimensions—none more so than his defeat of Jim Jefferies, the “Great White Hope,” on 4 July 1910. As a result of Johnson’s victory in the ring, whites attacked blacks in riots all across America, with the vast majority taking place in the South. Johnson was finally defeated by Jess Willard in 1915 as a result of a controversial knockout; quite possibly he threw the fight in the hope of appeasing the federal government, which had brought charges against him of violating the Mann Act. With his defeat, white America let out a grateful sigh of relief, expecting that things would return to normal in the sports world. For African Americans, the reality of Johnson’s defeat caused them to look inward and create new heroes in another sport, baseball.

The Negro Leagues were a relatively successful black business during their existence from 1920 until 1960. More important, they served as the premier form of entertainment for many African Americans in the South and in urban northern cities. Outstanding players such as Andrew “Rube” Foster, Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, Oscar Charleston, Judy Johnson, Buck Leonard, and Ray Dandridge were not allowed to play major league baseball prior to 1947. They played on teams in the South, such as the Atlanta Black Crackers, the Birmingham Black Barons, the Chattanooga Black Lookouts, the Memphis Red Sox, and the Nashville Elite Giants. There were also several successful northern teams, such as the Cleveland Buckeyes, the Homestead Grays, the Indianapolis ABCS, the Kansas City Monarchs, the Newark Eagles, the Philadelphia Stars, and the Pittsburgh Crawfords. These players and teams did not see themselves as being inferior. Just the opposite, black players felt that the talent in the Negro Leagues was better than that in major league baseball. This was proven in numerous exhibition games played between Negro League players and their major league counterparts. Sports historian John Holway estimated that teams made up of Negro League players won 57 percent of those games over teams made up of white major leaguers. World War II interrupted major league baseball, but after the war, in 1945, the signing of Jackie Robinson to a major league contract by the Brooklyn Dodgers sent shock waves throughout America. Robinson’s journey through the minor leagues in 1946 caused many people to overlook professional football, as four black players were added to the rosters of the Los Angeles Rams of the National Football League (NFL) and the Cleveland Browns of the All-American Football Conference.

Jack Johnson challenged white ideas of black inferiority when he became heavyweight boxing champion in 1908 (photographer unknown, Library of Congress [LC-USZ62-93412], Washington, D.C.)

Pro football had allowed black players to participate since Charles Follis was paid as the game’s first black professional in 1904, but a color barrier was established in the NFL after the 1933 season. Thus the signing of Kenny Washington and Woody Strode by the Rams and Bill Willis and Marion Motley by the Browns began the reintegration of pro football. Jackie Robinson’s successful debut with the Dodgers in 1947 opened the doors of baseball, and black talent from the Negro Leagues poured in. Larry Doby, Roy Campanella, Satchel Paige, Monte Irvin, Willie Mays, Minnie Minoso, Ernie Banks, Elston Howard, and Hank Aaron established records and took baseball to heights it had never before seen. But the accomplishments of these great players on the field did not matter when they trained and traveled in the South. They were housed with black families or required to stay in black hotels, and they could not frequent the same restaurants as their white teammates. But by the late 1950s and early 1960s, an organized movement was taking place that directly challenged legal segregation in the South.

The Brown decision, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and the murder of Emmitt Till provided the fuel for the civil rights movement, which forever changed the South. The three major college football conferences in the South—the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), the Southwest Conference (SWC), and the Southeastern Conference (SEC)—also underwent change as black players slowly integrated onto their respective teams. Arguably the University of Mississippi, which was forcibly integrated in 1962 by James Meredith, represented the last obstacle to African Americans in their pursuit of higher education. During the 1960s, black students trickled into southern colleges and universities, as well as onto their football teams.

Darryl Hill has been called the Jackie Robinson of southern college football. He was the first African American player at the U.S. Naval Academy, and when assistant coach Lee Corso at the University of Maryland convinced Hill to transfer to the Terps, he became their first black player. After sitting out one season, Hill became the first black player in the ACC when he made his debut against North Carolina State at wide receiver. “One of the toughest places I played was Clemson University. You know, 50,000 drunk southern gentlemen are waiting to see this brother come out on the field. Not a black person in the stands anywhere. The black people had to sit outside the stadium on a red dirt hill . . . and that’s where they watched the game.” Clemson used pass coverages that included double and triple teaming Hill, but he still set the ACC single-game pass-catching record with 10 catches. “I can remember they came down from the hill, when the game was over to the bus—and they were congratulating me. And that was a good feeling.”

In 1966, Jerry Levias became the first African American scholarship player at Southern Methodist University, thus breaking the color barrier in the SWC. The 5-foot, 9-inch, 177-pound wide receiver set career records for the Mustangs and was one of the most exciting players in college football. One year later, in 1967, Nat Northington broke the color barrier in the SEC when he took the field for the University of Kentucky and played wide receiver in a 26–13 loss against the University of Mississippi. Northington would play in only three more games before leaving the team after being distraught over the death of Greg Page, who had been recruited with Northington in 1966 with the expectation that both black players would integrate the SEC. Page was injured during practice in August, and he died in September 1967.

The SEC has long been one of college football’s strongest conferences. From 2006 to 2010, it produced five national champions. Without question, black players on these teams have been largely responsible for this success on the field, which has made the SEC the second-most-profitable conference in college football when it comes to television revenue. Although the Big 10 generated slightly more revenue than the SEC from television in 2010, that will likely change when future deals with national networks begin to produce funds. So schools like Mississippi and Alabama that fought hard against integration now fight each other in the recruitment of black athletes. Race is now viewed as an asset on the field, but not off the field. In college football, it is obvious that African Americans can play the game, but they cannot be head coaches who garner the same opportunities as their white counterparts. Jim Caldwell was the first black head football coach in the ACC when he coached Wake Forest from 1993 to 2000. In the old Southwestern Conference, which became the Big 12, Bob Simmons became its first black head coach when he took over Oklahoma State in 1995 and coached the Cowboys through the 2000 season. The SEC was the last of the major conferences in the South to integrate its head-coaching ranks, choosing to wait until the 21st century, when Mississippi State University hired Sylvester Croom in 2004.

The story of sports in the American South prior to World War II, like other aspects of this region, has been largely shaped by barriers based on race. The postwar period was largely shaped by the willingness, determination, and ability of African Americans to break down those same barriers. The process of adding athletes of color to football teams, basketball teams, baseball teams, track teams, golf teams, tennis teams, women’s basketball teams, softball teams, volleyball teams, and other teams has taken place in secondary schools, high schools, colleges and universities, and professional teams throughout this region. Arguably on-the-field integration has been embraced and can be seen clearly in a sport like football, which brings southern towns and communities together, beginning on Friday nights for high school games and on Saturday for college games. During these brief two-to-three-hour contests, many blacks and whites cheer together, complain about calls made by officials, and second-guess plays by coaches, united in their love of the game. Without question, sport allows human beings to briefly experience a connection that few other aspects of society can provide.

CHARLES K. ROSS

University of Mississippi

HBO, Breaking the Huddle: The Integration of College Football (16 December 2008); Charles Martin, Benching Jim Crow: The Rise and Fall of the Color Line in Southern College Sports, 1890–1980 (2010); Charles K. Ross, Outside the Lines, African Americans and the Integration of the National Football League (1999).

African Americans, Appalachian

African Americans have a long history in Appalachia. Arriving first in the 18th and 19th centuries as slaves, their numbers remained relatively small until the opening of the coalfields in the late 19th century. The need for miners encouraged a dramatic in-migration of free African Americans from the Deep South.

In West Virginia, the heart of central Appalachian coal country, the number of African American miners increased from just under 5,000 in 1900 to over 11,000 a decade later. By 1930, West Virginia had 22,000 African American miners. In Kentucky, African American miners numbered 2,200 in 1900 and 7,300 in 1930. These miners either followed family members to the central Appalachian region or were directly recruited by coal companies. While dispersed throughout the region, significant numbers of African Americans found their way to Kanawha and McDowell counties in West Virginia and Harlan County in Kentucky. In the region’s coal towns, African Americans generally stood on more equal footing with European Americans as coal companies strove to maximize profits by keeping racial antagonism low and placing the most skilled workers in the appropriate jobs, regardless of race. As Appalachians, African Americans presently experience the myriad effects of poverty, including dilapidated housing, low educational attainment, and limited access to health and social services that typify this marginalized subregion. As a minority among mountain people, African Americans additionally suffer the historical consequences of racism.

Any discussion of African Americans in Appalachia relates to a demographic understanding of Appalachia itself. The region, as delineated by the Appalachian Regional Commission in the 1960s, includes counties in 12 states stretching from Mississippi to New York. African Americans make up just under 8 percent of the Appalachian population across three subregions. In the southern, central, and northern subregions, African Americans make up 13, 2.2, and 3.6 percent of each subregion’s population, respectively. Of the almost 8 percent (1.7 million) Appalachian African Americans, approximately 76 percent reside in the southern subregion, 22 percent live in the northern subregion, and 2.8 percent live in the central subregion. The 10 Appalachian counties with the highest percentages of African Americans are in Mississippi and Alabama. Additionally, those counties with the highest numbers are urban or adjacent to urban areas.

Implicit in any discussion of blacks in Appalachia is their distinctiveness from other African Americans in the South based on their mountain experience. Practicing the religious and musical traditions of their Deep South kinfolk, rural Appalachian African Americans also had ties to industrializing America, with the skills to match. These African Americans, however, have largely been ignored in the media and in scholarship. In their “discovery” of Appalachian culture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, outsiders stereotyped Appalachian residents as isolated, backward, violent, and, not least of all, Anglo-Saxon. Over the past 20 years, the people of Appalachia, including African Americans, have become increasingly critical of their pejorative representation in mainstream America.

Black coal miners in Appalachia, date unknown (Victor Howard Collection, Archives and Special Collections, University of Mississippi Library, Oxford)

Accompanying the rise of “place-based” studies and identity politics in the 1990s, African Americans began actively claiming an Appalachian identity. William H. Turner and Edward J. Cabbell’s Blacks in Appalachia considered specific African American communities in the mountains and black coal miners. In the early 1990s, a Kentucky-based performance group, the Affrilachian Poets, began to give voice to the frustrations of African Americans in Appalachia who feel excluded from historical and contemporary understandings of what it means to be from Kentucky and/or Appalachia. In Pennington Gap, Va., the county’s first colored school, Lee County Colored Elementary School, has become the Appalachian African American Cultural Center. The center collects oral histories, photographs, copies of slave documents, and material culture pertaining to the African American historical experience in the region.

MICHAEL CRUTCHER

University of Kentucky

Dwight B. Billings, Gurney Norman, and Katherine Ledford, eds., Back Talk from Appalachia: Confronting Stereotypes (1999); William H. Turner and Edward J. Cabbell, eds., Blacks in Appalachia (1985); F. X. Walker, Affrilachia (2000).

