Synopses & Reviews
When did southern segregation begin? People often assume that segregation was a natural outcome of Reconstruction. In fact, scholars cannot agree on which events at the end of the nineteenth century mark the beginning of formalized Jim Crow. The 6 selections in this volume address the question of segregations origins and, amid the debate over when segregation began, also engage the issues of where, why, and how it became the norm for relations between black and white southerners. Concentrating on various issues—segregations antebellum antecedents, degrees of fluidity of racial interaction following emancipation, the complex relationship between race, gender, and class, and the diversity of segregation practices among the states—the selections illustrate the evolution of southern segregation from a diverse array of local practices to an inflexible American Apartheid.
About the Author
John David Smith is Graduate Alumni Distinguished Professor of History and Director of the M.A. Program in Public History at North Carolina State University. He is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including An Old Creed for the New South (1985), the multi-volume work Anti-Black Thought, 1863-1925 (1993), and Black Judas: William Hannibal Thomas and The American Negro (2000). In 1998-99, he served as the Fulbright Professor of American Studies at the Amerika Institut, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat, Munich, Germany.
Table of Contents
Foreword Preface
A Note for Students
PART ONE.
Introduction: Segregation and the Age of Jim Crow
From Slavery to Segregation
Historians and the Origins of Racial Segregation
PART TWO.
Some Current Questions
1) When did the South capitulate to segregation?
C. Vann Woodward, from The Strange Career of Jim Crow
2) Was segregation the creation of custom or law?
Joel Williamson, from "The Separation of the Races"
3) Why were railroads the "contested terrain" of race relations in the postwar South?
Edward L. Ayers, from The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction
4) What did segregation replace?
Howard N. Rabinowitz, "From Exclusion to Segregation: Southern Race Relations, 1865-1890,"
5) What role did gender play in railroad segregation?
Barbara Y. Welke, from "When All Women Were White and All the Blacks Were Men"(excerpt)
6) How did segregation enforce racial subordination?
Leon F. Litwack, from Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow
Making Connections
Suggestions for Further Reading