Jumpin' Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights
339
Jumpin' Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights
339eBook
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Overview
White supremacy shaped all aspects of post-Civil War southern life, yet its power was never complete or total. The form of segregation and subjection nicknamed Jim Crow constantly had to remake itself over time even as white southern politicians struggled to extend its grip. Here, some of the most innovative scholars of southern history question Jim Crow's sway, evolution, and methods over the course of a century. These essays bring to life the southern men and women--some heroic and decent, others mean and sinister, most a mixture of both--who supported and challenged Jim Crow, showing that white supremacy always had to prove its power.
Jim Crow was always in motion, always adjusting to meet resistance and defiance by both African Americans and whites. Sometimes white supremacists responded with increased ferocity, sometimes with more subtle political and legal ploys. Jumpin' Jim Crow presents a clear picture of this complex negotiation. For example, even as some black and white women launched the strongest attacks on the system, other white women nurtured myths glorifying white supremacy. Even as elite whites blamed racial violence on poor whites, they used Jim Crow to dominate poor whites as well as blacks. Most important, the book portrays change over time, suggesting that Strom Thurmond is not a simple reincarnation of Ben Tillman and that Rosa Parks was not the first black woman to say no to Jim Crow.
From a study of the segregation of household consumption to a fresh look at critical elections, from an examination of an unlikely antilynching campaign to an analysis of how miscegenation laws tried to sexualize black political power, these essays about specific southern times and places exemplify the latest trends in historical research. Its rich, accessible content makes Jumpin' Jim Crow an ideal undergraduate reader on American history, while its methodological innovations will be emulated by scholars of political history generally. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Edward L. Ayers, Elsa Barkley Brown, W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Laura F. Edwards, Kari Frederickson, David F. Godshalk, Grace Elizabeth Hale, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Stephen Kantrowitz, Nancy MacLean, Nell Irwin Painter, and Timothy B. Tyson.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691216249 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/21/2020 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 339 |
| File size: | 637 KB |
About the Author
Jane Dailey is Assistant Professor of History at Rice University and author of Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Post-Emancipation Virginia.
Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore is Professor of History at Yale and author of Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920.
Bryant Simon is Associate Professor of History at the University of Georgia and author of A Fabric of Defeat: The Politics of South Carolina Millhands, 1910-1948.
Read an Excerpt
Introduction
I jump jis'so, An' ev'y time I turn about I jump Jim Crow
—Thomas "Daddy" Rice
IN 1955, on the very eve of the modern Civil Rights Movement, African American novelist James Baldwin remarked that "the history of the American Negro problem is not merely shameful, it is also something of an achievement. For even when the worst has been said, it must also be added that the perpetual challenge posed by this problem was always, somehow, perpetually met." Assuming an ironic tone of grudging admiration, Baldwin highlighted the contested nature of southern race relations. Far from being static, the South's "Negro problem" was instead lively, slippery, a "perpetual challenge" that had to be repeatedly "met."1
The ways in which white southerners "met" the race "problem" have intrigued historians writing about post-Civil War southern politics since at least 1928, when Ulrich B. Phillips pronounced race relations the "central theme" of southern history. What contemporaries referred to as "the race question" may be phrased more bluntly today as the struggle for white domination. Establishing and maintaining this domination—creating the system of racial segregation and African American disfranchisement known as Jim Crow—has remained a preoccupation of southern historians. From our vantage point on the far side of the Civil Rights Movement, it is easy to understand why: just as the questions we ask about German state formation in the nineteenth century are grounded by events in the twentieth, so too was it difficult to comprehend the dissolution of the Jim Crow South without looking back to itsfoundations. Southern political history's best narratives focus on the frenzied efforts of the champions of white supremacy—whether the button-down booster, the "feather-legged" demagogue, or the good ol' boy populist—to erect and defend an institutional and ideological edifice capable of repelling challenges from within as well as from without.
