New Negroes Versus the New South: African American Cultural and Intellectual Resistance to White Supremacy Jane Dailey (bio) Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow. New York: Penguin, 2018. 296 pp. $30.00. There was no “South” before the Civil War. There were slaveholding states, but there was no unitary region described as “the South” before the defeat of the Confederacy in 1865. It was “the conflict with the Yankee that created the concept of the South as something more than a matter of geography,” southern chronicler and armchair regional psychologist W. J. Cash observed in The Mind of the South (1941).1 According to Cash, a coherent regional collective identity was forged for the first time out of opposition to the victorious “North,” a term that stood for the Union Army, emancipation, and Reconstruction. The “South,” in other words, was everything the North was not. A notion of southern distinctiveness antedated the rise and defeat of the Confederacy, but the development of a narrative of southern distinctiveness was a post-emancipation phenomenon forged out of the ashes of what white southerners experienced as a catastrophic military defeat. Declensionist narratives of cultural destruction and existential peril have driven political transformation in the South at every stage since Appomattox. After the Civil War, such narratives about Reconstruction became a leading southern export, designed to convince the rest of the country that the war had been a tragic error, emancipation a mistake, Reconstruction a folly, and the Jim Crow South of legalized racial hierarchy and segregation a necessity. This “tragic era” story of the postwar South swamped competing narratives of the reconstitution of the Union and the incorporation of black men into politics and governance, and was used to justify the white terror and election fraud that was necessary—from the white point of view—to achieve disenfranchisement and American apartheid. Recognizing the narrative warfare of white supremacy, Henry Louis Gates notes in Stony the Road that “each generation of black people needed to invent their own New Negro” (p. 232) to further black goals and detach a growing cadre of elite African Americans from the masses of the freedpeople. Gates [End Page 264] focuses on his longtime fascination with the New Negro, which existed both in the form of actual people and as a representation, an argument against the destruction of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow. “[T]he New Negro,” Gates argues, “is one of the most important legacies of the Reconstruction era” (p. 231). His book, he explains, “is a close reading of the history of the use of this imagery in the larger war to kill Reconstruction through the end of the nineteenth century, and of the imagery embodying the counternarrative by black people” (p. xviii). The New Negro was intimately tied to political competition. Gates recognizes the fluidity and competitive nature of the world of late-nineteenth-century southern politics. The “Redeemers,” white supremacists who ripped political power from the freedmen in the 1880s and 1890s, focused instantly on black voting and its consequences. The importance of black male enfranchisement, and disenfranchisement, cannot be overemphasized. Frederick Douglass identified the stakes in May of 1865, less than a month after Confederate surrender at Appomattox: “Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot” (p. 24). The catastrophic consequences of disenfranchisement for southern blacks cannot be overstated. In the spring of 1867, less than one percent of black men could vote. By December, over 80 percent could.2 By the 1880s, more than two-thirds of all adult southern males still voted. That proportion rose to nearly three-quarters in the 1890s in states that had not yet limited the franchise. By the early 1900s, fewer than one man in three, white or black, voted in the South.3 As intended, voting restrictions had a hugely disproportionate effect on African Americans. If black men could not vote, they could not be elected to office; if they could not be elected to office, they could not shape or administer the laws that governed them. Sixty-four African Americans sat in Mississippi’s state legislature in 1873: none sat...

Can one person change the past? And through that, shape the future? These were necessary questions for historians of the American South before the 1950s, when southern history was still trapped in oppositional narratives that divided along race lines. These questions were also pertinent for someone interested in mounting a historical reclamation process—of herself as well as her region, in the 1940s. By investigating her past as a white southerner, Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, an economist and sharp observer of life in many dimensions, turned her memories of home to the purpose of social critique. Her aim was to use her own life to demonstrate how the culture of white supremacy was reproduced and how it could be overcome. Katharine Lumpkin is one of three remarkable Lumpkin sisters who together people Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s magisterial Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America. With breathtaking sweep and...

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Almighty God Created Races. Christianity, Interracial Marriage, and American Law. By Fay Botham. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Pp. [xvi], 271. $36.95, ISBN 978-0-8078-3318-6.) In 1947 Daniel Marshall, a progressive lawyer in Los Angeles, helped a young interracial couple challenge California's antimiscegenation law according to following logic: Church considered a sacrament; Church did not bar interracial among Catholics; and therefore, state, by prohibiting interracial marriage, was violating couple's rights under free exercise clause of Constitution. Unlike rest of arguments offered in this book, Marshall's claim was plausible. It was not victorious--indeed, all but one California Supreme Court justice rejected religion outright in Perez v. Lippold (1948). Nevertheless, in a 4-3 decision that offered three separate opinions for majority, California Supreme Court became first court since Reconstruction to rule an antimiscegenation law unconstitutional. With this context as her launchpad, Fay Botham makes following logical leaps: The Church did not take into account when determining eligibility of two Catholics to marry (this is correct). Marshall was a and fought against antimiscegenation laws, which reveal[s] critical significance of Christianity within American antimiscegenation history and shows that Church's theologies of and paved way for support for interracial marriage (pp. 13, 128). Finally, this supposed Catholic commitment to interracial marriage was deeply rooted in long-standing doctrines on and in less entrenched--to put it mildly--yet critically important doctrines on race and stood in stark contrast to that had resulted in genocide of some six million Jewish people in Europe (p. 174). To make this argument work, Botham has to portray Marshall as representative rather than exceptional, misrepresent Perez decision, demonize as idiosyncratic readers of Bible and purveyors of racism, and explain away 1965 decision upholding Virginia's antimiscegenation law by trial judge Leon M. Bazile, also a Catholic, which concluded with ringing endorsement of divine origins of segregation that provides book's title (p. 165). Here are key points: 1. The racial beliefs responsible for both Holocaust and Jim Crow were rooted in idea of divinely separated races, which originated with white Protestants and underlay their belief both in difference and hierarchy and in polygenesis (separate creations) (pp. 174, 163). 2. Catholics rejected polygenesis and believed that all people descended from Adam and Eve, the one father and one mother (p. …

