Southern Blacks Research Articles

How the Struggle for Public Health in the Jim Crow South Reflected and Reinforced Systemic Racial Health Inequality

Abstract The twenty-first century COVID-19 epidemic revealed a U.S. public health system that countenanced health inequities and a U.S. public that resisted disease containment policies. This crisis, however, was only the most recent chapter in a longer struggle in the United States to institutionalize public health. We focus on two early twentieth-century public health campaigns in the American South, the unhealthiest U.S. region at the time. Black southerners—denied basic health, political, economic, and social rights under a rising Jim Crow regime—self-organized health services networks, including through the Tuskegee Woman’s Club, the Negro Organization Society of Virginia, and the Moveable School (1890s–1915). Around the same time, a philanthropic project, the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission (RSC, 1909–1914), seeded state-level public health agencies in eleven southern states, thereby installing public health in a top-down manner. We use archival data sources to explore key similarities and differences in the public health concerns and coalition-building approaches of each campaign and southern resistance to their efforts. We find Black-led campaigns often blurred the color line to form coalitions that provided services to the underserved while tackling environmental health risks at the community level. In contrast, RSC affiliates in southern states, as directed by RSC administrators, provided health services as short-term public dispensaries. Services reached Black and White communities willing to participate but in a manner that did not overtly challenge Jim Crow-era practices. Southern resistance to public health expansion persisted under each approach. The legacies of these struggles remain; the political-economic and ideological forces that limited public health expansion while marginalizing Black community health efforts reverberate in public health inequities today.

"Even in a Place of Sorrow, Even in a Place of Joy": Intersections of Blackness and Southernness in the Works of bell hooks and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

ABSTRACT: bell hooks's Belonging: A Culture of Place (2009) and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers's The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois (2021) exist at the intersection of southernness and Blackness, mapping the ways that the south can be a site of trauma and profound identification for the Black southerners who call it home. Both texts articulate the intense emotional experience that stems from returning to the south and offer alternative models for considering Black southern affects. These models challenge the white emotional paradigm—particularly its preoccupation with nostalgia—that dominates conversations about southern feelings. Situating these two texts within the current discourse surrounding monuments and memorials, this article highlights a non-linear engagement with history that prioritizes the felt aftermaths of slavery and the Jim Crow era in southern Black communities. In centering the complex, and often contradictory, affects that define the Black southern experience, both Belonging and The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois articulate the felt forms through which Black southerners return to both the physical region and history of the south.

Specters of the Mythic South: How Plantation Fiction Fixed Ghost Stories to Black Americans

Abstract: The author challenges the notion of southern ghost stories as inherently subversive. Beginning with the stories in late nineteenth-century plantation fiction, this essay explores how wealthy white southerners used the genre to redeem and remake the region's past and present. White authors' claims of fraternity with largely nameless and faceless Black contacts are central to the story and reveal how these ghost stories helped to suppress reality, in favor of mythic tales. A comparison of the planation ghost stories and ghost stories accurately attributed to Black southerners shows that rather than faithfully recording the stories or making room for the oppressed to speak, white writers of planation ghost stories made a mockery of their Black neighbors and denied their post-emancipation agency. The roots of today's southern ghost stories are vastly more diverse, and significantly less empowering, than the celebrated Southern Gothic tales.

In Search of the Promised Land: County-Level Disadvantage and Low Birth Weight among Black Mothers of the Great Migration.

The Great Migration was a movement of roughly eight million Black Southerners relocating to the North and West from 1910 to 1980. Despite being one of the most significant mass internal migrations during the twentieth century, little is known about the health outcomes resulting from migration and whether migrators' destination choices were potential mechanisms. This study measured the association between destination county disadvantage and odds of low birth weight during the last decade of the Great Migration. We used the US Census from 1970 as well as the birth records of first-time Black mothers who migrated from the South collected through the National Center of Health Statistics from 1973 to 1980 (n = 154,145). We examined three measures of area-based opportunity: Black male high school graduation rate, Black poverty rate, and racialized economic residential segregation. We used multilevel logistic regression, where mothers were nested within US counties, to quantify the relationship between county disadvantage and low birth weight. After adjusting for individual risk and protective factors for infant health, there was no relationship between county opportunity measures and low birth weight among migrators. Although high socioeconomic opportunity is typically associated with protection of low birth weight, we did not see these outcomes in this study. These results may support that persistent racial discrimination encountered in the North inhibited infant health even as migrators experienced higher economic opportunity relative to the South.