Afro-Cubans

“Afro-Cuban” (afrocubano) is a term that was invented by Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz in the early 20th century. Those whom the term designates often suggest it fails to capture the nuances of Cuban history and seems to qualify citizenship in the nation that Cubans of African descent were instrumental in creating. Historically, the African population was proportionately much larger in Cuba than in the United States. Expanded sugar production in 19th-century Cuba rested on the labor of African slaves. Yet there were many more free people of color in Cuba than in the South under slavery. Afro-Cuban mutual aid societies (los cabildos de naciones) enabled retention of African languages and fostered syncretic Afro-Catholic religions (for example, Santeria). African-derived music and folklore have strongly influenced Cuban popular culture. Afro-Cuban music has enjoyed sustained popularity in the United States. Dizzy Gillespie’s mid-20th-century collaboration with Cuban musicians Tito Puente, Mario Bauza, and Celia Cruz helped to establish a strong audience for salsa. Drums and metaphors from African religious traditions flavor this musical genre, which continues to draw broad interest, exemplified in the successful revival of the Buena Vista Social Club.

More than half of the soldiers in the Cuban revolt against Spain in 1895 were black or mulatto. It was during this revolution (and the earlier revolt of 1868) that Afro-Cubans first migrated to Florida and Louisiana. Cigar production in Key West and Tampa attracted Cuban settlers. Afro-Cubans accounted for about 15 percent of these 19th-century Cuban migrants. Smaller settlements of cigar workers located in Jacksonville and New Orleans. In addition to cigar workers, these early communities included a large number of Cuban intellectuals and political figures prominent in exile political organizations.

The end of the war against Spain in 1898 coincided with the rise of Jim Crow laws. Afro-Cubans were adversely affected by these laws. Segregated social clubs formed. The Sociedad La Unión Martí-Maceo, founded in Tampa in 1900, still remains in existence, as does El Círculo Cubano, the white Cuban club founded in 1899. The leading center of Cuban settlement in the United States during the early 20th century, Ybor City and West Tampa, were enclaves with elaborate social, recreational, and political organizations. Afro-Cubans were integrated into these enclaves, but with growing distance from white compatriots.

Cigar manufacture migration to Florida slowed during the Depression of the 1930s and ended completely with the 1961 embargo against Cuban tobacco imports. The very large influx of anti-Castro Cuban exiles, beginning in 1959, targeted Miami far more than Tampa; the Cuban histories of Key West and Jacksonville were by then nearly forgotten. Fewer than 10 percent of the immediate post-1959 immigrants were Afro-Cuban. Second- and third-generation Afro-Cubans in Tampa became more isolated, cut off from contact with Cuba and increasingly involved with African Americans.

The “Mariel” influx of Cubans in 1981 included a much larger proportion of Afro-Cubans, many of whom remained in Miami. More recent waves of immigrants and refugees on rafts have continued to include Afro-Cubans. Despite an increase in numbers, black Cubans of Miami have remained spatially and socially separate from white Cubans. Jim Crow and southern patterns of residential segregation explain only part of this phenomenon. The issue of racial diversity among Cubans has a long history of ambivalence. José Martí, who sought national unity, urged Cubans to ignore racial differences and forget past injustices. However, this discourages discourse about racial problems and has made Afro-Cubans relatively invisible.

Average incomes of Cuban immigrants exceed those of all other Latino ethnic groups in the United States. Black Cubans, however, have been shown to earn significantly less than their white counterparts. In Miami, especially, segregation between black Cubans and white Cubans is greater than for the population as a whole. Nevertheless, among recent immigrants and their children, there remains a strong identification with Cuba, and cultural practices such as food and music continue to favor the homeland. In Tampa, descendants of past immigrants are more varied in identification and cultural preferences. Fewer speak Spanish or regularly eat Cuban food. Many still attend the St. Peter Claver Catholic Church, and a smaller number continue to belong to the Sociedad La Unión Martí-Maceo. The majority of descendants, however, more strongly identify as African American.

SUSAN D. GREENBAUM

University of South Florida

Alejandro de la Fuente, A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba (2001); Susan Greenbaum, More Than Black: Afro-Cubans in Tampa (2002); Guillermo Grenier and Alex Stepick, eds., Miami Now! Immigration, Ethnicity, and Social Change (1992); Pedro Perez Sarduy and Jean Stubbs, eds., Afro-Cuba (1993); Madeline Zavodny, Working Paper 2003–10, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta (July 2003).

Afro-Seminole Creole

Afro-Seminole Creole is an offshoot of 17th- and 18th-century Gullah, traceable to the Africans who escaped from the British plantations in the southeastern Crown colonies of Georgia and South Carolina. These slaves, along with Creeks and other indigenous tribes, were allowed refuge in Spanish Florida, where they were called cimarrones ‘fugitives,’ possibly from a Native word referring to a kind of wild grass. Seminole comes from the Creek pronunciation (siminoli, similoni) of this Spanish word. When Florida joined the United States, slavery was still legal, and the African Seminoles petitioned to move west to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), which they did in 1837. Others went to the Bahamas or Cuba. Still subject to slave raids in the United States, in 1849 they again petitioned to move, this time into northern Mexico, where they were granted 25 square miles of land at Nacimiento, in the state of Coahuila. In 1870, they were invited by the Texas Rangers to become scouts to help clear south Texas of Lipan Apaches and other tribes for European settlement. This they did, basing themselves in Fort Clark in Brackettville and in Fort Nicholas at Eagle Pass. In 1914, with the dissolution of the garrisons, some returned to Nacimiento and some remained in Brackettville. Today, the three main areas inhabited by Afro-Seminoles are Brackettville, Nacimiento (where they are known as Maskogos), and Wewoka, Okla. (where they are known as Freedmen). Their genetic and cultural makeup is traceable to various African and Native American peoples. They refer to themselves as “Negro Indians.”

The food and the culture of Afro-Seminoles also include African and Amerindian elements. At a revival meeting, African gospel rhythms eventually move into the “Seminole stomp,” which is clearly Native American, as is the preparation of frybread, suffki, and a flour from the royal palm (called a coonteh). Use of a large pestle and mortar to grind rice and corn probably has dual origins.

Historically, Gullah has developed into two independent branches: Sea Island Creole (SIC) and Afro-Seminole Creole (ASC). Their separation took place before the large-scale influence from Upper Guinean languages into the Georgia/Carolina region in the mid-18th century modified Gullah to become the variety described by Lorenzo Dow Turner and others in the 20th century. By contrast, ASC has been influenced by Spanish and indigenous languages. SIC resembled ASC more in the late 19th century than it does today. ASC negates solely with no (hunnuh no bin yeddy um ‘you didn’t hear her’) and pluralizes with postnominal dem (duh wisseh de knife dem dey? ‘where are the knives?’), both of which are now rare in contemporary SIC. It retains forms such as warra ‘what’ and darra ‘that,’ recorded only as archaic in other Creoles, such as Jamaican. Its future marker is en, from gwen ‘going’ (e n’en talk turrum ‘she won’t talk to her’), not found in SIC, where the similar-sounding ain’ is today the common verbal negator. Some indigenous American words in ASC include suffki, stamal, and polejo, all foodstuffs prepared from corn. Spanish words include calpintero ‘woodpecker,’ banya ‘wash,’ metati ‘mortar,’ and many others. Quite a few African-derived words are shared with SIC (pinda ‘peanut,’ coota ‘turtle,’ tabby ‘mud’), but that language has many more African-derived words not found in ASC. SIC also admits African phonological features, such as the doubly articulated stops /kp/ and /gb/, not found in ASC. ASC does not share with SIC such words as buntas ‘buttocks,’ skiffi ‘pudenda,’ and so on (though variants of both of these occur in some Caribbean Creoles).

ASC is a very private language, and when asked, its speakers typically deny any knowledge of it. At a gravestone dedication attended by the Seminole and non-Seminole Brackettville community, a woman greeted her friend in English from a distance as she approached her, then repeated the whole greeting in ASC quietly in her ear as she bent to hug her. ASC is not being passed on to younger generations. While ASC speakers know what they are speaking—Creole or English—at any given time, the English of the oldest generation is clearly influenced grammatically and phonologically by ASC. Speakers are also aware that ASC was “deeper” in earlier times; a younger speaker who said trow-way for ‘spill’ was corrected by an older speaker, who told her that the proper pronunciation was chuwway. Likewise, the “proper” pronunciation of the name of the language is said to be Shiminóleh, not Siminóle, as it is commonly pronounced. Young people today can mimic the distinctive English pronunciation of their elders but cannot produce the language.

None of the pidgin or creole languages spoken in the South are in good shape today. Mobilian Jargon (or Mobilian Yamá), once spoken in the Lower Mississippi Valley, is extinct. Louisiana Creole French has fewer than 30,000 speakers and is not being learned by children. Sea Island Gullah of South Carolina and Georgia shows an ongoing drift toward English. Fewer than 400 people today can speak Afro-Seminole Creole fluently, none of whom is younger than about 60.

IAN HANCOCK

University of Texas at Austin

Thomas A. Britten, A Brief History of the Seminole-Negro Indian Scouts (1999); Cloyde I. Brown, Black Warrior Chiefs: A History of the Seminole Negro Indian Scouts (1999); Joshua R. Giddings, The Exiles of Florida (1858); Ian Hancock, Hablar, Nombrar, Pertenecer (1998), in Language Variety in the South: Perspectives in Black and White, ed. Michael Montgomery and Guy Bailey (1986).

Alabama Blacks to Mexico

The Tlahualilo labor recruitment project in Alabama was the largest single private Mexican migration effort in Mexican history in the 19th century. The project sought to move up to 20,000 African American tenant farmers to plant and establish cotton fields in the Mapimi basin in northern Mexico. The first stage of the Tlahualilo cotton project involved building a 60-mile-long private irrigation canal to the privately owned dry Tlahualilo lakebed. The second phase involved recruiting approximately 100 families from towns along the Tuscaloosa River Valley in Alabama. The Tlahualilo Agricultural Company hoped that this large investment in black labor might yield enough cotton to begin to cover the capital expenses associated with building a private canal and trunk line to the Tlahualilo lakebed.

In Alabama, news that a large agricultural syndicate wanted skilled African American agricultural labor roared through black farming communities across the state. The actual handbill that followed the rumors promised a larger share of the cotton crop (on the halves), transportation costs, bountiful forests and plains, and a political climate that offered equal rights and that valued black immigrants over Chinese and Italian labor.

The Tlahualilo Agricultural Syndicate’s recruitment of black families turned into something of a black exodus. William Ellis, a Texas-based businessman and black emigration activist, was the main contractor and chief contact between Mexico’s president, Porfirio Díaz, the Tlahualilo Agricultural Company, and Ralph Williams, the agent for the labor recruitment project. Ellis pushed this labor arrangement as the best solution to the dire economic and political straits facing black voters across the American South. The Tlahualilo venture promised profits and freedom, and Ellis stood to enjoy his freedoms and profit in Mexico.

