New Negro Politics in the Jim Crow South
Cover -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- One: The Hour Has Come -- Two: Now Comes the Test -- Three: Making Way for Democracy -- Four: On the Firing Line -- Five: The South Will Be Invaded -- Six: New Negro Southerners -- Seven: Stormy Weather -- Epilogue: In the Whirlwind -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y
Jumpin' Jim Crow
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.
The New Negro
Black Politics in New Deal Atlanta
When Franklin Roosevelt was elected president in 1932, Atlanta had the South's largest population of college-educated African Americans. The dictates of Jim Crow meant that these men and women were almost entirely excluded from public life, but as Karen Ferguson demonstrates, Roosevelt's New Deal opened unprecedented opportunities for black Atlantans struggling to achieve full citizenship. Black reformers, often working within federal agencies as social workers and administrators, saw the inclusion of African Americans in New Deal social welfare programs as a chance to prepare black Atlantans to take their rightful place in the political and social mainstream. They also worked to build a constituency they could mobilize for civil rights, in the process facilitating a shift from elite reform to the mass mobilization that marked the postwar black freedom struggle. Although these reformers' efforts were an essential prelude to civil rights activism, Ferguson argues that they also had lasting negative repercussions, embedded as they were in the politics of respectability. By attempting to impose bourgeois behavioral standards on the black community, elite reformers stratified it into those they determined deserving to participate in federal social welfare programs and those they consigned to remain at the margins of civic life.
Schooling Jim Crow
In 1919 the NAACP organized a voting bloc powerful enough to compel the city of Atlanta to budget $1.5 million for the construction of schools for black students. This victory would have been remarkable in any era, but in the context of the Jim Crow South it was revolutionary. Schooling Jim Crow tells the story of this little-known campaign, which happened less than thirteen years after the Atlanta race riot of 1906 and just weeks before a wave of anti-black violence swept the nation in the summer after the end of World War I. Despite the constant threat of violence, Atlanta’s black voters were able to force the city to build five black grammar schools and Booker T. Washington High School, the city’s first publicly funded black high school. Schooling Jim Crow reveals how they did it and why it matters. In this pathbreaking book, Jay Driskell explores the changes in black political consciousness that made the NAACP’s grassroots campaign possible at a time when most black southerners could not vote, let alone demand schools. He reveals how black Atlantans transformed a reactionary politics of respectability into a militant force for change. Contributing to this militancy were understandings of class and gender transformed by decades of racially segregated urban development, the 1906 Atlanta race riot, Georgia’s disfranchisement campaign of 1908, and the upheavals of World War I. On this cultural foundation, black Atlantans built a new urban black politics that would become the model for the NAACP’s political strategy well into the twentieth century.
