Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

On August 12, 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia, alt-right/White supremacy groups and Black Lives Matter (BLM) supporters came face-to-face regarding what to do about public monuments that celebrate key figures from slavery and the Jim Crow era. White supremacists and White nationalists did not hide their racist ideologies as they demanded that their privileged place in history not be erased. The BLM movement, which challenges state-sanctioned anti-Black racism, was ready to confront themes of White discontent and reverse racism, critiques of political correctness, and the assumption that racialized people should know their place and be content to be the subordinate other.It is easy to frame the events in Charlottesville as indicative of US-specific race problems. However, a sense that White spaces should prevail and an ongoing history of anti-Black racism are not unique to the United States. The rise of Canadian activism under the BLM banner also signals a movement to change Canadian forms of institutional racism in policing, education, and the labor market. This article responds to perceptions that the BLM movement has given insufficient attention to environmental concerns (Pellow 2016; Halpern 2017). Drawing on critical race theory as a conceptual tool, this article focuses on the Canadian context as part of the author’s argument in favor of greater collaboration between BLM and the environmental justice (EJ) movement in Canada. This article also engages with the common stereotype that Blacks in Canada have it better than Blacks in the United States.

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The Negro Digest: Race, Exceptionalism and the Second World War

Journal of American Studies ◽

10.1017/s0021875817001906 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 52 (2) ◽

pp. 358-389 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

NICHOLAS GRANT

Keyword(s):

White Supremacy ◽

Jim Crow ◽

Global Analysis ◽

Second World War ◽

Border Crossing ◽

American Democracy ◽

Racial Oppression ◽

The Us ◽

The World ◽

Second World

This article examines the border-crossing journalism of the Negro Digest, a leading African American periodical, published from 1942 to 1951. The first title produced by the Johnson Publishing Company, the Digest had an international focus that connected Jim Crow to racial oppression around the world. However, while the magazine challenged white supremacy on a local and global level, its patriotic tone and faith in American democracy occasionally restricted its global analysis of racism. Ultimately, the internationalism of the Negro Digest was quintessentially American – wedded to the exceptional status of American freedom and an overriding belief that the US could change the world for the better.

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Beyond the Psychological Wage: Du Bois on White Dominion

Political Theory ◽

10.1177/0090591718791744 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 47 (1) ◽

pp. 6-31 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Ella Myers

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Twentieth Century ◽

White Supremacy ◽

Jim Crow ◽

Human Life ◽

The United States ◽

Du Bois ◽

Historical Fact ◽

The Universe

W.E.B. Du Bois’s reading of whiteness as a “public and psychological wage” is enormously influential. This essay examines another, lesser known facet of Du Bois’s account of racialized identity: his conceptualization of whiteness as dominion. In his 1920–1940 writings, “modern” whiteness appears as a proprietary orientation toward the planet in general and toward “darker peoples” in particular. This “title to the universe” is part of chattel slavery’s uneven afterlife, in which the historical fact of “propertized human life” endures as a racialized ethos of ownership. The essay examines how this “title” is expressed and reinforced in the twentieth century by the Jim Crow system of racial signs in the United States and by violent “colonial aggrandizement” worldwide. The analytic of white dominion, I argue, allows Du Bois to productively link phenomena often regarded as discrete, namely, domestic and global forms of white supremacy and practices of exploitation and dispossession. Ultimately, the entitlement Du Bois associates with whiteness is best understood as a pervasive, taken-for-granted horizon of perception, which facilitates the transaction of the “wage” but is not reducible to it.