The Tlahualilo project was not without its critics. In Mexico, according to El Tiempo, “this way of stopping the lynchings and helping get rid of a race which the Yankees detest is very harmful and disquieting to Mexico.” The Economista Mexicano believed that it would be “better we continue seeing our fields deserted and living with a small population than to admit North Americans of the Negro race.” In Alabama, Republicans decried the loss of votes in Alabama’s swing counties after the nationally controversial election in 1894. Others celebrated the departure of the more difficult element among sharecroppers in Tuscaloosa County. Most observers seemed to agree that the collective departure of black southern workers for Mexico was a symbol of things to come in the New American South.

The families, once they arrived at the Tlahualilo hacienda in February, did not take to their assigned roles as symbols of political defeat in Alabama. They rejected their difficult working and living conditions: roofless housing, snow, unbuilt churches, a dry desert lakebed, no individual farm plots, and immediate ongoing oversight. Some took the next train back to Alabama. The majority started demanding familiar food, a slower work pace, and a day’s wage for a day’s work. Ellis acceded to these demands, but when people refused to work more than four days a week planting cotton, Ellis detained the people he considered ringleaders and had his foremen drag them in front of their friends and neighbors. The colonists rebelled. Some fled the plantation and sought American consular intervention.

News of the outrages in the Tlahualilo plantation circulated widely. The State Department, under pressure from congressional representatives from Alabama, ordered an investigation. Workers and their families responded to the investigation by leaving the plantation and walking, as a group, to the Torreon, Coahuila, train station. They demanded a return to Alabama, and, after news of smallpox and a tense military standoff in the middle of Torreon made its way to Grover Cleveland, the U.S. government agreed to reimburse the Southern Pacific for the journey. Their odyssey did not end there.

The Texas State Health Office detained all the migrants, regardless of smallpox status, at the Texas border. Once it became clear that Texas was refusing to try to provide adequate care, the U.S. Marine Hospital Service (USMHS) took over the quarantine and the migrants, providing the best care possible and even testing a barely experimental serum vaccination therapy at Camp Jenner. Once it became clear the serum failed, the USMHS placed the migrants in the hands of the local American consul and the African American church community in Texas. The USMHS cleared them for travel once the governor of Alabama gave the Southern Pacific permission to bring the colonists into Alabama, only 45 days after the last actual smallpox case in Eagle Pass. The numbers are dismal—78 people died in Tlahualilo and 58 people died in Camp Jenner. All in all, 107 people stayed in Tlahualilo, and 353 people officially returned to Tuscaloosa County. Their status as wards of the state prompted white southern pundits to claim that this Mexican experience proved that African Americans needed white southern oversight. The Memphis Commercial Appeal bluntly stated, “This is another instance of the inability of the Negro to live without the white man.” Ellis himself mourned, “The impression is now before the world that the Negro as a colonist is a failure and must remain in the southern United States and there work out his destiny.” The dismal news of their detention and return reverberated across Alabama’s communities. Concerns with Mexico and Liberia were in the air when Booker T. Washington called on white employers and black workers to “cast their bucket where they are” and invest their time and energy in the southern economy.

The Mexican odyssey of 866 residents of central Alabama should also be an impressive example of transnational political organizing put into place by working-class Alabama-based black southerners. That they received military and medical assistance in Mexico and at the Texas border under conditions far from their choosing simply underlines the challenges the Tlahualilo colonists faced when they sought to make their American civil rights relevant to their workplace in Mexico. The actions taken by black working-class residents of Alabama in Mexico and the political responses by business and political elites in Mexico, Alabama, and Washington, D.C., remind us that the boundaries of the New South are both porous and changing and that southern history is made inside and outside the South, even outside the United States.

JOHN MCKIERNAN GONZALES

University of Texas at Austin

Karl Jacoby, Alabama Heritage (Winter 1995), in Continental Crossroads: Remapping U.S.-Mexico Borderlands History, ed. Samuel Truett and Elliott Young (2004); J. J. Kinyoun, Annual Report of the Supervising Surgeon General of the United States Marine Hospital Service of the United States Treasury for the Fiscal Year 1897 (1899); Jerrold M. Michael and Thomas R. Bender, Public Health Reports (November/December 1984); Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (1976); Edwin Redkey, Black Exodus: Black Nationalist and Back-to-Africa Movements, 1890–1910 (1969); Alfred Reynolds, Alabama Review (October 1952); Fred Rippy, Journal of Negro History (January 1921); Milton Rosenau, in Annual Report of the Surgeon General of the United States Marine Hospital Service for the Fiscal Year 1896, ed. Walter Wyman (1896).

Armstrong, Louis

(1900–1971) JAZZ MUSICIAN AND ENTERTAINER.

Born 4 July 1900 in New Orleans, Daniel Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong achieved acclaim as a jazz emissary to the world. Duke Ellington once called him “the epitome of jazz.” As a child, Armstrong played music on the streets of New Orleans and received musical training in the public schools and at the Coloured Waif’s Home (1913–14). He heard and was influenced by such early jazz performers as Charles “Buddy” Bolden, William “Bunk” Johnson, and Joseph “King” Oliver, who became his mentor. Armstrong performed briefly in a New Orleans nightclub at age 15 but did not become a full-time professional until he was 17. He joined Edward “Kid” Ory’s band in 1918 and thereafter played with other jazz greats and led his own groups, especially the Hot Five and the Hot Seven, in the 1920s. His recording debut was with Oliver in 1923. Recordings made him a celebrity, and he toured widely in the 1930s, including a trip to Europe in 1932. He acquired his nickname “Satchmo” in England from the editor of a music magazine. Armstrong made a historic recording with Jimmie Rodgers, the “father of country music,” on 16 July 1930. Rodgers sang his “Blue Yodel No. 9” with accompaniment by Armstrong on the trumpet and his wife, Lillian Hardin Armstrong, on piano.

Armstrong was a popular international figure by the 1940s and thereafter performed around the world; he played at major jazz festivals; he recorded frequently; he performed in Broadway musicals, on radio, and later on television; and he appeared in 60 films, including Cabin in the Sky (1943), New Orleans (1947), High Society (1956), Satchmo the Great (1956), Jazz, the Intimate Art (1968), and Hello, Dolly (1969). He died in New York City on 6 July 1971.

Armstrong’s powerful trumpet and soulful, gravelly singing voice, as well as his infectious smile and effusive good humor, helped to establish the image of the archetypal jazzman. “Satchmo” communicated to everyone the irrepressible message that jazz was “good-time” music. His nickname, as well as his use of street vernacular for expressions of endearment and cordiality, reflected the communal New Orleans roots of the music.

The jazz personality that Armstrong helped create grew out of the southern urban underclass found most clearly in New Orleans. Armstrong’s demeanor was as a loose-mannered, self-assertive (that is, “bad”), somewhat “hip” good-time person whose music was a refuge from the external world. The jazz personality that emerged with Armstrong from the southern urban world included a bold and flirtatious manner, a zany sense of humor, a familiarity bordering on impertinence in interpersonal contact, a flashy, fancy code of dress, and an open and adventurous attitude toward life. Certainly, all jazz people have not fit this personality mold, but Armstrong—the most influential role model available to early jazz performers—did much to implant that abiding notion in the public mind.

Armstrong’s jazz personality reflected certain aspects of the black culture in the South. He found his niche through music entertainment, a common pattern among blacks in southern urban areas. He drew on the vernacular tradition of black street and saloon life. His loose manner reflected an easygoing tolerance essential to the southern black underclass and fit squarely into the laid-back folk tradition. The hip mentality infusing the jazz personality is also a form of pride, validating the jazzman’s self-assertiveness (“badness”) in musical activities.

CURTIS D. JERDE

W. R. Hogan Jazz Archive

Tulane University

Louis Armstrong, Louis Armstrong, in His Own Words: Selected Writings, ed. Thomas Brothers (2001), Satchmo (1954), Swing That Music (1936); Laurence Bergreen, Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life (1997); Gary Giddins, Satchmo: The Genius of Louis Armstrong (2001); Robert Goffin, Horn of Plenty: The Story of Louis Armstrong (1947); Max Jones and John Chilton, Louis: The Louis Armstrong Story, 1900–1971 (1971).

Baker, Ella Jo

(1903–1986) CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST.

Ella Jo Baker, the daughter of Georgianna and Blake Baker, was born in 1903 in Norfolk, Va. When she was seven, Baker’s family moved to Littleton, N.C., to live with her maternal grandparents, who owned a plantation where they had previously worked as slaves. The absence of adequate public schools for blacks in rural North Carolina and her mother’s concern that she be properly educated resulted in Baker’s attending Shaw University in Raleigh, where she received her high school and college education. Following her graduation in 1927, she moved to New York City to live with a cousin, where she worked as a waitress and, later, in a factory.

The product of a southern environment in which caring and sharing were facts of life and of a family in which her grandfather regularly mortgaged his property in order to help neighbors, Baker soon became involved in various community groups. In 1932, she became the national director of the Young Negroes Cooperative League and the office manager of the Negro National News. Six years later, she began her active career with the NAACP, working initially as a field secretary in the South. In 1943, she was appointed national director of the branches for the NAACP. In both capacities, Baker spent long periods in southern black communities, where her southern roots served her well. Her success in recruiting southern blacks to join what was considered a radical organization in the 1930s and 1940s may be attributed, in part, to her being a native of the region and, therefore, best able to approach southern people. Baker, who neither married nor had children of her own, left active service in the NAACP in 1946 in order to raise a niece. A short while later, she reactivated her involvement with the NAACP, becoming president of the New York City chapter in 1954.

In 1957, Baker went south again, this time to work with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a newly formed civil rights organization. The student sit-in movement of the 1960s protested the refusal of public restaurants in the South to serve blacks and resulted in Baker’s involvement in still another civil rights group. As the coordinator of the 1960 Nonviolent Resistance to Segregation Leadership Conference, which brought together over 300 student sit-in leaders and resulted in the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Baker is credited with playing a major role in SNCC’s founding. Severing a formal relationship with SCLC, she worked with the Southern Conference Educational Fund. In recognition of her contribution to improving the quality of life of southern blacks and to the founding of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, Ella Baker was asked to deliver the keynote address at its 1964 convention in Jackson, Miss.

Ella Baker spent the remainder of her life in New York City, where she served as an adviser to a number of community groups. Prior to the release of Joanne Grant’s film Fundi: The Story of Ella Baker, few people outside of the civil rights movement in the South knew about Baker’s long career as a civil rights activist, but since then a number of leadership programs and grassroots organizations, such as the Children’s Defense Fund’s Ella Baker Child Policy Training Institute and the Bay Area’s Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, have been named in her honor. Nevertheless, she is probably less well known than many other civil rights workers, because she was a woman surrounded by southern men, primarily ministers, who generally perceived women as supporters rather than as leaders in the movement, and because of her own firm belief in group-centered rather than individual-centered leadership.

SHARON HARLEY

University of Maryland

Ellen Cantarow and Susan Gushee O’Malley, Moving the Mountain: Women Working for Social Change (1980); Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (1981); Joanne Grant, Ella Baker: Freedom Bound (1999); Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (2003).