In recognizing white supremacy as the "central theme" of southern history, however, historians have sometimes minimized variations on that theme in ways that impoverish our appreciation of the complexities of racism and power. Stunned by the sheer magnitude and obscenity of the Jim Crow South, historians often emphasize the power of white supremacists and their tools—violence, economic oppression, electoral fraud, and manipulation of the social structure—and minimize the contingent nature of white supremacist ideas and regimes. In this collection, the "central theme" of southern history remains central, but white supremacy is not seen as an overwhelming force. Rather, it is a precarious balancing act, pulled in all directions by class, gender, and racial tensions. As the epigraph from Daddy Rice suggests, Jim Crow was at bottom a social relationship, a dance in which the wary partners matched their steps, bent, and whirled in an unending series of deadly serious improvisations.
To point to the dynamism of white supremacy is not to underestimate either its thoroughness or its potency. Jim Crow looked anything but precarious to those who tried to fight it in 1880 or 1930 or 1955. But stressing the contingent nature of Jim Crow by seeing it as dependent on individual actions through time helps to denaturalize white supremacy. Jim Crow was not the logical and inevitable culmination of civil war and emancipation, but rather the result of a calculated campaign by white elites to circumscribe all possibility of African American political, economic, and social power.
These essays explore white supremacy's balancing act from a number of analytical and narrative perspectives. All turn on politics. Many investigate the broad spectrum of African American resistance to white supremacist ideas and regimes. Some emphasize the agency of white and black women in crafting or resisting (as the case may be) a coherent system of white racial domination. To complicate white electoral politics and to uncover sites of resistance, these essays often turn away from the polling place and voter returns toward a broader definition of the political. Some find contestation in the creation and interpretation of law, in the rhetoric and structure of political parties, and in governmental agencies and the courts. Borrowing from cultural studies, anthropology, and feminist theory, others find the political in more unlikely spaces: in the household; in the overflowing aisles of a dime store; on the street. The notion of politics that informs this collection extends from the polling station to the front porch, and bridges the distance between public and private contests for power and dignity.
The expanded definition of politics and the attention paid to African American actions in these essays suggest a conclusion to one of the most drawn-out debates of southern historiography: the "continuity/change" argument. For forty years, southern historians have argued over to what degree, and in what ways, the Civil War and emancipation represented a rupture in the history of the South. Traditionally, this debate has analyzed white electoral politics, landownership, and patterns of economic change to determine exactly which white men got on top and how they stayed there. Continuarians insist that despite changes in personnel, traditional values—particularly the value of elite white social, political, and economic domination—persevered through Reconstruction and the turn of the twentieth century. Those who emphasize change argue that the New South of factories, white tenant farmers, and cities called for a new white supremacy in a revolutionary context.
Shifting the focus from white to black southerners reveals a new definition of continuity and change. Black resistance, not white supremacy, was continuous, while white supremacy remodeled itself to meet any challenge. In every decade from emancipation through the 1960s, black people in the South resisted white elite domination. Despite the fact that fighting for civil rights could spark civil war, African Americans in the South looked continuously for room to jump Jim Crow. Sometimes they found it in alliances with whites disenchanted with parts of their region's "traditions." Other times they resisted white definitions of black rights and prerogatives through the courts, or on the streets, or in the dressing room of a department store. In this way, the actions of black southerners and their white allies both molded the articulation of white supremacy and suggested strategies of resistance to it. The essays in this collection trace channels that began at emancipation to cut paths through the dam of white supremacy. While these individual streams often ran dry for decades, taken as a whole these essays demonstrate the continuous contest between southern blacks determined to assert their civil rights and whites determined to deny blacks that power.
Uncovering resistance to segregation undermines the traditional periodization of postwar southern history at the same time that it strips Jim Crow of the sense of inevitability and invulnerability traditionally ascribed to it. In viewing the "Age of Segregation" as constantly beleaguered, the essays in this book collectively make the point that the grid lines of power were never drawn neatly on the ground, and no single event marked either the birth or the death of Jim Crow. At the same time, by placing black southerners, white dissidents, and women of both races at the center of southern history, we begin to rewrite the history of the "backward" South—that miasma of reactionary politics, poverty, and violence—and focus instead on those portions of the South that served as an incubator for one of the most extraordinary social justice movements in the history of the United States. Strom Thurmond was not simply a reincarnation of Ben Tillman. Rosa Parks was not the first black woman to challenge segregation. Martin Luther King, Jr., did not emerge sui generis to advocate political equality from the pulpit. Just as white supremacy made and remade itself over a century, Parks and King continued a long tradition of African American activism. By revealing the history of racism and resistance central in the southern experience, this collection, we hope, will enable students to understand not just the Second Reconstruction but how racism continues to thrive and be thwarted today. It is our hope that the gathering together of these essays in Jumpin' Jim Crow will spotlight the many turnabouts in what remains the central dance of southern history.
COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Published by Princeton University Press and copyrighted, © 2002, by Princeton University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher, except for reading and browsing via the World Wide Web. Users are not permitted to mount this file on any network servers.
Table of Contents
PrefaceAcknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1: by Laura Edwards The Politics of Marriage and Households in North Carolina during Reconstruction
Chapter 2: by Elsa Barkely Brown Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom
Chapter 3: by Stephen Kantrowwitz One Man's Mob Is Another Man's Militia: Violence, Manhood, and Authority in Reconstruction South Carolina
Chapter 4: by Jane Daily The Limits of Liberalism in the New South: The Politics of Race, Sex, and Patronage in Virginia, 1879-1883
Chapter 5: by W. Fitzhugh Brundage White Women and the Politics of Historical Memory in the New South, 1880-1920
Chapter 6: by David F. Godshalk William J. Northen's Public and Personal Struggles against Lynching
Chapter 7: by Grace Elizabeth Hale "For Colored" and "For White": Segregating Consumption in the South
Chapter 8: by Nancy MacLean The Leo Frank Case Reconsidered: Vender and Sexual Politics in the Making of Reactionary Populism
Chapter 9: by Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore False Friends and Avowed Enemies: Southern African Americans and Party Allegiances in the 1920s
Chapter 10: by Bryant Simon Race Reactions: African American Organizing, Liberalism, and White Working-Class Politics in Postwar South Carolina
Chapter 11: by Kari Frederickson "As a Man, I Am Interested in States' Rights": Gender, Race, and the Family in the Dixiecrat Party, 1948-195O
Chapter 12: by Timothy B. Tyson Dynamite and "The Silent South": A Story from the Second Reconstruction in South Carolina
Afterwards
Portraying Power by Edward Ayers
Reflections by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall
The Shoah and Southern History by Nell Irvin Painter
Contributors
Index
What People are Saying About This
This important book offers a pathbreaking approach to the study of southern politics and culture. Finding the political in 'unlikely spaces,' these essays require us to rethink the foundations of white supremacy and of southern history more generally.
— Drew Gilpin Faust, Annenberg Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania
This volume is especially pertinent because so many historians over the last decade have de-emphasized the importance of race in the South. . . . These essays argue that the central dance of southern history was the efforts of whites to dominate African Americans. Expanding the definition of the political to include the front porch, these essays bridge 'the distance between public and private contests for power and dignity.' Focusing on the role of African Americans, dissident whites, and especially black and white women, these essays help explain how the most progressive of reform movements, the Civil Rights Movement, came out of what has been viewed by too many for too long as the 'backward' South.
— Vernon Burton, author of "In My Father's House Are Many Mansions" and "A Gentleman and an Officer"
"This volume is especially pertinent because so many historians over the last decade have de-emphasized the importance of race in the South. . . . These essays argue that the central dance of southern history was the efforts of whites to dominate African Americans. Expanding the definition of the political to include the front porch, these essays bridge 'the distance between public and private contests for power and dignity.' Focusing on the role of African Americans, dissident whites, and especially black and white women, these essays help explain how the most progressive of reform movements, the Civil Rights Movement, came out of what has been viewed by too many for too long as the 'backward' South."—Vernon Burton, author of In My Father's House Are Many Mansions and A Gentleman and an Officer"This important book offers a pathbreaking approach to the study of southern politics and culture. Finding the political in 'unlikely spaces,' these essays require us to rethink the foundations of white supremacy and of southern history more generally."—Drew Gilpin Faust, Annenberg Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania