How Lynchings Became High-Tech, and Other Tales from the Modern South

Abstract

How Lynchings Became High-Tech, and Other Tales from the Modern South Carl H. Nightingale (bio) Grace Elizabeth Hale. Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940. New York: Pantheon Books, 1998. xii + 427 pp. Photographs, notes, bibliography, and index. $30.00. The Jim Crow we have come to know best is a political animal: a legal system, a one-party state, a master-race “democracy,” a near-seamless machine of racial separation, one of America’s worst reigns of official and unofficial terror. Grace Elizabeth Hale’s mission is to get us to see Southern segregation also as culture—as memory, identity, values, taboos, imagery, coming-of-age, daily life, commodity worship, ritual, and spectacle. In her rendition, Jim Crow was more fluid, problematic, contradictory, and ambiguous than most of us are used to, as much dependent on crossing color lines as setting them in stone. At the same time, it was also more brutal and grisly—sustaining itself not only upon the horrors of lynching but even more pervasively upon a kind of mass-marketed worship of violence. The culture of segregation, Hale argues, was an expression of modernity. It was born at the dangerous crossroads where white southerners’ post-emancipation efforts to redeem the social hierarchies of the plantation contended with such late-nineteenth-century transformations as the growth of cities and the expansion of anonymity in ordinary daily interactions; the encroachment of a national market and centralized federal power; and the increasing contact of southerners with the technologies and visual orientation of mass culture. These wrenching changes at once made segregation necessary, created challenges for it, and provided tools to disseminate its underlying transformation and privileging of race. To make these broader points about the South and the nation, Hale takes us on a tour of smaller, local places. From southern homes, she proceeds to train stations, dry-goods stores, soda fountains, billboards, and gas pumps, and culminates at the lynching tree. Along the way she rereads familiar texts of contemporary southern writers and historians, black and white. Indeed, her historian’s pursuit of archival evidence, and her style, is fired by the literary inspiration of W.E.B. DuBois, James Weldon Johnson, Ralph Ellison, James [End Page 140] Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and by the white writer and critic of segregation Lillian Smith. Hale’s sources are as varied and complex as the narrative—in addition to literature and history she relies on poetry, folklore, personal papers, diaries, photographs, advertisements, picture post cards, consumer surveys, trade journals, proclamations, and inscriptions on monuments. The book’s first two chapters act as a kind of prologue to the main research effort and contain a few twists on some familiar material in intellectual and literary history. In a dense summary of black views of segregation, she traces the ways African American intellectuals and writers exposed the falseness of racial categories masquerading as natural and timeless, revealed the consciously constructed and historic nature of race, explored the essentially hybrid character of American culture, and sought alternatives to identities based solely on whiteness or blackness. These alternative possibilities never became central to America’s self-definition however, because turn-of-the-century southern whites coordinated a cultural juggernaut that successfully implanted whiteness deep into dominant visions of regional and national identity. They accomplished this, in critical part, by reinterpreting the bitter defeats of the recent southern past and inventing images of blackness that both served to enunciate white supremacy and to endow distinctions of race with a patina of timelessness and universality. Turn-of-the-century white historians, folklorists, writers, and activists nostalgically remembered and remade the slave plantation as an antebellum Eden, “civilized” the Civil War an expression of national military valor, and vilified Reconstruction as a parable on the horrors of black power. Such narratives were rich with codes of white male honor and vulnerable, if tenacious, white womanhood. They also helped launch an explosion of imagery of loyal, subservient blacks which also took on comic, hapless, lazy, or childlike characteristics derived from northern minstrelsy. Some of these caricatures, notably folklorist William Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus, were at times allowed by their white authors to exhibit...