The Birth of a Nation

D. W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation (Epoch, 1915) celebrates the Ku Klux Klan. This organization, according to the film’s subtitles, saved the South from the anarchy of black rule by reuniting former wartime enemies “in defense of their Aryan birthright.” Griffith based his film on two novels by Rev. Thomas Dixon Jr., The Leopard’s Spots (1902) and The Clansman (1905).

One of the most controversial and profitable films ever made, the movie set many precedents. It was the first film to cost over $100,000 and charge a $2 admission, the first to have a full-scale premiere, and the first to be shown at the White House. President Woodrow Wilson reportedly declared, “It’s like writing history with lightning. My only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” African Americans protested the film’s biased portrayal of Reconstruction.

Originally called The Clansman when it opened in Los Angeles on 8 February 1915, it was retitled Birth of a Nation just prior to its Broadway showing in March. Fully exploiting the motion picture as a propaganda vehicle, Griffith used every device he had developed in his years at Biograph studio—long shot, close-up, flashback, montage—to create excitement and tension. Provocative subtitles heightened his messages, and southern audiences acclaimed the film enthusiastically. Horsemen in Klan costumes often rode through towns prior to the film’s showing to increase box-office receipts. In cities like New York, Chicago, and Boston, however, the film was greeted with pickets, demonstrations, and lawsuits.

Reconstruction violence against blacks portrayed in the film The Birth of a Nation, 1915 (Film Stills Archives, Museum of Modern Art, New York, N.Y.)

For a time, Newark and Atlantic City, N.J., banned the film, as did St. Louis, Mo., and the states of Kansas, West Virginia, and Ohio. (In the 1950s, Atlanta banned the film, fearing that the violence of some scenes might provoke audience emulation.) As a result of the widespread interest in Birth of a Nation, newspapers began to review new films regularly, and motion picture advertising began to appear in the press. This film helped make moviegoing a middle-class activity, and its success led to the erection of ornate movie palaces in fashionable districts.

The two-part film centers on two families, the Camerons of South Carolina and the Stonemans of Pennsylvania, who are eventually joined in marriage. An idyllic, gracious, carefree antebellum South, based on the labor of happy slaves, is shattered by bloody battles and the devastation and defeat of the Confederacy. With the assassination of Lincoln, the South appears to be doomed to black control. Part two concerns the Reconstruction period and focuses on the Little Colonel, Ben Cameron (Henry B. Walthall), who is in love with Elsie Stoneman (Lillian Gish), daughter of a Negrophile congressman and his black mistress. One of the key scenes shows the Little Colonel’s sister (Mae Marsh) hurling herself off a cliff, terrified by the black renegade Gus’s lustful pursuit. “For her who had learned the stern lesson of honor we should not grieve that she found sweeter the opal gates of death,” reads the subtitle.

Two kinds of blacks appear in the film: the sober, industrious slaves inspired by Uncle Tom, who stay on as loyal servants after the war, and the freedmen, portrayed as arrogant, lecherous, and bestial. Instead of working in the cotton fields, the former slaves make a mockery of legislative government, spend time carousing in saloons, lust after white women, and demand “equal rights, equal politics, equal marriage.” The rise of the Ku Klux Klan led by the Little Colonel promises to restore the social order, disfranchise the blacks, protect southern womanhood, and reunite the nation.

The film is said to have inspired the revival of the Klan in November 1915 and to have promoted the passage of the prohibition amendment. Generally regarded as a masterpiece and the greatest American silent film, Birth of a Nation has never, because of its overt racism, received unequivocal praise.

JOAN L. SILVERMAN

New York University

Roy E. Aitken, “The Birth of a Nation” Story (1965); Michael R. Hurwitz, D. W. Griffith’s Film, “The Birth of a Nation”: The Film That Transformed America (2006); Fred Silva, ed., Focus on “The Birth of a Nation” (1971); Melvyn Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation”: A History of the Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time (2007); Edward Wagenknecht and Anthony Slide, The Films of D. W. Griffith (1975).

Black Soldiers in Cuba and Puerto Rico

When the United States formally declared war on Spain and invaded Cuba and Puerto Rico in 1898, the Americans found themselves in the midst of a protracted revolution that was nearing the end of three phases: the Ten Years’ War (1868–78), the Guerra Chiquita, or Little War (1879–80), and the final War of Independence (1895–98). The Americans made short shrift of the “splendid little war” in Puerto Rico but had to forge alliances with the Cuban revolutionaries who were unwilling to surrender to either the Spanish or the Americans. Cubans of all colors and social origins had created a formidable cross-racial, cross-class alliance and had forged a nationalist ideology in which all, regardless of race and social status, became equal members in the new nation.

The African Americans who fought in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and ultimately the Philippines included regulars (the Buffalo Soldiers), state-organized volunteers, and “immunes,” federally organized regiments of volunteers who purportedly could withstand the diseases of the tropics. The Buffalo Soldiers were servicemen so named for their work in the West suppressing American Indian tribes. The volunteers included 11 regiments of African American volunteers enlisted via state militias. And 4 of the 10 federally organized “immune regiments” were made up of African Americans largely from southern states. Moreover, scores of African American women, many of them yellow fever nurses from the southern states or former nurses from the Civil War, also flooded recruitment stations, later serving in the medical hospitals in Cuba.

African American soldiers who participated in the Spanish-American War, ca. 1899 (photographer unknown, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-41594], Washington, D.C.)

The immune regiments appeared to be an answer to the problem of fighting a war in the midst of malaria season. The discussion over the immunes divided African Americans as they debated whether this idea was scientifically legitimate and the best means to bring honor upon the race, particularly when McKinley decided that white men would fill all the officers’ positions above the rank of lieutenant—captain, major, and colonel. Nevertheless, African American volunteers resolved the debate by enlisting en masse. Soldiers enlisted for a myriad of reasons: they wanted to take up the cause of Antonio Maceo, the slain mulatto Cuban revolutionary leader, prove their manhood, buttress their ongoing claims for full citizenship, and improve the economic lives of their families.

Charged with disarming the Cuban revolutionary forces and restoring peace, black soldiers found themselves at the center of a conflict over how to govern Cuba and protect American interests there. Environmental conditions and diseases proved to be the greatest challenge for the soldiers, however, and when the soldiers returned home, many of them were sick with disease and in no better position politically than when they had left.

SHERRI CHARLESTON

University of Wisconsin

Sherri Ann Charleston, “The Fruits of Citizenship: African Americans, Military Service, and the Cause of Cuba Libre, 1868–1920” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, 2009); Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898 (1999); Willard B. Gatewood Jr., Black Americans and the White Man’s Burden, 1898–1903 (1975); Rebecca J. Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (2005).

Blues

Nowhere is the aesthetic of the “changing same” of African American music more resonant than in the emergent sounds and styles of the blues. From its foundations in the vernacular song of enslaved African peoples of the American South, the blues enunciated new black mobilities at the threshold of the 20th century. A legacy of blues poetics, aesthetics, styles of dress and dance, political discourses, performances of class and gender, and local inflections offers a self-authored genealogy of African American life. In its many variations, migrations, and transformations, the blues represents at once a multitude of authors, works, and narratives and a unified body of black aesthetic practices by which African Americans continue to articulate a living relationship to the agrarian American South.

Blues narratives often collect around particular personalities, historical eras, and geographic centers, most notably the extensive travels of the early 20th-century touring minstrel show singers Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, the heavy sharecropping-era blues of Robert Johnson and John Lee Hooker of the Mississippi Delta and their contemporaries in the pre–World War II Deep South, the up-tempo 1930s Carolina Piedmont blues of Blind Boy Fuller and Rev. Gary Davis, the mid-century jump blues popular in New York dance clubs with incoming southerners, and the electrified Upsouth Chicago blues of the Great Migration’s Muddy Waters and B. B. King. Wherever deployed, the blues maintains cultural routes to a common African American South, despite historical limitations on conventional mobility and communication, including binding sharecropping contracts, poverty, imposed illiteracy, and Jim Crow laws.

The notion that the blues is born simply of pathological reaction to oppressive social circumstances fails to account for the self- and community-motivated empowerment of blues performance. While articulating a private vocabulary of personal strength, forming safe space for otherwise dangerous discourses of social protest, and establishing alternative systems of community leadership and communication out of the reach of hostile officials, the blues represents a series of practices by which African Americans have actively authored themselves and their communities beyond the historical constraints of the southern plantation system. As both an inspiration and an aesthetic foundation, the blues finds continuity with a host of contemporary genres that draw direct familial and cultural lineage with blues communities; soul, hip-hop, and contemporary R&B each allows artists to reference blues themes, lyrics, and styles across new global contexts.

Early 20th-century folklorists, charged with collecting national vernacular traditions for the 1930s Works Progress Administration, sought to record individual blues players at their rural plantation homes or workplaces. These documentary recordings, often accomplished outdoors and under the watchful eye of overseers and sheriffs, stand in contrast to the lively community affairs that unfolded in private, often interior spaces—living rooms, juke joints, the Chitlin’ Circuit of black-owned southern venues, and dance clubs. While many blues musicians have cultural origins in the agrarian South, blues performance modes reflect the remarkable cosmopolitanism of African American culture that converged at bustling southern centers for trade and transportation.

Another dimension of the blues is its function as a point of encounter between southern African Americans and the groups with which they have found historical proximity. Working-class white southerners Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash brought local traditions of minstrelsy into conversation with a sympathetic engagement with blues themes and styles in their germinal rock and roll recordings. Blues artists were presented to collegiate, curious, and mainstream audiences at the 1950s Newport Jazz Festival and stages across hip 1960s Western Europe. In its poetries of liberation and expressive style, the blues also appeals to a host of global minority groups, from American Indian blues players in Oklahoma to Jewish songwriters Leiber and Stoller, who helped to forge the rock and roll genre from the intersection of Tin Pan Alley and the 12-bar blues. These tributes serve as an index to the masterful skill and intensive community schooling manifest in African American musicianship and lyricism, as well as the powerful cross-cultural appeal of the blues.

While the academic folklorist’s 78-rpm record captured a single song for the sake of archives and commercial sale to a variety of audiences, a full blues performance assembles multiple modes of black oral and musical creativity. These include hyperbolic boasts, the trading of stylized insults called the “dozens,” dramatic tales of rogue “badmen,” eloquent toasts, and the witty call-and-response between artists and various audience members. The music’s community-based performative context also suggests the many important ways African American women have engaged the art form as vocalists, instrumentalists, dancers, interjecting speakers, and fans, although this work was rarely of interest to early songcatchers. African American thinkers, including W. C. Handy, W. E. B. Du Bois, Albert Murray, Amiri Baraka, and Eileen Southern, have drawn from the blues to write foundational texts in black cultural theory. When writer Ralph Ellison describes the blues as a medium by which African Americans “finger [the] jagged grain” of the memories of plantation brutality, he invokes an important aspect of the blues that cannot be captured by conventional formal studies: that is, the importance of the blues as an embodied form of musical remembrance rooted in the shared experience of black Americans.

