Maintaining Segregation: Children and Racial Instruction in the South, 1920–1955 by LeeAnn G. Reynolds

Abstract

Reviewed by: Maintaining Segregation: Children and Racial Instruction in the South, 1920–1955by LeeAnn G. Reynolds Courtney Shah Maintaining Segregation: Children and Racial Instruction in the South, 1920–1955. By LeeAnn G. Reynolds. Making the Modern South. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. Pp. xiv, 223. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-6564-5.) In Maintaining Segregation: Children and Racial Instruction in the South, 1920–1955, LeeAnn G. Reynolds examines how black and white children learned about the realities of segregation. She organizes her study around three major settings: homes, schools, and churches. Both black and white communities had a vested interest in teaching children to navigate the color line, whether to protect reputations, to maintain power, or to avoid violence. But teaching children about segregation could also perpetuate a harmful system. Black parents, teachers, and church leaders wished to instill a sense of racial and community pride, while also recognizing the need to keep children safe in a dangerous environment. Segregation, Reynolds notes, included not just the separation of the races but also "ritual humiliation" directed at black people (p. 41). How could black communities raise children to live within the confines and horrors of segregation without destroying their self-respect? Reynolds contends families, teachers, and churches employed multiple strategies, each with its own costs and dangers. Should they raise their children to accept the status quo and endanger their self-worth? Or should they raise their children to challenge the system and possibly face violent reprisals? Several white memoirists have written about how their families never discussed or contemplated segregation. Yet Reynolds invokes sociological explanations about how children were socialized into a society in which questioning the racial order was met with disapproving silence or threats of punishment. Children remembered silence as the socially approved response to segregation. Schoolbooks and Sunday school lessons, often purposefully, utilized faith and history to cement white supremacy. Reynolds examines a period when segregation had solidified after the Progressive era and the peak of lynching but before the onset of the modern civil rights movement. She argues that the culture of segregation was largely frozen, silent, and nonnegotiable. Parents, teachers, and community leaders failed to explain segregation's rationale and discouraged children from asking questions. Yet the civil rights movement shows that challenges to segregation could succeed. Reynolds's work provides an intriguing look at how families [End Page 505]and communities could never fully acculturate either white or black children into unquestioned acceptance of segregation. Children challenged the status quo, sometimes with the assistance of their guardians and sometimes despite them. Reynolds situates Maintaining Segregationin the growing field of memory studies. By using autobiography, Reynolds allows people on both sides of the color line to interpret their own racial awakenings. However, the use of autobiographies as the central sources for this work tends to limit which voices enter the narrative. People like Anne Moody and Melton McLaurin present compelling narratives of racial awakening, but are they representative? Reynolds recognizes this challenge and attempts to contextualize autobiography as memories to be analyzed and evaluated. Reynolds's sources do not fully address how organizations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) purposefully spread white supremacy and the Lost Cause narrative of the Civil War through schoolbooks, curricula, and public spaces. Reynolds touches only briefly on the UDC's systematic campaign to memorialize a faulty history of the South. The author concludes that "civil rights activists had to target and overcome the childhood conditioning of both black and white southerners" (p. 143). This was no mean task, considering the violent past that created the Jim Crow system. Reynolds provides a valuable contribution to our understanding of both the structure of the segregated South and the seeds of its destruction. Courtney Shah Lower Columbia College Copyright © 2018 The Southern Historical Association