The Great Migration and Implicit Bias in the Northern United States

The spatial patterning of present-day racial bias in Southern states is predicted by the prevalence of slavery in 1860 and the structural inequalities that followed. Here we extend the investigation of the historical roots of implicit bias to areas outside the South by tracing the Great Migration of Black southerners to Northern and Western states. We found that the proportion of Black residents in each county (N = 1,981 counties) during the years of the Great Migration (1900–1950) was significantly associated with greater implicit bias among White residents today. The association was statistically explained by measures of structural inequalities. Results parallel the pattern seen in Southern states but reflect population changes that occurred decades later as cities reacted to larger Black populations. These findings suggest that implicit biases reflect structural inequalities and the historical conditions that produced them.

Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States by Erin Austin Dwyer

Reviewed by: Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States by Erin Austin Dwyer Laura McCoy (bio) Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States. By Erin Austin Dwyer. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Pp. 320. Cloth, $39.95.) Erin Austin Dwyer’s intriguing new book brings together the histories of slavery and emotions to illuminate how Black and white southerners alike deployed emotions as “a currency of power” (3). Dwyer reads slave narratives alongside and against documents of enslavers to reconstruct people’s emotional lives. While it is never possible to know how other people truly felt, Dwyer analyzes the rhetoric used to discuss emotions, what emotions were expected of whom, motives for feigning or hiding specific emotions, and differences between emotional norms and actual emotional practices. In doing so, she uncovers “what people thought emotions could actually accomplish” (13)—in short, how power operated through emotions in both slavery and Emancipation. From the outset, Dwyer makes clear that the stakes of these affective politics were not even. For enslavers, deviating from emotional norms most commonly risked public scrutiny and potential loss of capital, while enslaved people “risked the whip, the auction block, or even death” (3). While historians of slavery have separately explored affective relations among the slaveholding class or enslaved communities, Dwyer considers affective relations between the two groups. This approach enables her to interrogate how individuals navigated power hierarchies through emotional expression and to convincingly contend that attending to emotions sharpens our understanding of how white southerners perpetuated and Black southerners resisted the politics of white supremacy during the years before and after the Civil War. The first chapter broadly explores how enslavers constructed their emotional lives and social identities through enslaved people and, in turn, how enslaved people could manipulate slave owners’ feelings and relationships to survive and resist enslavement. The second chapter explains how southerners learned the emotional politics of a society organized around slavery. Slaveholding parents actively taught their children how to master their own emotions and those of the people they enslaved. From enslaved adults, trickster tales, and the process of play, enslaved children learned how to mask sadness, read slaveholders’ emotions, and identify emotional allies—all affective strategies that could mean the difference between life and death. Together, these chapters emphasize that the emotional politics of slavery were socially constructed and thus intentionally reinforced or resisted. [End Page 246] The third and fourth chapters consider the rhetorical importance and literal commodification of emotions in a society dominated by market forces. For instance, members of the planter class linked the appearance of contentment to profitability, worrying that “sulky” slaves were poor workers and that crying or lashing out on the auction block depreciated an enslaved person’s value. Because trustworthiness had market value, enslaved people could strategically display honesty and loyalty to gain benefits like greater mobility. These chapters demonstrate how the market values of happiness and trust constrained enslaved people’s freedom of emotional expression while simultaneously providing opportunities for enslavers and enslaved people to negotiate their daily lives and material conditions. Chapters 5 and 6 explore the contours and consequences of affective discipline as a means of social control. Enslavers assumed the authority to coerce displays of desired emotions from enslaved people and punish them for expressing an emotion deemed inappropriate or threatening, such as grief or anger. The goal of affective discipline was not just to control enslaved people’s emotional expressions, but also to punish them for how they had made slaveholders feel. The final chapter examines Emancipation as “a seismic shift in the emotional terrain of the South” (162), in part because the planter class fretted over losing the power to affectively discipline Black people. Formerly enslaved people made clear that they believed being free meant the ability to pursue happiness and freely express emotions that had been restricted in bondage. Members of the planter class felt threatened by this emotional liberation and employed both legal and extralegal tactics to reassert the emotional hierarchies of slavery, especially the authority to control Black people’s emotions. The power of Mastering Emotions rests on Dwyer’s patient and nuanced readings of conflicting perspectives and...