ALI COLLEEN NEFF

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Angela Y. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism (1999); W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903); William R. Ferris, Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues (2009); Robert Gordon and Bruce Nemerov, eds., Lost Delta Found: Rediscovering the Fisk University–Library of Congress Coahoma County Study, 1941–1942 (1995); LeRoi Jones, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963); Charles Kiel, Urban Blues (1992); Jacqui Malone, Stepping the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance (1996); Albert Murray, Stomping the Blues (1976); Mark Anthony Neal, Songs in the Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation (1993); Ali Colleen Neff, Let the World Listen Right: The Mississippi Delta Hip-Hop Story (2009); Robert Palmer, Deep Blues (1981); Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History (1971).

Bontemps, Arna

(1902–1973) WRITER AND SCHOLAR.

Arnaud Wendell Bontemps was three years old when his father decided to move his family from his son’s birthplace in Alexandria, La., to California. The elder Bontemps hoped to escape the prejudice and intimidation that tormented his and other black families. Trying to protect his son, he later warned Arna never to act black.

Having read Harlem Shadows, a book of poems by black author Claude McKay, Arna Bontemps became aware of the emergence of black voices from Harlem. After he graduated from Union Pacific College in 1923 and with the first publication of one of his own poems, Bontemps moved from Los Angeles to Harlem, where he taught at the Harlem Academy. He continued to write and, subsequently, became identified with the Harlem Renaissance. In 1931, he published his first novel, God Sends Sunday, which was later adapted as St. Louis Woman, the musical in which Pearl Bailey made her Broadway acting debut.

A few years of teaching and writing in Alabama, a master’s degree from the University of Chicago, and work with the Illinois Writers Project marked Bontemps’s career until the beginning of his 22-year tenure as librarian at Fisk University in Nashville, Tenn. In 1968, he resumed teaching, first at the University of Illinois and then at Yale, where he also served as curator of the James Weldon Johnson Collection of Negro Arts and Letters. He had moved back to Nashville when he died of a heart attack in 1973.

Bontemps devoted much time to writing about black life, wanting, as he said in Harper’s, “to write something about the changes I have seen in my lifetime, and about the Negro awakening and regeneration.” Short stories portraying southern black life (The Old South: “A Summer Tragedy” and Other Stories of the Thirties), historical novels about black uprisings (Black Thunder), children’s literature about black leaders (Free at Last: The Life of Frederick Douglass), and anthologies of works by black authors (American Negro Poetry) represent the range of his writings. He also edited W. C. Handy’s autobiography, Father of the Blues, and collaborated with fellow writers Langston Hughes, Jack Conroy, and Countee Cullen.

Arna Bontemps spent much of his life exploring the culture of his race and his southern black heritage. In doing so, he became a primary force in the development and promotion of black literature in America.

JESSICA FOY

Cooperstown Graduate Program Cooperstown, New York

J. A. Alvarez, African American Review (Spring 1998); Robert A. Bone, Down Home: A History of Afro-American Short Fiction from Its Beginnings to the End of the Harlem Renaissance (1975); Arna Bontemps, Harper’s, April 1965; Arthur P. Davis, From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers, 1900–1960 (1974); V. Harris, The Lion and the Unicorn (1 June 1990); Daniel Reagan, Studies in American Fiction (Spring 1991).

Brown, Sterling Allen

(1901–1989) TEACHER, POET, LITERARY CRITIC.

The strong men keep a-comin’ on The strong men git stronger.

—from “Strong Men”

More a celebrant of southern culture than a child of its soil, Sterling Allen Brown exalted southern culture and examined the legacy of African Americans in the South through his poetry and essays and, perhaps most markedly, through his long teaching career at Howard University.

Brown was born on 1 May 1901, the youngest of six and the only son to former slave Sterling Nelson Brown and Adelaide Allen Brown. His father was a minister in the Congregational Church and a professor in the School of Religion at Howard University. An alumna of Fisk University, his mother was a former Fisk Jubilee Singer and a major influence on her children’s appreciation for the arts.

Growing up on the Howard University campus, Brown established relationships with notable scholars of the time, including Jean Toomer, Alain Locke, and W. E. B. Du Bois, and had the benefit of Jessie Redmon Fauset as a high school teacher. Interaction with scholars and writers led to an early appreciation of poetry, history, and culture. Graduation with honors from prestigious Dunbar High School led to a scholarship at Williams College in eastern Massachusetts. There Brown earned an A.B. degree and his Phi Beta Kappa key. He then entered Harvard in 1922, where he earned the M.A. degree.

A prolific teaching career followed, started by an English faculty position at Virginia Seminary in Lynchburg, Va. In the three years he was there, he encountered two important influences that would change his life: Daisy Turnball, whom he married in 1927, and the southern culture that would become his inspiration and the foundation of his writing and teaching for the remainder of his career.

His teaching career included Lincoln University in Missouri (1926–28) and Fisk University (1928–29). In 1929, Brown stepped onto the path his father had walked and began teaching at Howard University. His tenure at Howard would span more than 40 years and included semesters spent as visiting faculty at Atlanta University, Vassar College, and New York University.

At Howard, Brown taught the first courses in black literature and became known for his intellectual support of African American culture. He was a “great man” in the community because of active community involvement, consistent patronage of African American businesses, and mentoring of young people. The hallmark of his Howard years is his work highlighting African American culture. According to literary critic Joanne Gabbien, “During the 1930s and 1940s, Brown’s studies of the folk experience and culture were the fullest of any in the field.” He was one of the first scholars to identify folklore as critical to the black aesthetic and to appreciate it as a form of literature and art. The Negro in American Fiction (1937) reveals parallels between the literary experience of African Americans and their real-life experiences. Although now familiar concepts, theories like these made Brown a pioneer in the field of African American criticism. He was able to “tie literature in with life, music, justice, and the struggle for existence.”

As a poet, Brown blended the rhythms of black music and black southern culture. He championed the southern black community, creating folk heroes where caricatures had previously existed. His belief in the voice of the black community extended to his students, who included Ossie Davis, Stokely Carmichael, and Toni Morrison. He challenged them to have confidence in their own voices and to find strength in the experiences of their people.

Sterling Brown’s influence is so far reaching that contemporary theorists believe that “all trails lead, at some point, to Sterling Brown,” although Brown’s acclaim did not extend far beyond Howard’s walls until the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. In 1979, the Washington, D.C., city council declared his birthday, 1 May, to be Sterling A. Brown Day. The next year, Brown published The Collected Poems of Sterling Brown, which won the 1980 Lenore Marshall Prize as the best book of poetry published. In 1984, he was named poet laureate of the District of Columbia. In 1991, Brown was honored in a way that illustrates the impact that he left on the Howard University community. Following a campus contest, “Sterling” was the name selected for Howard University libraries’ online catalog. Brown’s legacy comes alive every time Howard students access the libraries, and Sterling once again guides them to countless resources of research and literature.

JONI JOHNSON WILLIAMS

Georgia State University

Harold Bloom, Black American Poets and Dramatists of the Harlem Renaissance (1995); Arna Bontemps and Langston Hughes, The Book of Negro Folklore (1958); Sterling Brown, Phylon (1953); Joyce Camper, African American Review (Fall 1997); Joanne Gabbin, African American Review (Fall 1997); Ronald Palmer, African American Review (Fall 1997); Dudley Randall, The Black Poets (1972).

Chesnutt, Charles Waddell

(1858–1932) WRITER.

Charles Waddell Chesnutt, African American man of letters, was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on 20 June 1858, the son of free blacks who had emigrated from Fayetteville, N.C. When he was eight years old, Chesnutt’s parents returned to Fayetteville, where Charles worked part time in the family grocery store and attended a school founded by the Freedmen’s Bureau. In 1872, financial necessity forced him to begin a teaching career in Charlotte, N.C. He returned to Fayetteville in 1877, married a year later, and by 1880 had become principal of the Fayetteville State Normal School for Negroes. Meanwhile, he continued to pursue private studies of classic English literature, foreign languages, music, and stenography. Despite his successes, he longed for broader opportunities and a chance to develop the literary skills that by 1880 led him toward an author’s life. In 1883, he moved his family to Cleveland. There he passed the state bar examination and established his own court-reporting firm. Financially prosperous and prominent in civic affairs, he resided in Cleveland for the remainder of his life.

“The Goophered Grapevine,” an unusual dialect story that displayed intimate knowledge of black folk culture in the South, was Chesnutt’s first nationally recognized work of fiction. Its publication in the August 1887 issue of Atlantic Monthly marked the first time that a short story by an African American had appeared in that prestigious magazine. After subsequent tales in this vein were accepted by other magazines, Chesnutt submitted to Houghton Mifflin a collection of these stories, which was published in 1899 as The Conjure Woman. His second collection of short fiction, The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line (1899), ranged over a broader area of southern and northern racial experience than any previous writer on African American life had attempted. These two volumes were popular enough to convince Houghton Mifflin to publish Chesnutt’s first novel, The House behind the Cedars, in 1900. This story of two light-skinned African American siblings who pass for white in the postwar South revealed Chesnutt’s sense of the psychological and social dilemmas facing persons of mixed blood in the region. In his second novel, The Marrow of Tradition (1901), Chesnutt confronted the causes and effects of the Wilmington, N.C., race riot of 1898. Hoping to write the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of his generation, Chesnutt made a plea for racial justice that impressed the noted novelist and critic William Dean Howells, who reviewed The Marrow of Tradition as a work of “great power,” though with “more justice than mercy in it.” The failure of Chesnutt’s second novel to sell widely forced its author to give up his dream of supporting his family as a professional author. In 1905, he published his final novel, The Colonel’s Dream, a tragic story of an idealist’s attempt to revive a depressed North Carolina town through a socioeconomic program much akin to the New South creed of Henry W. Grady and Booker T. Washington. The novel received little critical notice.

In the twilight of his literary career, Chesnutt continued to write novels (some of which ultimately found publishers in the late 20th century) and published occasional short stories. His fiction was largely eclipsed in the 1920s by the writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Nevertheless, he was awarded the Spingarn Medal in 1928 by the NAACP for his pioneering literary work on behalf of African American civil rights and racial understanding. Today, Chesnutt is recognized as a major innovator in African American fiction, an important contributor to the deromanticizing trend in post–Civil War southern literature, and a singular voice among turn-of-the-century literary realists who probed the color line in American life.

WILLIAM L. ANDREWS

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

William L. Andrews, The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt (1980); Frances Richardson Keller, An American Crusade: The Life of Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1978); Joseph R. McElrath Jr., ed., Critical Essays on Charles Chesnutt (1999); Henry B. Wonham, Studies in American Fiction (Fall 1998).