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The Great Migration Escape

Gone Home ◽

10.5149/northcarolina/9781469647036.003.0003 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 29-52

Author(s):

Karida L. Brown

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

Social Order ◽

White Supremacy ◽

Jim Crow ◽

Great Migration ◽

Eastern Kentucky ◽

United States Steel Corporation ◽

The Social ◽

The Great Migration ◽

Black Codes

This chapter provides an account of the first wave of African American migration into the Appalachian region of eastern Kentucky. It addresses the implementation of Black Codes, also known as Jim Crow laws, the convict leasing system, and how psychological and physical terror in the form of public lynchings helped maintain the social order of white supremacy. Brown attends to the role of the labor agent as a grey-market actor in facilitating the onset of the first wave of the African American Great Migration. Drawing on the oral history and archival data, the chapter distils a profile of the legendary figure, Limehouse, the white labor agent hired by United States Steel Corporation to sneak and transport black men and their families out of Alabama to Harlan County, Kentucky to work in the coalmines. The chapter also focuses on the psychosocial dimensions of this silent mass migration, specifically the spiritual strivings, the hopes, dreams, and disappointments that accompanied the Great Migration.

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A Table Prepared by Our Enemies

The End of Days ◽

10.5149/northcarolina/9781469629360.003.0006 ◽

2016 ◽

Author(s):

Matthew Harper

Keyword(s):

North Carolina ◽

African Americans ◽

White Supremacy ◽

Jim Crow ◽

Racial Violence ◽

Spanish American ◽

Political Movement ◽

Spanish American War ◽

The Cross

This chapter explains how black southerners interpreted early Jim Crow politics in light of the theological expectations they held from emancipation. Despite new forms of segregation, intensified racial violence, and disfranchisment efforts, black Protestants in North Carolina were encouraged by Fusion, a successful biracial political movement, and black autonomy in that state’s black regiment for the Spanish American War. Then, a devastating white supremacy campaign in 1898 left African Americans in mourning. Black Protestant leaders turned to the crucifixion narrative to make sense of the loss. Just as Jesus faced abandoned by God on the cross only days before his glorious resurrection, black southerners still had reason to hope. Their theological expectations forced them to see their own struggle for freedom as uninterrupted by the politics of Jim Crow.

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Deploying Jim Crow

10.1093/oso/9780195342659.003.0009 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 297-343

Author(s):

Thomas A. Guglielmo

Keyword(s):

White Supremacy ◽

Jim Crow ◽

Black Americans ◽

Home Front ◽

The Other ◽

Multiple Forms ◽

Us Military ◽

The Us ◽

The World ◽

The One

Chapter 8 explores what happened to the US military’s black-white lines as American troops moved overseas. On the one hand, the US military transplanted these lines all around the world. While not identical to those on the home front, they also took multiple forms, involving everything from jobs and dances to courts-martial and minstrel performances. They also stemmed from the military’s paradoxical goals of winning a war for democracy while at the same time protecting white supremacy. On the other hand, fully achieving this latter goal became more difficult overseas because of locals’ warm relations with black Americans, the black-white comradeship of some American GIs, and the activism of black troops. Taken together, these developments chipped away at the black-white divide. At war’s end, Jim Crow in uniform was far from dead, but it lay moderately wounded just the same.

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A Procession of Spectres

Engines of Redemption ◽

10.5149/northcarolina/9781469652818.003.0009 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 231-240

Author(s):

R. Scott Huffard

Keyword(s):

White Supremacy ◽

Jim Crow ◽

New South ◽

Success Story ◽

Counter Narrative

The conclusion opens with a vignette about the death of Southern Railway president Samuel Spencer in a train wreck and it looks at how this moment revealed how transformative the previous decades had been in southern railroading. Spencer’s death also was a moment for critics to share a counter narrative of the New South success story, as Tom Watson argued that “a procession of spectres” haunted Spencer’s wealth. The chapter then recaps the main arguments of the book, and uses the “procession of spectres” as a metaphor to describe the anxieties that railroads and capitalism unleashed in the region. In the end, New South boosters and white elites used racial division, Jim Crow segregation, and white supremacy to distract from and overcome the monsters of the railroad. Capitalism and white supremacy advanced in tandem through the New South. The conclusion then discusses how storytelling and narrative continue to be essential to the success of capitalism. The chapter closes with a discussion of a Johnny Cash documentary that focuses on train songs and notes how the South’s railroads have now mostly moved into the realm of nostalgia.

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