Moving to opportunity? Low birth weight outcomes among Southern-born Black mothers during the Great Migration

ObjectiveThe Great Migration was a mass movement in the United States during the twentieth century of roughly eight million Black Southerners to the Northeast, Midwest, and West. Despite its significance, little is known about the health outcomes associated with this internal migration. This study assessed the relationship between migration and low birth weight among mothers born in the South between 1950 and 1969. MethodsWe used approximately 1.4 million birth records of Black infants maintained by the US National Center for Health Statistics. To tease out the roles of the healthy migrant bias and of destination contexts, we compared two migration groups to Southern non-migrators: (1) migrators moving to the North and (2) migrators moving within the South. Non-migrants were matched to migrants using coarsened exact matching. We estimated the relationship between migration status and low birth weight stratified by birth year cohorts using logistic regression models. ResultsThere was positive selection in education and marriage among migrants moving out of the South and within the South. Results showed lower odds of low birth weight in both migration groups compared to Southern non-migrants. The odds ratios of low birth weight were similar in both comparisons. ConclusionWe found evidence consistent with a healthy migrant bias in infant health among mothers during the last decades of the Great Migration. Despite better economic opportunity, migrating to the North may not have offered additional protection for infant birth weight outcomes.

A Letter from the American Historical Association to California’s Placentia–Yorba Linda Unified School District

Research Article| May 01 2023 A Letter from the American Historical Association to California’s Placentia–Yorba Linda Unified School District James R. Grossman James R. Grossman JAMES R. GROSSMAN is executive director of the American Historical Association. Formerly vice-president for research and education at the Newberry Library, he has taught at the University of Chicago and the University of California, San Diego. The author of Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration and A Chance to Make Good: African-Americans, 1900–1929, Grossman was project director and coeditor of the print and digital Encyclopedia of Chicago. He is editor emeritus of the University of Chicago Press book series “Historical Studies of Urban America,” which he abandoned to his colleagues after fifty volumes. Articles and short essays have focused on urban history, African American history, ethnicity, higher education, and the place of history in public culture. Short pieces have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Time, New York Daily News, North Shore Magazine, Chronicle of Higher Education, The Hill, and elsewhere. Grossman’s consulting experience includes history-related projects generated by BBC, Smithsonian, various “Teaching American History” programs, and a wide range of theater companies, films, museums, libraries, and foundations. He has served on governing boards of the American Council of Learned Societies, Association of American Colleges and Universities, Center for Research Libraries, National Humanities Alliance, Vivian G. Harsh Society, and Chicago Metro History Education Center. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar California History (2023) 100 (2): 78–81. https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2023.100.2.78 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation James R. Grossman; A Letter from the American Historical Association to California’s Placentia–Yorba Linda Unified School District. California History 1 May 2023; 100 (2): 78–81. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2023.100.2.78 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentCalifornia History Search In January 2022, the American Historical Association (AHA) sent a letter to the leadership of the Placentia–Yorba Linda Unified School District (California) opposing a proposed Resolution No. 21–12, “Resolution Opposing the Teaching of Critical Race Theory” (see the proposed resolution at https://4.files.edl.io/e3c9/11/22/21/155531-39d91aa4-c235-4949-a1f4-153f76aa17e8.pdf). We were alerted to this agenda item by a resident concerned about censorship and the quality of history education. We immediately noticed that its text resembled bills being introduced in many state legislatures; the AHA had already begun writing letters to members of those legislatures (for the AHA’s list of letters, organized by state—at this writing, eighteen states—see https://www.historians.org/news-and-advocacy/teaching-history-with-integrity/freedom-to-learn). In this particular letter the AHA noted that “the proposal singled out one set of ideas—critical race theory—as a subject that cannot be taught in Placentia–Yorba Linda schools. The letter includes a link to a statement criticizing similar legislative efforts to restrict education about racism in American... You do not currently have access to this content.