Chinese

Chinese first came to the South to work in cotton and sugarcane fields and in construction of Texas railroads. Young men from the artisan and peasant classes traveled as sojourners, and this is how they came to Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. These first arrivals were often from the Sze Yap (or Four Counties) district of Guangdong Province in southern China. Much like other Chinese who came to the United States in the 1800s, the Chinese in the South sent most of their money home to their families and planned to retire to their homeland. Their prosperity encouraged the immigration of family and friends.

Beginning during Reconstruction, planters and businessmen recruited Asians as a new source of labor to replace freed slaves. Most found employment in agricultural work, although some took railroad construction jobs. They soon realized that their new roles in the plantation system would not foster the wealth with which they had hoped to return to China, and many left farmwork in the late 19th century to work in laundries and restaurants in urban areas. In the rural Mississippi Delta, many opened small grocery and agricultural supply stores. There they found their economic niche supplying African Americans, who were often turned away or refused credit by white grocers but who had new cash purchasing power. Chinese men replaced slave labor at the sugar plantations in Jefferson Parish, La., where they often intermarried with African Americans or American Indians. Fewer than 1,000 Chinese had come to the South before the nationwide Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

Once the Exclusion Act was repealed by the 1943 Magnuson Act, the Chinese communities in Mississippi attracted new arrivals, and communities also began forming in Houston and San Antonio. By 1900, El Paso had a small Chinatown. In Texas, cultural distinctions still separate the “Old” and the “New” Chinese immigrants. The Cantonese-speaking, 19th-century immigrants were mostly from southern China, while 20th-century arrivals were from various other locations in China and are predominantly Mandarin-speaking. The older immigrants came mostly from peasant backgrounds, were upwardly mobile, and have succeeded in business. The newer immigrants were of China’s elite and have focused on the professions. Descendants of the older immigrants long maintained a focus on clan or family association (defined by surname). Today, Chinese New Year may still be celebrated, and a Confucian emphasis on family obligations remains strong. Many are now Baptists.

Considered “colored,” Chinese children attended African American schools. The Chinese established a few private schools in Texas and Mississippi with the assistance of Baptist missions, whose members sought to convert Chinese immigrants and to provide a vehicle for acculturation. Not until the 1950s and 1960s, when approximately 10,000 Chinese called the South home, did Chinese children attend white public schools.

Many in the Mississippi Delta came to see the Chinese as having a social identity “between black and white” in a biracial hierarchy. The Chinese grocery stores were almost entirely in African American neighborhoods, and this is also where the Chinese people lived. Neighborhood residents were the regular clientele for these “mom and pop” establishments, although whites came to shop there on occasion. The lack of a Chinatown offered in larger, more urban areas did not prevent the Delta Chinese from forming a distinct community. Even though there has been some competition among family-owned businesses, extended families formed support networks. Store labor was shared, with the very young and the old taking their turns stocking shelves and bagging groceries. Meals would be in a traditional family style, usually with Chinese dishes, but those sitting at the table would rotate in shifts while the store was open. Regular mah jong nights (a gambling game for four players) have characterized evenings with families and neighbors, and tournaments even take place at Chinese Baptist church halls. Birthday and wedding celebrations have a distinctly Chinese style with traditional decorations (such as wall hangings of calligraphic characters), speeches given in Cantonese, and Chinese food. Holidays, such as Chinese New Year and the New Moon Festival, are recognized, typically with smaller, extended family gatherings. Cantonese, the dialect of Guangdong Province and of most of the Delta Chinese, is passed on to children in varying degrees in the home.

Chinese grocery, Vicksburg, Miss., 1975 (William R. Ferris Collection, Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

The number of Chinese families in the Mississippi Delta who continue to live this grocery-store lifestyle is shrinking, as many of the younger generation move away for other opportunities and to go into the professions. Waves of in-migration and out-migration continue. In the past few decades, Chinese businesses have diversified, with the opening of Chinese restaurants and fast-food takeouts. Retirees are frequently replaced not by their children but rather by new Chinese families looking to immigrate into the area. New immigrants are increasingly coming from large urban areas within the United States to escape the higher costs of living in cities like New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago.

MELINDA CHOW

University of Memphis

Lucy Cohen, Chinese in the Post–Civil War South: A People without a History (1984); James W. Loewen, The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White (1988); Robert Seto Quan, Lotus among the Magnolias: The Mississippi Chinese (1982); Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (1998).

Cooper, Anna Julia Haywood

(1858–1964) WRITER.

Anna Julia Cooper’s extraordinary energy and long productive life propelled her from her beginnings as the daughter of a bondwoman to a place among the most educated and articulate voices in America. She devoted her 105 years in North Carolina, Ohio, and Washington, D.C., to education, language, and social change.

Cooper’s education in rhetoric at St. Augustine’s Normal and Collegiate Institute in Raleigh, N.C., at Oberlin College in Ohio, and in her faculty position as a teacher of Latin at the renowned M Street School in Washington, D.C., paved the way for her writings. Her education also created the subject and method she used to stand for asserting rights in the educational and gender politics of African American women.

Cooper’s father was reputed to be her mother’s owner. After the Civil War, at age nine, Cooper attended a school founded as an outgrowth of the Freedmen’s Bureau, St. Augustine’s Normal School, and made it her “world.” At St. Augustine’s, she ignored school rules limiting Latin and Greek instruction to boys and finagled her way into classes. By the time she enrolled at Oberlin College in 1881, she had read a wide array of Greek and Latin texts. Oberlin stoked those interests in classical literature, and, beginning in 1887, Cooper taught Latin and Greek at the M Street School for nearly 40 years. Cooper used education to prepare students for societal leadership roles. Her focus on cultivating the minds of black children put her at odds with Booker T. Washington and those who believed that blacks were suited only for manual work, and she temporarily lost her job at the M Street School when she insisted on an intellectually based curriculum for her students.

Cooper had a command of argumentative skills at a time when American racial ideologies and educational institutions specifically excluded blacks from the power of oratory and rhetoric. Popular culture framed blacks as people incapable of delivering useful information or shaping the public discourse. Nevertheless, in A Voice from the South (1892), Cooper built tight deductive arguments using the skills of classical rhetoric she had learned in her youth. She quickly convinced her audience to agree with her on some point about general moral standards and, with a swift turn of phrase, hijacked their assumptions governing women’s rights and even the definition of race. Cooper’s collection of orations and essays demonstrates her command of argument and prose to rework the very foundations of race and gender in the United States.

While teaching at M Street, Cooper took a leave from her job and attended the University of Paris–Sorbonne, earning a Ph.D. in French with a 1925 dissertation on slavery and the French Revolution. Cooper served as the president of Frelinghuysen University in Washington, D.C., in her 70s. For 10 years she oversaw the school, which offered adult education at night to working people in the city. She remained committed to education and the power to speak throughout her long life.

TODD VOGEL

University of Washington

Anna Julia Cooper, Slavery and the French Revolutionists, 1788–1805, Studies in French Civilization, vol. 1 (1925; 1988), The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper: Including “A Voice from the South” and Other Important Essays, Papers, and Letters, ed. Esme Bhan and Charles Lemert (1998); Leona C. Gable, From Slavery to the Sorbonne and Beyond: The Life and Writings of Anna J. Cooper (1982); Todd Vogel, Rewriting White: Race, Class, and Cultural Capital in Nineteenth-Century America (2004).

Country Music

Country music has related to racial categories in two ways. On the one hand, it is an expression of white yeoman folk culture and took commercial form during the high point of Jim Crow segregation, when southern society enforced a legal racial separation and national recording companies divided popular music into white “hillbilly” music and black “race” music. Few African Americans have been successful as country music performers, and blacks traditionally were not often spectators at country music shows. On the other hand, country music has borrowed heavily from black musical culture, including blues, jazz, spirituals, ragtime, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll. In the contemporary era, even rap has produced country rappers. Instrumentation and instrumental techniques have crossed racial lines. Country music came out of a southern musical culture that had folk origins of biracial interchanges and produced a musical street culture of diverse sounds that could not be limited to groups classified at the time as “white” or “black.” Country music influenced black performers, further promoting a biracial southern musical context.

Historian Bill Malone identifies British-Celtic music as one of the major musical streams shaping southern music, and country music grew out of that inheritance. British ballads and stringed instrumentation became a foundation for frontier southerners making music, with European dance styles popular in both the Upper South and the lowlands. British music was itself in transition among the settlers who came to early America, though, so it would be hard to identify pure strands of British music, which, in any event, included distinct traditions of English, Scots-Irish, Irish, Welsh, and Scottish music. Early on, British sounds mixed with those of other subcultures—Germans in the mountains, the Piedmont, and central Texas; Cajuns in south Louisiana; Mexicans in south Texas; and Spanish and French along the Gulf Coast. Malone identifies the other large musical stream flowing into southern music as coming from Africa. Black and white southerners began exchanging musical ideas from first encountering each other in colonial Virginia, with the common farm and plantation life providing a setting for slaves and indentured servants exchanging songs and musical instrumentation. Racial prejudice did not prevent whites from borrowing from blacks. Over centuries, a folk pool of music took deepest root among people who were rural, agricultural, working class, and southern, people with common experiences with poverty, isolation, and exploitation. Minstrelsy emerged in the antebellum years as a prime American entertainment form, which drew from stereotypical ideas of southern life and became popular among northern working-class audiences. White-faced performers mimicked blacks, but by the early 20th century, black and white performers were popular figures within the medicine show and traveling show circuit in the South itself.

The crossing of racial lines in country music was apparent in musical instrumentation. The first references to country music in North America go back to fiddling contests in the mid-1700s in Virginia. The instrument was associated with southern whites, and it was so compact that it easily fit into saddlebags as white farmers moved west. Many references can be found to fiddling slaves in advertisements for runaways, reflecting the popularity of slave fiddlers at plantation dances. The banjo also crossed racial lines as time went on in southern history. Originally, the instrument came from Africa, typical of that continent’s stringed instrument traditions, but blacks abandoned it as whites took it up after the Civil War. It became crucial to mountain string bands, early country hillbilly groups, and, later, bluegrass entertainers. Guitars were found in the South going back to the 18th century, but only in the late 19th century did they become more popular than fiddles among rural musicians. Black southerners took up the instrument earlier than whites. Bluesmen used the slide guitar technique, while white country performers used the steel guitar, but both sounds had a common origin in late 19th-century Hawaiian guitar music. South Carolina country performer Jimmy Tarlton adopted the bottleneck style in the 1920s after seeing black guitarists use a steel bar.

Songs also reflected interchanges across racial boundaries. The ballad “Frankie and Johnny” originated among blacks in 1899, but it became a common song after that among black and white musicians. In the 1920s, blues singer Mississippi John Hurt recorded it, for example, but so did the “father of country music,” Jimmie Rodgers. “Casey Jones” was identified with white folk music but was written by a black railroad worker, Wallace Saunders, and was recorded in the 1920s by both Fiddlin’ John Carson and Furry Lewis. The blues form originated among blacks, but it became a durable genre among country performers as well. Dock Boggs’s “Country Blues” and his “Old Rub Alcohol Blues” established him as one of the South’s most compelling earlier country figures, but Gene Autry, Cliff Carlisle, Jimmie Davis, and the Delmore Brothers all became noted as white performers of the blues. Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Matchbox Blues” was recorded by at least a half dozen country performers from 1927 to 1958. Western swing was particularly attuned to African American blues in the 1930s and 1940s, including “Brain Cloudy Blues.”