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The case for a long civil rights movement could use the history of what Danielle L. McGuire calls the crusade for black women's dignity. McGuire's passionate, prize-winning book At the Dark End of the Street broadens the mid-twentieth-century civil rights narrative by anchoring the freedom struggle in “a decades-long struggle to protect black women … from sexualized violence and rape” (p. xvii). This focus represents a significant departure from civil rights orthodoxy; McGuire is correct to observe that “analyses of rape and sexualized violence play little or no role in most histories of the civil rights movement, which present it as a struggle between black and white men” (p. xix). Civil rights historians find political meaning and causal power in violence against black males, such as the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, but have neglected violence directed at black women and girls. The result, according to McGuire, has blinded us to the ways “sexual violence and interracial rape became one crucial battleground upon which African Americans sought to destroy white supremacy and gain personal and political autonomy” (ibid.). Fannie Lou Hamer said it best: “A black woman's body was never hers alone” (p. xviii).

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purposes, arguing that if men could not meet the manly standard of protecting their women, then it was up to women to lead the race. Black women advocated a variety of strategies, in part for pragmatic reasons. Faced with potential criticism that she was simply giving in to white standards of beauty, Madame C. J. Walker chose to market herself as an economic nationalist, and in so doing she relied on the feminist argument that she was creating opportunities for black women to become respectable and independent. However, despite her nationalist credentials, she was a patron of almost every racial uplift organization, nationalist and integrationist, knowing that access to and support from such networks would help improve her image and also her sales. Similarly, Amy Jacques Garvey chose to portray herself as her husband’s helpmeet in order to maintain access to a political platform where she could expound on images of strong and independent women. Dossett’s work makes it clear that most black women did not hesitate to adapt to their situation and advocate what they thought would best serve their interests, but also that many of them did not see these shifting strategies as incompatible. There are a few weaker sections in the book, most notably the somewhat unclear defence of A’Lelia Walker that seems unrelated to the rest of the book. At times, Dossett’s definition of nationalism seems a little thin, and she is less adept at showing how nationalists like Jacques Garvey advocated integrationist strategies. She could also occasionally use a broader historical context, for example in explaining the rise of Pan-Africanism among women’s groups around the First World War. Lastly, the only photos in the book are of Bethune and the Walkers, which seems to be an omission. However, overall Dossett has produced a fine, readable analysis which complicates the discussion of racial uplift in the early twentieth century and shows how black women networked and blended seemingly opposing ideas into a coherent whole. Jacqueline M. Moore Austin College, Texas a 2009, Jacqueline M. Moore

Jane Dailey's commentary raises methodological issues at play in Ely's book but also of concern to the wider world of historical writing. Ely focuses on human behavior in antebellum Virginia rather than on human thought or ideology. This kind of division between behavior and thought visible in Israel on the Appomattox is reproduced at the methodological level in the historical discipline as a whole. Some historians claim the triumph of social history, others economic or intellectual or cultural history. This sort of oppositional choice—behavior matters more than ideas—needs to be thought of not dogmatically but strategically. It is one thing to divide thought and action heuristically, in order to discover something unknown about one or the other—we can separate x from y in order to see x more clearly. However, privileging day-to-day behavior over law and ideology does not take us any closer to a model of history that accounts for the complexity of society and for the possibility of that society to generate all types of potential and conflicting histories, many of which are never realized. Dividing cognitive and ideological structures from everyday behavior constrains our ability to explain why behavior matters. Histories are punctuated equilibriums. The behavioral model can go a long way toward explaining equilibriums, but it has a hard time explaining punctuations.

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July 01 2004 Managing White Supremacy: Race, Politics, and Citizenship in Jim Crow Virginia Managing White Supremacy: Race, Politics, and Citizenship in Jim Crow Virginia. By J. DouglasSmith (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2002) 411 pp. $55.00 cloth $19.95 paper Jane Dailey Jane Dailey Johns Hopkins University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Jane Dailey Johns Hopkins University Online ISSN: 1530-9169 Print ISSN: 0022-1953 © 2004 Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc.2004 The Journal of Interdisciplinary History (2004) 35 (1): 161–163. https://doi.org/10.1162/002219504323091586 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Jane Dailey; Managing White Supremacy: Race, Politics, and Citizenship in Jim Crow Virginia. The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2004; 35 (1): 161–163. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/002219504323091586 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsThe Journal of Interdisciplinary History Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. © 2004 Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc.2004 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Asked to explain the victories of the civil rights movement, activists have often replied, "God was on our side." Martin Luther King Jr., for example, portrayed himself and his cause as divinely sanctioned, positioning segregationists clearly across the fence. "We have the strange feeling down in Montgomery that in our struggle we have cosmic companionship," King revealed during the bus boycott in 1956. "We feel that the universe is on the side of right and righteousness. That is what keeps us going." King did not simply consider segregation unconstitutional; he considered it a sin, and its Christian champions, heretics. Speaking of the boycott in another context, King portrayed segregationists as wayward Christians who, like the Prodigal Son, "have strayed away to some far country of sin and evil."1 1