The People of Rose Hill: Black and White Life on a Maryland Plantation by Lucy Maddox

Reviewed by: The People of Rose Hill: Black and White Life on a Maryland Plantation by Lucy Maddox Whitney Nell Stewart (bio) The People of Rose Hill: Black and White Life on a Maryland Plantation. By Lucy Maddox. ( Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021. Pp. 244. Cloth, $54.95.) Scholarly consensus of what defines a plantation has often focused on the estate's number of laborers or the type of crop they harvested, yet we know that these sites were about far more than agriculture. They were workplaces, but also homeplaces. They were shaped by the individuals who lived there and by the relationships, both imposed and chosen, those individuals formed. And they were structured by a violent, oppressive system that denied so much to Black southerners for the benefit of white enslavers. What makes plantations fascinating, then, is that they can reveal to us big stories of deeply ingrained structural inequality and small stories of personal experience. In The People of Rose Hill, Lucy Maddox attempts the difficult task of telling both the macro and micro of plantation life in the U.S. South, giving us an engaging deep dive into a single estate on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Maddox provides a history of Rose Hill and, with the plantation mistress's diaries as her primary account, extracts an impressive amount of information about dozens of plantation residents, their work, and their relationships. The narrative is, for the most part, chronologically structured and focused on the first half of the nineteenth century. Maddox reveals how, in this transformative time, a Maryland plantation could embody the simultaneous stability of the plantation model and its capacity to quickly change, emphasizing for the reader just how contingent, unexpected, yet drearily repetitive life could be on an antebellum plantation. Long before the sectional crisis came to full civil war, most Maryland enslavers recognized that slavery was on the decline in their state. However, in the particular area where Rose Hill sat—the Eastern Shore—planters such as Rose Hill owner Thomas Forman refused to believe it. Historians Ira Berlin and Barbara Jeanne Fields have noted that peculiar stubbornness among Eastern Shore planters before; yet Maddox's single plantation [End Page 119] focus allows her to dig deeper into the particularities that produced a different kind of Maryland enslaver and plantation. The tobacco industry had collapsed in the Chesapeake by the late eighteenth century, eventually leading to the rampant selling or emancipating of enslaved Marylanders throughout the state in the nineteenth century. Yet Rose Hill was relatively stable economically, maintaining its enslaved population of roughly thirty to forty throughout the first four decades of the nineteenth century. Rose Hill had adjusted, focusing on sustainable agriculture, selling such household products as butter, and reaping profits from Forman's other properties in Delaware. Rose Hill is not necessarily representative of a southern plantation or even of a Maryland plantation. But its history reiterates the flexibility and longevity of slavery and capitalism even in a time and place in which many believed the institution was floundering. Maddox is not only interested in the enslaving, plantation-owning Forman family, however. She weaves together stories of Black and white folks, enslaving and enslaved people, hired hands and wealthy visitors to reveal the array of experiences at Rose Hill. The short biographical vignettes of Rose Hill's enslaved residents found throughout the book are especially key in decentering enslavers and showing diversity within the shared experience of plantation slavery. At the heart of The People of Rose Hill is Maddox's investigation of the complicated, difficult, and often destructive relationships between the various individuals and groups that made up the plantation. For instance, the analysis of Thomas and Martha Forman's relationship is balanced and persuasive, painstakingly comparing two different versions of Martha's diary to illuminate the tension between a husband and wife's ideals of marriage, manhood, and womanhood on a southern plantation. Indeed, Maddox's work in recovering these contemporaneous diaries, both written by Martha but one with the editorial oversight of Thomas, is an important reminder of why careful archival research is so necessary. Maddox is especially clear about what her main source—Martha...

Elizabeth L. Jemison. Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South.

Scholars have long recognized that citizenship was perhaps the most hotly contested concept in America in the second half of the nineteenth century. From Dred Scott v. Sandford to the Fourteenth Amendment to Plessy v. Ferguson, both the meaning of citizenship and its relationship to equality were unstable. As Elizabeth L. Jemison argues in Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South, Christianity’s role in shaping the meaning of citizenship in postemancipation America has not been fully appreciated. Jemison’s main contention is that Christian identity was central to emerging conceptions of citizenship and thus is indispensable for understanding both African Americans’ aspirations for equality and white southerners’ attempts to maintain a racial hierarchy through violence and segregation. Jemison builds on the taxonomy of three competing religious visions for the postemancipation South—of Black southerners, of white southerners, and of white northern missionaries—that Daniel W. Stowell established in Rebuilding Zion: The Religious Reconstruction of the South, 1863–1877. The first vision maintained that African Americans’ status as Christians meant they should be equal citizens. In contrast, white southern Christians adapted the paternalistic rhetoric of proslavery theology to defend a racially exclusivist understanding of citizenship. Lastly, white northern missionaries advanced their own form of paternalism that separated Black Christian identity from Black civil and political rights. Jemison’s book, which examines the lower Mississippi River valley of Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and western Tennessee, mostly confirms Stowell’s earlier work on Georgia and eastern Tennessee.