Jimmie Rodgers, the “father of country music,” 1929. His music was influenced by the blues, as was the music of countless other country musicians. (Jimmie Rodgers Museum, Meridian, Miss.)

Country music influenced black performers as well. The Mississippi Sheiks, Charley Patton, Son House, and other Mississippi blues performers played often at white house parties in the early 20th century, expanding their repertoire to sing country songs to please their audiences. Western Virginia bluesman John Jackson admitted indebtedness to white country performers, absorbing and playing songs by Jimmie Rodgers, the Delmore Brothers, and Uncle Dave Macon. Furry Lewis sang Rodgers’s “Waiting for a Train” under the title “The Dying Hobo” and yodeled on it. Examples of black musicians recording country songs range from the Memphis Sheiks doing Jimmie Rodgers’s “He’s in the Jailhouse Now” in the 1930s to Aaron Neville’s version of the George Jones classic “The Grand Tour” in the 1990s.

Several black performers have become country music stars, contributing to its biracial heritage. DeFord Bailey, a harmonica player who was an early regular on Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry, was one of the first country performers recorded. More recently, Charley Pride heard the Grand Ole Opry on clear channel WSM broadcasting into his Mississippi Delta tenant house, learned to sing not the blues but Hank Williams songs, and became one of modern country’s greatest stars. Perhaps the more enduring contribution of blacks to country music, though, has been from amateurs who taught country stars, from the railroad workers who taught Jimmie Rodgers the blues to Tee-Tot (Rufus Payne), the Alabama street musician whom Hank Williams singled out as a musical influence.

CHARLES REAGAN WILSON

University of Mississippi

John Cohen, Sing Out! The Folk Song Magazine (January 1964); Bill Malone and David Stricklin, Southern Music/American Music (1979; 2003); Tony Russell, Blacks, Whites, and Blues (1970); Nick Tosches, Country: Living Legends and Dying Metaphors in America’s Biggest Music (1977; 1985).

Delta

The Yazoo Mississippi Delta is not the true delta of the Mississippi River but the fertile alluvial plain shared by the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers. Encompassing all of 10 Mississippi counties and parts of 8 more, it is 160 miles long and 50 miles wide at its widest. Distinguished by its flatness and its fertility, the Delta was even better defined by its late-developing plantation economy and the distinctive society that economy nurtured.

Destined to become the richest agricultural region in the South, the Delta was only sparsely settled in 1860 and still not far removed from the frontier in 1880. During the next two decades, a new network of levees and a modern railway system opened the plantation South’s last frontier for full-scale settlement and development.

The fertile Delta drew not only ambitious whites but also blacks, who saw it as the best place to test their newly won freedom and climb the agricultural ladder to become independent landowners. For many whites, the Delta became a land of wildest fantasies fulfilled, but for thousands of blacks the Delta that had promised them the rural South’s best chance for upward mobility became the burial ground for hopes and dreams. In reality, the Delta proved to be little more than a stopover for many southern blacks on their way (via the conveniently located Illinois Central Railroad, which bisected the area) to the North. The Delta experienced a massive out-migration of blacks in the years after World War I. During the same period, the region was emerging as a spawning ground for the blues. This new musical idiom explored the shared experiences of southern blacks, who had tested the economic, social, and political parameters of their freedom, as defined by a rigidly enforced system of caste, and discovered that, for them, the American Dream was little more than a cruel myth.

Meanwhile, despite their constant fears over labor shortages, Delta planters thrived on the annual gamble on the price of cotton, living lavishly and laughing at debts. Even the onslaught of the boll weevil did the Delta relatively little harm. Meanwhile, by channeling all of its acreage reduction and related payments through the planter and looking the other way as these same planters illegally evicted now-superfluous sharecroppers, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) confirmed the dominance of the large landholder in the region. In 1934, 44 percent of all AAA payments in excess of $10,000 nationwide went to 10 counties in the Delta. This largesse facilitated mechanization and consolidation of agriculture, and as federal farm programs continued, the money kept rolling in. In 1967, Delta planter and U.S. senator James Eastland received $167,000 in federal payments. The Delta’s poor blacks were not nearly as fortunate, as a power structure dominated by lavishly subsidized planters declared war on the War on Poverty.

Day laborers carrying sacks of cotton from the field to the cotton house to be weighed, Marcella Plantation, Mississippi Delta, Miss. (Marion Post Wolcott, photographer, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USF33-030557-M5], Washington, D.C.)

Many Delta planters finally met their day of reckoning in the farm crisis of the 1980s, and although the Delta was the birthplace of the Citizens’ Council and a citadel of white resistance to racial equality, the black-majority area finally elected a black congressman, Mike Espy, in 1986. The region’s history had been one of tension and struggle—between the races, against the poorer hill counties, against the impenetrable swampy wilderness and the ravages of flood, pestilence, and disease, and finally, against the intrusions of civil rights activists and federal civil rights policies.

Out of this tangle of tension and paradox came a remarkable outpouring of creativity, one that made the Delta’s artistic climate arguably as rich as its agricultural one. Greenville alone produced writers William Alexander Percy, Walker Percy, Shelby Foote, Ellen Douglas, Hodding Carter II, Hodding Carter III, David Cohn, and Beverly Lowry. Classical composer Kenneth Haxton is from the Greenville area, as are sculptor Leon Koury and artist Valerie Jaudon. The Delta has produced a host of entertainers, including Jim Henson, creator of the Muppets, country singers Charley Pride and Conway Twitty, and an especially large number of blues singers past and present, from the legendary Charley Patton to contemporary artists like B. B. King and James “Son” Thomas. Sometimes appalling, always fascinating, the Delta’s historical and cultural experience often seemed that of an entire region in microcosm. It richly deserved the title, accorded by writer Richard Ford, as “the South’s South.”

JAMES C. COBB

University of Georgia

Robert L. Brandfon, Cotton Kingdom of the New South: A History of the Yazoo Mississippi Delta from Reconstruction to the Twentieth Century (1967); James C. Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity (1992); David L. Cohn, Where I Was Born and Raised (1967); Tony Dunbar, Delta Time (1990); John C. Willis, Forgotten Time: The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta after the Civil War (2000).

Dixon, Thomas, Jr.

(1864–1946) WRITER.

Throughout Thomas Dixon’s adult life, he fixated on the apocryphal notion that black men yearned to commit sexual violence against white women, while black temptresses lured white men into their embrace. In his mind, the mulatto children that resulted from white men and women’s “forced” unions with black sexual predators spelled the death of American civilization and the Anglo-Saxon race. To Dixon, the decline of the United States rested upon the North’s insistence on granting bestial black men political rights during Reconstruction, thereby unleashing their libidinous desires for white women and facilitating the transformation of the white nation into a “mongrelized” and vulnerable state.

While Dixon’s notions were profoundly shaped by a rabid racism rooted in his southern heritage, he was piercingly attuned to the cultural beats of his time. Steeped in the moral intensity of his Baptist background and of Victorian America as a whole, he plied his cautionary tales about white and black men and women acting outside their gendered roles and racial hierarchies within the easily digested forms of popular romance and melodrama.

Dixon was born in 1864 in Cleveland County in the southwestern corner of North Carolina. His father was a minister and farmer who belonged to the Ku Klux Klan, as did his Confederate veteran brother. Thomas Dixon Sr. seems to have been the source of many of his son’s psychosexual perceptions. Not only did his son decry his mother’s ostensible rape as a child bride in his autobiography, but Dixon Sr. was rumored to have fathered a son with the family’s African American cook.

Thomas Dixon Jr. embraced the principles of white superiority that rationalized Jim Crow disfranchisement, segregation, and brutality against African Americans in the turn-of-the-century South. He believed that thousands of years of development separated Aryans from Africans, and that African Americans believed they could bridge that gap through interracial marriage. White men, Dixon argued, must stop this black press for miscegenation at all costs. Dixon’s beliefs reflected a wider culture in which white southern manhood seemed under siege. A developing market economy and interracial political alliances, combined with a changing population in which young single white women could move to the cities for employment and black men could become urban entrepreneurs and businessmen, challenged traditional white patriarchal authority and served as a crucible for the myth of the black beast rapist.

Dixon has played an unparalleled role in disseminating that myth throughout American culture. He portrayed black men as innate barbarians unable to restrain their lust for white virgins, a theme hammered home in his best-selling trilogy, The Leopard’s Spots (1902), The Clansman (1905), and The Traitor (1907). He used his inflammatory scenes of black men skulking after unprotected white women to justify the resurrection of the chivalric Ku Klux Klan, charged with saving not only southern womanhood but the country as a whole. America’s future, Dixon was suggesting, depended on the heroism of southern white men, a point literally writ large in the sensationalistic film he cowrote with D. W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation (1915).

Dixon did not write exclusively about the South however. As an advocate of the Social Gospel Movement, he addressed the social problems of modernity. He condemned society’s blind eye for poor working women’s desperate lives and wished that they were honored as mothers of civilization instead. Interestingly, Dixon did not see white women as passive victims in all contexts. He celebrated women’s strong leadership in church, even as he sought more exemplifiers of Christian manhood in his pews. He believed that strong women could prevent men from pursuing the twin dangers of radicalism and promiscuity, a theme he explored in several of his books, including his first best seller, The One Woman (1903). For Dixon, a white man and white woman’s romantic love, made sacred by having a child, ensured a man’s highest morality. Modern white women who pursued careers and independence must give up those aspirations to “save” their men. Black men and black women, by comparison, lacked the capacity for romantic love, and therefore the capacity for true piety.

Dixon’s preoccupation with the dangers of black sexuality never waned. In his final book, The Flaming Sword (1939), he tied the rape of a white Piedmont wife by a savage black man to Communist efforts to overthrow the United States with the support of a black army. Throughout his long career, Dixon appealed to a national audience of white men and white women anxious about modernization and its impact on manliness, race, and white authority. In the end, it is important to recognize that Dixon’s horrific stereotypes ultimately reflected the collective anxieties of white America as much or more than Dixon’s own warped imagination.

MICHELE GILLESPIE

Wake Forest University

Michele K. Gillespie and Randal L. Hall, eds., Thomas Dixon Jr. and the Birth of Modern America (2006); Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (1996); Diane Miller Sommerville, Rape and Race in the Nineteenth-Century South (2004); Joel Williamson, Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South since Emancipation (1984).

Douglass, Frederick

(1808–1895) BLACK LEADER.

Frederick Douglass was the most important black American leader of the 19th century. He was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, in Talbot County, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, in 1808, the son of a slave woman and, in all likelihood, her white master. Upon his escape from slavery at age 20, Douglass adopted a new surname from the hero of Sir Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake. Douglass immortalized his formative years as a slave in the first of three autobiographies, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, published in 1845. This and two subsequent autobiographies, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881), mark Douglass’s greatest contributions to southern culture. Written both as antislavery propaganda and as personal revelation, they are universally regarded as the finest examples of the slave narrative tradition and as classics of American autobiography.

