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James Baldwin wrote that blacks have typically rejected the Great American Myths, for unlike most white Americans, they discerned the extent to which those myths were rooted in America’s primal myth, the myth of White Supremacy. Yet one must wonder how those myths might serve the nation if stripped of their coloration. The issue comes down to this—is such a color stripping even possible? At the very least, a color stripping would depend on two factors—increased face-to-face relationships between blacks and whites and, perhaps even more important, resistance, even in the face of torture and death. Perhaps a thin sliver of hope is all that American history can justify. But hope we must, for if we abandon hope, we have also abandoned our future.

The myth of the Millennial Nation held that the United States, grounded as it was in the natural order, would shine its example around the globe until all nations of earth had abandoned despotic rulers and claimed the natural order of freedom and democracy for themselves. White Americans in the early national period, therefore, stood with one foot in the mythic age of creation and the other in the mythic, golden age to come. History became irrelevant. Early in the nineteenth century, white Americans imagined that the millennial transformation of the globe could be wrought solely through America’s moral example. But moral example gave way to force and violence as the myth of the Millennial Nation gave way to the doctrine of manifest destiny. By the early twentieth century, manifest destiny morphed into the American Dream. If manifest destiny had turned the millennial vision outward, inspiring the acquisition of both land and opportunity for economic investment abroad, the American Dream turned the millennial vision inward, inspiring new visions of opportunity at home. As the nation transitioned from millennial vision to manifest destiny to American dream, the myth of White Supremacy was the constant connecting factor that underpinned all three.

The German Schuetzenfest was an important festival that combined German cultural traditions of sport-shooting, gymnastics, ballroom dancing, beer gardens, and various amusements. The festival was essential to the maintenance of German identity in the postwar period and especially following German unification in 1871. The chapter demonstrates that German business leaders organized the event not only as a cultural activity based upon their ethnic heritage, but also as an opportunity to showcase their business success. In 1868, Germans organized the first Schuetzenfest since the Civil War and mainly Germans attended the event. By 1871, Charlestonians of all races and ethnicities, including southern white elites, flocked to the Schuetzenfest and made it the largest recreational and social event of the year. African Americans, Germans, and white southern children competed with each other in the various amusements located on the Schuetzenplatz grounds. Germans invited rifle clubs from throughout the South and United States to participate though African American rifle clubs were excluded. Increasingly, native-born white rifle clubs formed or reformed, and they participated in the annual military parade that took place on the first day of the Schuetzenfest. In parading alongside white rifle clubs, the Germans revealed their support for white supremacy.

Germans, Irish, and African Americans profoundly influenced municipal politics during the Reconstruction period. African Americans, Germans, and Irish immigrants took advantage of universal suffrage to run for political office and exercise their right to vote. The majority of African Americans voted Republican, but a small minority moved toward the Democratic Party. The Germans were primarily Democrats, but some Germans supported the Republican Party and several even served as Republican Party officials. When German immigrants took control of the Democratic nomination conventions in Charleston during the 1870s, it caused considerable conflict with conservative white southerners and African American Republicans. The 1871, 1873, and 1875 municipal elections revealed significant ethnic divisions in both the Democratic and Republican parties that often led to violence. In 1871, a municipal riot occurred in which African Americans assaulted German shopkeepers and destroyed their property, which highlighted the growing tension between both groups. By the mid-1870s, first-generation German immigrants and second-generation German Southerners had become more middle class than ever before, and most Germans decided to support the Democratic Party even though it had returned to a white supremacist platform by 1876.

Playwright Eugene O’Neill jumpstarted his career and had his first major successes in and from the little art colony in Provincetown; this chapter focuses on O’Neill, the Provincetown Players’ most prominent member, who lived and worked there between 1916 and 1922. The chapter shows how the compressed scale and distinctive mobility of Provincetown’s creative community was crucial to O’Neill’s success. There, O’Neill was exposed to the art colony’s distinctive amalgamation of modern and experimental theatre practices, including those dealing with writing, staging, and promotion. His own work built upon these: he was especially adept at harvesting, adapting, and exporting these practices from the rural outpost to the metropolitan hub of modernist activity in New York. This chapter argues that the formal and topical elements of O’Neill’s notorious play The Emperor Jones (conceived and written in Provincetown), along with its production and promotional strategies, were distinctive to the little art colony. There, O’Neill cultivated and marketed to a ‘special audience,’ drew topical inspiration from long-simmering racial anxieties in the region, and expanded upon the Provincetown Players’ theatrical practice of superpersonalization: a writing and staging strategy that amplifies the bleed between character and actor in order to heighten the audience’s engagement in the play. These strategies kindled his white audience’s ‘racial feelings’: a move that brought the relatively unknown O’Neill into the national and international public consciousness and created a still-resonant sensation about his work.

This chapter provides an overview of racial politics in the United States and South Africa in the 1940s and 1950s. It traces how African Americans and black South Africans have historically configured their struggles as being interconnected, while documenting how anticommunism limited opportunities for transnational black activism between both countries during the early Cold War.

Religious dissent within the Black Church focuses on defending the Christian gospel against the alliance of Christianity and the race order of white supremacy marks the contribution of the Black Church to the wider dissenting tradition. It engages in the religious delegitimation of the dominant racial order. While the White Church in the United States has historically replicated the dominant racial order of African American subordination, the religious dissent of the Black Church has resisted and subverted the dominant racial order in a way in which grace pre-empts race in the functional ecclesiology of the Black Church with Christian egalitarianism affirming the equality of the races, envisioning a church where grace structures ecclesial life rather than racism.

In addition to wrapping up the central themes covered in this book, the conclusion details the fate of Miami’s Central Negro District, also known as Overtown, shortly after the building of Interstate-95 and mass black suburbanization. It contends that present day recollections of Overtown’s apparent demise remain linked to black frustrations about the failures of suburbanization to provide greater racial and economic equality.

This chapter details the ways opponents of the civil rights movement opposed the notion of brotherhood, referring to “brotherhoodism” as a concept that could undermine all authority, the significance of race, and, ultimately, any standards of right and wrong. The chapter argues that leaders of massive resistance against the civil rights movement claimed their movement was about family protection, and they said that instead of brotherhood, they supported the power of parents.

This concluding chapter argues that African Americans were part of a broad and multifaceted effort to isolate South Africa in the global political arena. By repeatedly attempting to offer direct support to African liberation movements and calling for America to renounce its political and economic ties with the National Party, their actions made life difficult for white politicians in ways that that would continue to inform the global anti-apartheid movement beyond the Sharpeville massacre of 1960. This argument is not meant to downplay the disruptive influence that anticommunism had on black protest. Rather, it is designed to shift the focus onto the ways in which black activists, with different political visions, responded to state power. Finally, given the broad response of African Americans to the anti-apartheid movement, this concluding chapter suggests that we might need to move towards a more expansive definition of black internationalism – one that accounts for the anticolonial political agenda and transnational solidarities forges by both African American leftists and liberals.

This final chapter returns to the balancing act in assessing the difference an individual in charge of a global governance body can make and where his or her limitations are depending on the institutional context and constraints. It argues that values matter and that choices are not pre-determined by origin, despite the impact of social influences in a person’s upbringing. It acknowledges that, despite being from different parts of the world, leading international civil servants share some (middle) class-based commonalities and thereby (re)produce a certain understanding, but refutes the suggestion that this translates into support of white supremacy and Western dominance. It ends with some of the assessments offered as a tribute to Dag Hammarskjöld and the role he played in the decolonization of Africa despite having been faced with institutional limitations.

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.