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This chapter draws on traditional constructions of maternal responsibilities in constructing a public role as defender of white supremacy. It argues that women had a duty to campaign against racial integration in order to protect the welfare of current and future generations of white southerners. It notes that this increased public activism on the part of white southern women was by implication a criticism of the incompetence of the male power structure. It shows that white women served more than a rhetorical purpose for the segregationist cause as passive victims in need of male protection.

This chapter assesses how the forces of massive resistance overwhelmed more liberal opinion on racial integration. It stresses that those white southerners who were opposed to the Brown decision were more politically committed than were those who accepted or supported it. It adds that die-hard segregationists used the apparatus of local and state government to destroy political dissent among the southern whites. It highlights the importance of legislative malapportionment, which provided disproportionate political power to rural districts where white racism was most virulent. It shows a dramatic picture of the southern states in the grip of reactionary racial politics.

This chapter traces the road to secession. Most white southerners came to support secession not because of a positive embrace of southern nationalism, but rather because their attachment to the Union could not withstand the pressures generated by northern opposition to slavery. Most white southerners were conditional unionists: they wished to remain in the United States, but only if slavery and the rights of the South were protected within it. By the winter of 1860—61 the conditional unionism of the majority had dissolved. This dissolution was caused most directly by the political conflict over the expansion of slavery, but was also driven by perceptions that an American national community that had been imagined in affective terms was being destroyed by northern betrayals. Up to and beyond secession, many white southerners continued to feel strong loyalty to the United States.

This chapter asserts that segregationists were motivated by their fear of miscegenation to seek divine sanction for the separation of the races. It explains that in their reading of the Bible, segregationists make theological justification for their opposition to the atheistic Supreme Court decision. It adds that many of the ordinary white southerners who quoted Holy Scripture in support of segregation were women.

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.

The emergence of the New South after the Civil War brought forth some innovative ideas about education and schooling in the region. White southerners refocused their education system by formalizing teacher training and creating an educational bureaucracy that allowed the creation of textbooks and reading materials that idealized the antebellum South, especially regarding race and gender roles. In these books, African American men were portrayed as either a “Coon,” “Sambo” or “Uncle Tom” – all three stereotypes represent black men as lazy, easily frightened, inarticulate, and unintelligent. On the other hand, adult black women played the role of “Mammy,” a maternal figure who cared faithfully for her white family and, in doing so, sacrificed her sexuality. Nowhere in these books was there ever any mention of the achievements of any African Americans. To prevent “improper” literature from reaching white children's hands, the school boards in the South created a suggested purchase list for public schools. Thus, schools became agents of socialization, and their choices reinforced the dominant cultural values of white society. There are a few novels, however, that offered counternarratives that humanize African Americans, pointed out the ironies of Jim Crow race relations, and illustrated how, by subtle ruses, an underling could gain a measure of power. While the works of Mark Twain and Joel Chandler Harris on the surface appear to reinforce white supremacy, a careful analysis would reveal an alternative discourse that could open the eyes of both white and black children to dissenting narratives about race within the plantation genre.

This introductory chapter sets out the book’s purpose, which is to re-examine distinct groups of white southerners that were impacted by the media spotlight via the lens of inferiority. It demonstrates how public criticism and a common experience of inferiority contributed to white southern conservatism and homogeneity, which has survived and prospered with dogged perseverance. The chapter also discusses the roots of inferiority; the process of public criticism; the mutually constructive relationship of individual, regional, and national identities; and the overdetermination of southern whiteness.

White southerners took advantage of the emergence of mass culture in the early twentieth century to reiterate their justifications for white dominance over African Americans and impart to their children a distorted version of southern history. National advertisement campaigns made use of evocative images of the South to reinforce the idealized racial roles of southern antebellum society that were also portrayed in public-school instructional materials. Much like southern history books, many toys portrayed African Americans as entertainment, reinforcing the idea that blacks enjoyed subserviently performing for whites. Mechanical toys encouraged male dominance and rewarded aggression, placing white boys in control of stereotypical figurines of black bodies. Even in the chants and rhymes that children recited during games and playground amusements, African Americans are often referred to in a derogatory manner or as deserving of some form of violence. Parents also encouraged their children to participate in school plays and become members of youth organizations, such as the Ku Klux Klan and the Children of the Confederacy, to prepare them for their future racial and gender roles.

This chapter discusses the liberal republicans' goals for Reconstruction—restoring republican government, incorporating freed slaves into Southern society with basic protections, and changing the basis of that society—and the reasons they failed to implement their program fully. The liberal republicans had a dilemma: How was it possible to have the strong federal government necessary for implementing Reconstruction without destroying the republican institutions they considered so essential? How could they institute changes and create republican institutions without using the strong-armed tactics that they opposed? In the end, the intransigence of President Andrew Johnson and white Southerners generally in the face of attempts at change led liberal republicans to support a more extensive Reconstruction that made it necessary to use seemingly tyrannical power. Ultimately, they concluded that the South had been reconstructed as much as it could be without destroying republican government in the country, and the compromise they reached was unsatisfying.