Douglass’s public life ranged from his work as an abolitionist in the early 1840s to his attacks on Jim Crow segregation in the 1890s. Douglass spent the bulk of his career in Rochester, N.Y., where for 16 years he edited the most influential black newspaper of the mid-19th century, called successively The North Star (1847–51), Frederick Douglass’ Paper (1851–58), and Douglass’ Monthly (1859–63). Douglass achieved international fame as an orator with few peers and as a writer of persuasive power. In thousands of speeches and editorials, Douglass levied an irresistible indictment against slavery and racism, provided an indomitable voice of hope for his people, embraced antislavery politics, and preached his own brand of American ideals.

Frederick Douglass, abolitionist and black leader, date unknown (Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass.)

Douglass welcomed the Civil War in 1861 as a moral crusade to eradicate the evil of slavery. During the war, he labored as a fierce propagandist of the Union cause and emancipation, as a recruiter of black troops, and on two occasions as an adviser to President Abraham Lincoln. Douglass made a major contribution to the intellectual tradition of millennial nationalism, the outlook from which many Americans, North and South, interpreted the Civil War. During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, Douglass’s leadership became less activist and more emblematic. He traveled and lectured widely on racial issues, but his most popular topic was “Self-Made Men.” By the 1870s, Douglass had moved to Washington, D.C., where he edited the newspaper the New National Era and became president of the ill-fated Freedmen’s Bank. As a stalwart Republican, he was appointed marshal (1877–81) and recorder of deeds (1881–86) for the District of Columbia and chargé d’affaires for Santo Domingo and minister to Haiti (1889–91). Douglass had five children by his first wife, Anna Murray, a free black woman from Baltimore who followed him out of slavery in 1838. Less than two years after Anna died in 1882, the 63-year-old Douglass married Helen Pitts, his white former secretary, an event of considerable controversy. Thus, by birth and by his two marriages, Douglass is one of the South’s most famous examples of the region’s mixed racial heritage.

Douglass never lost a sense of attachment to the South. “Nothing but an intense love of personal freedom keeps us [fugitive slaves] from the South,” Douglass wrote in 1848. He often referred to Maryland as his “own dear native soil.” Brilliant, heroic, and complex, Douglass became a symbol of his age and a unique American voice for humanism and social justice. His life and thought will always speak profoundly to the dilemma of being black in America. Douglass died of heart failure in 1895, the year Booker T. Washington rose to national prominence with his Atlanta Exposition speech suggesting black accommodation to racial segregation.

DAVID W. BLIGHT

Yale University

John W. Blassingame et al., The Frederick Douglass Papers, 2 vols. (1979–82); David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (1989); Philip S. Foner, Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, 4 vols. (1955); August Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1800–1915 (1963); Benjamin Quarles, Frederick Douglass (1948).

Du Bois, W. E. B.

(1868–1963) HISTORIAN, SOCIOLOGIST, EDITOR, NOVELIST.

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born on 23 February 1868 in Great Barrington, Mass. A New Englander in thought and conduct, as he put it, he entered the South in 1885, after a promising high school career, to attend Fisk University in Nashville. He found the South deeply humiliating. “No one but a Negro,” he wrote, “going into the South without previous experience of color caste can have any conception of its barbarism.” Nevertheless, Fisk itself was challenging, even exhilarating, and summer teaching in rural counties sealed his attachment to the black masses and his determination to champion their cause. Graduating in 1888, he trained further at Harvard University (Ph.D., 1895) and the University of Berlin. His doctoral dissertation on the suppression of the slave trade was published in 1896. He held positions briefly with the University of Pennsylvania and Wilberforce in Ohio before returning to the South in 1897 to teach sociology, economics, and history at Atlanta University.

His third book, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), was a collection of hauntingly beautiful essays on every important aspect of black culture in the South; perhaps its most famous insight concerned the “double-consciousness” of the black American: “One ever feels his twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” With this book, he secured preeminence among all African American intellectuals and became the leader of those opposed to the powerful and conservative Booker T. Washington of Tuskegee. His yearly (1897–1914) Atlanta University Studies of black social conditions and a biography of John Brown (1909) added to his reputation.

Increasingly controversial, he moved to New York in 1910 to found and edit The Crisis, the monthly magazine of the fledgling NAACP. For 24 years, he sustained an assault on all forms of racial injustice, especially in the South. In 1934, he published Black Reconstruction in America, a grand Marxist-framed reevaluation of the much-maligned role of blacks in the Civil War and its aftermath. That year, he returned to Atlanta University after grave disagreements with the NAACP leadership over strategies during the Depression; Du Bois favored a program of voluntary self-segregation stressing economics, which many people found similar to the old program of Booker T. Washington. At Atlanta University, he found little support for his projected scheme to organize the study of sociology among black colleges and other institutions in the South. In 1944, he rejoined the NAACP in New York but soon found himself again at odds with the leadership, this time over his growing interest in radical socialism. He left the NAACP finally in 1948. By this time, his attitude toward the South had changed somewhat. Influenced no doubt by the aims of the leftist Southern Negro Youth Congress, he declared in 1948 that “the future of American Negroes is in the South. . . . Here is the magnificent climate; here is the fruitful earth under the beauty of the southern sun; and here . . . is the need of the thinker, the worker, and the dreamer.” His socialist activities culminated in his arrest and trial in 1951 as an unregistered agent of a foreign principal; the presiding judge heard the evidence and then directed his acquittal.

ARNOLD RAMPERSAD

Stanford University

Herbert Aptheker, Annotated Bibliography of the Published Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois (1973); David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (1993); Arnold Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois (1976); Raymond Wolters, Du Bois and His Rivals (2002); Shamoon Zamir, Dark Voices: W.E.B. Du Bois and American Thought, 1888–1903 (1995).

Faulkner, William

(1897–1962) WRITER.

William Cuthbert Faulkner was born on 25 September 1897, in New Albany, Miss. The great-grandson of William Clark Falkner, a southern novelist and Confederate officer, Faulkner was responsible for adding the u to his family name—just as he was responsible for transmogrifying his native South into a universal place of the imagination in brilliant novels and stories that have put him first among 20th-century American writers of prose fiction. He explored the psychology of race relations and made race itself the central feature of southern life, realistically showing the brutalities and complexities for southerners.

Faulkner came to maturity at a time when Mississippi and the South were changing. He grew up a part of post–Civil War southern culture, which was dominated by memories of the Old South and the war, and yet he also experienced the modernizing forces of the early 20th century in the region. He had romantic instincts, expressed in his early poetry and prose and in his enlistment in the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1918, hoping to be a gallant fighter pilot. He went back to Oxford, Miss., in that same year, though, and pursued work as a writer. Lawyer Phil Stone encouraged him, financially and intellectually, introducing him to the work of modernists such as T. S. Eliot.

Faulkner spent several months in New Orleans in 1925, becoming friends with Sherwood Anderson and other creative talents there, and in July of that year he embarked on a walking tour through parts of Europe. With the exception of stints working as a screenwriter in California, he mostly lived thereafter in Mississippi. His first novel, Soldiers’ Pay, appeared in 1926, followed by Mosquitoes in 1927.

All of Faulkner’s major novels reflect his southern rootedness. Beginning with Flags in the Dust (published as Sartoris in 1929), he creates a mythical Mississippi county, Yoknapatawpha, in which his main characters and their families confront not only specifically southern subjects—such as a native Indian population, the Civil War, plantation life, and race relations—but also themes that transcend a regional focus. Absalom, Absalom! (1936), perhaps Faulkner’s greatest achievement, explicitly conjoins his southernness and his universality in the partnership of the southerner, Quentin Compson, and the Canadian, Shreve McCannon, Harvard roommates, whose exploration of the southern past provokes questions about the meaning of history itself. Race is central here, with the ambitions of planter Thomas Sutpen leading to his refusal to accept his mixed-race son and the ultimate failure of his grand plans.

In The Sound and the Fury (1929), his first great novel, Faulkner depicts several generations of a southern family, the Compsons, with a sophisticated handling of point of view and human voice that is equal to the greatest work of his European contemporaries. In As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), The Hamlet (1940), and Go Down, Moses (1942), Faulkner portrays many different kinds and classes of southerners, exemplified by the Bundrens, the Snopeses, and the McCaslins. He also conveys penetrating insights into southern Protestantism, miscegenation, and discrimination, which again point beyond themselves—especially in the figure of Joe Christmas—to fundamental concerns about the nature of human identity and how it is shaped, as well as the specific embodiments of racial identities in the South.

Other leading Faulkner novels include Pylon (1935), The Unvanquished (1938), The Wild Palms (1939), A Fable (1954), and his last major work, The Reivers (1962). Sanctuary (1931) was one of the few Faulkner novels to sell well, and he had abiding financial problems that led to his work in films and as a short story writer for popular magazines. His accomplished short fiction appears in Collected Stories (1950) and Uncollected Stories (1979). Despite his critical success, especially in Europe, all of Faulkner’s novels were out of print when Malcolm Cowley’s edited Portable Faulkner appeared in 1946, which led to a steadily rising appreciation, and sale, of his work.

In the latter part of his career, Faulkner became increasingly aware that he had established his apocryphal county as a counterweight to the actual South, where he had spent most of his life. In Requiem for a Nun (1951), he juxtaposed the development of Yoknapatawpha and its town, Jefferson, with the history of Mississippi and its capital, Jackson. In this underrated experimental drama, as well as in his later Snopes novels, The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959), he directly addressed the issue of the South’s changing culture and political structure in the context of world history and national events—as he did at the same time in numerous public letters, speeches, and interviews, especially after receiving the Nobel Prize in 1950. He died in Oxford, Miss., on 6 July 1962.

CARL E. ROLLYSON JR.

Wayne State University

Ann Abadie and Doreen Fowler, eds., Faulkner and the Short Story: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1990 (1992); John E. Bassett, William Faulkner: An Annotated Checklist of Criticism (1972), William Faulkner: An Annotated Checklist of Recent Criticism (1983); Joseph Blotner, William Faulkner: A Biography, 2 vols. (1974); Louis Daniel Brodsky and Robert W. Hamblin, eds., Faulkner: A Comprehensive Guide to the Brodsky Collection, 2 vols. (1982–84); Cleanth Brooks, William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country (1963), William Faulkner: Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond (1978); James Ferguson, Faulkner’s Short Fiction (1991); Donald M. Kartiganer, Modern Fiction Studies (Fall 1998); Thomas L. McHaney, William Faulkner: A Reference Guide (1976); Michael Millgate, The Achievement of William Faulkner (1965); Jay Parini, One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner (2004); Daniel J. Singal, William Faulkner: The Making of a Modernist (1997); Joel Williamson, William Faulkner and Southern History (1993).