During the Jim Crow era, white southerners struggled to maintain cultural, political, and economic control as African Americans and reformers began to gain ground in their fight to eliminate segregation. With the absence of slavery, white adults feared that their children would grow up not knowing their proper racial and gender roles. Hence, southern adults focused on socializing white children into their racial beliefs by replicating and perpetuating the ideology and practices of white supremacy. The white community strengthened the race-related lessons learned at home as white youth attended segregated public schools and their newly published southern texts presented an idealized image of race relations and gender roles carefully crafted to reflect the concepts of white adults deemed appropriate for their children. White adults also took advantage of the emerging mass culture of youth, including advertising, toys, and games, to create an idealized image of white power by perpetuating racial caricatures of black bodies and suggestions that African Americans enjoyed their subservient roles. Because of their successful indoctrination into the mores of segregation and white supremacy, many white boys readily accepted mass mob lynching rituals and, at times, actively participated in them. White girls capitalized on their idealized image of passive, protected females to gain some measure of social power. The violent enforcement of segregation in the Jim Crow era began to fade in the early twentieth century and during World War II as African Americans succeeded in bringing the problem to national attention. Many white southerners stopped attempting to enforce white supremacy in 1939, and with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, they no longer had unchallenged exclusive access to southern institutions and society became increasingly intolerant of open examples of extralegal violence.

German and Irish immigrants interacted with slaves and free blacks in Charleston on a daily basis and in a variety of social and economic contexts. The brutality of urban slavery was unmistakable as public punishment of slaves and free blacks by city authorities, mainly at the work house, was a common occurrence. German petty entrepreneurs were middlemen minorities that served as a buffer between African Americans and native-born whites. Germans owned and operated successful groceries and wholesale firms, and they often purchased property in the form of two-or three-story houses with stores on the ground level. Germans owned slaves at a rate consistent with their population numbers in 1850. Irish immigrants who could afford slaves purchased them with regularity. German men with few marital prospects among the native-born white population kept enslaved women as concubines. German and Irish petty shopkeepers undermined the slave system when they sold liquor to slaves and traded with slaves for property requisitioned from their masters. White Southerners disapproved of German and Irish shopkeepers who challenged their authority, and they reorganized the police force to better enforce the slave code.

The interaction of German and Irish immigrants, enslaved and free African Americans, and white Southerners defined the social, economic and political developments in Civil War–era Charleston. Slavery and emancipation profoundly influenced relations between European immigrants and black and white Southerners. Immigrant artisans and entrepreneurs occupied a middle tier on a racial and ethnic hierarchy, often acting as a buffer between white Southerners and African Americans and alleviating tensions between the castes. The introduction discusses sources, historiography, and details the contents of each chapter.

This chapter focuses on journalist H. L. Mencken, attorney Clarence Darrow, and politician and activist William Jennings Bryan, whose interactions contributed to a collective regional identity for white southerners. The Scopes Evolution Trial transformed the three men into regional symbols of competing cultural and political values that remain relevant today. Darrow and Mencken (and the larger body of journalists that he represented) would be demonized as liberal skeptics, embracing modernism and the debauchery and chaos that would surely follow. Bryan would come to represent the cause of religious fundamentalism and states’ rights.

This chapter focuses on Paul Gaston's The New South Creed, in which he notes the unanimity with which white southerners saw themselves as the protectors of African Americans in a segregated society after the postwar amendments to the Constitution provided the slaves with freedom and United States citizenship. Gaston's work is probably the most recognizable of those covering the development of a “New South” philosophy in newspaper and magazine articles and lectures written and given between the 1860s and 1890s. Gaston presents an array of newspaper editors and southern men of letters who provided the public with pictures of an industrialized, self-sufficient, segregated South that allowed politicians and jurists to undo the gains African Americans had made during Reconstruction and to move toward Jim Crow.

This chapter discusses how the national and international response to the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision, coupled with the press outrage and public criticism of the South that followed the lynching of Emmett Till, and the successful start of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, ushered in a new era of the Benighted South. Many people in the northern parts of the United States perceived the South as a single, homogenous body of people, all of whom did the same thing in about the same way, for about the same reasons, and with about the same feelings. In response, white southerners, particularly journalists, defined a new southern foe—the pro-civil rights and antisouthern media. They sought new outlets to get out their message, foreshadowing yet another element of southern conservatism still active today.