Reclaiming the Revolutionary

Reclaiming the Revolutionary

Reinventing the Blues

Reinventing the Blues Gregory P. Downs (bio) B. Brian Foster, I Don’t Like the Blues: Race, Place, and the Backbeat of Black Life. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. 206 pp. Figures, maps, appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $99.00. In 1941, three Fisk University scholars—musician John Wesley Work, sociologist Lewis Jones, and sociology student Samuel Adams—documented the listening habits of Black residents of Coahuma County, Mississippi, and the jukebox offerings in the Black-patronized establishments of Coahuma’s county seat, Clarksdale, while their Library of Congress colleague Alan Lomax recorded local blues and folk musicians. Lomax was in search of Robert Johnson, who had died three years earlier, so instead recorded songs by Muddy Waters, Son House, and other Delta blues musicians that remain lodestars of the genre. Work, Jones, and Adams, however, discovered that many Black Delta people did not listen to much blues. At the King and Anderson Plantation, near Clarksdale, Black farmworkers and sharecroppers liked some blues songs (though primarily of the crooning type that would influence 1940s jazz) but listened mostly to popular songs, swing numbers, hymns, and gospel, admiring Cab Calloway and the sometimes-bluesy Count Basie but also Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, and Roy Acuff. On the jukebox at Messenger’s Café in Clarksdale, the top six numbers were by bandleaders Count Basie, Louis Jordan, Johnny Hodges, Eddy Duchin, and Sammy Kaye. Even in the cradle of the blues, scant miles from Robert Johnson’s Crossroads, in the town where Bessie Smith died, Black Mississippians were mostly listening to other things. Even in 1941.1 This disparity between apparent and actual Black Southern taste endures: now, Clarksdale is a center for blues tourism, attracting more than 100,000 visitors—almost all white—to the blues clubs downtown, while Black people repeatedly told sociologist B. Brian Foster that they mostly liked other music: soul (Luther Vandross, Marvin Gaye, Patti LaBelle) and gospel, among older people, and hip-hop (Nicki Minaj, Moneybagg Yo, 2 Chainz), among the younger. Even when asked to name blues music they like, they refer to people who might be classed as blues but might also be called southern soul: Johnnie Taylor, Marvin Sease, Jackie Neal, Tyrone Davis. [End Page 422] How important are the blues anyway to Black Mississippians? This is the question Foster poses in his skeptical, sometimes-circular, but often compelling I Don’t Like the Blues: Race, Place & the Backbeat of Black Life. Over five years, Foster lived in Clarksdale for stretches, observing from diner booths and sidewalks, and conducted more than 200 interviews with Black Clarks-dale residents. What Foster wanted to know changed over the course of his interviews, in ways that help us pin down the elusive, unavoidable question of what the blues mean today. Foster arrived in Clarksdale determined not to write a study of the blues. He wrote in his notebooks, “I am not studying the blues” (p. 2). He wondered if “Black southerners were no longer blues people” but “post-blues people,” “beyond the blues” (p. 3). Foster himself hated the blues, and hated even more Clarksdale’s downtown blues district. And Black resident after Black resident told him that they too hated the blues and never went to those clubs. “Fuck that blues shit,” one tells him (p. 3). At its best blues was “old-timing,” (p. 51) as one of Foster’s subjects says, (a view arguably widespread even among 1930s Clarksdale Black residents); at worst, it was a put-on for white tourists, who got what they demanded and who saw in it what they wanted to see, mostly a façade of authenticity. Instead of the blues, Foster went to Clarksdale to explore an important lacuna in contemporary sociology (and arguably history): the study of 21st-century rural Black Southerners. Foster quickly sketches the emergence of the Black rural South as a problem in early-20th-century sociology, then its eclipse by urban studies, then by studies of what Foster calls the New South (Atlanta) and the Historic South (New Orleans.) What disappeared in these studies were the people who stayed in place, in places where the population was shrinking, the economy...

Emancipating Masculinity: Black Union Deserters and Their Families in the Civil War South

In June 1863, James Smith fled slavery in Virginia and joined the Union ranks. Not six months later he deserted again—this time emancipating himself from the 36th United States Colored Infantry (Usci). Chaplain Henry McNeal Turner of the 1st Usci learned of the desertion and wrestled with why Smith would run from the army. To proponents of military service such as Turner, fighting would forcefully reclaim Black manhood in the wake of emasculating bondage. Deserters disrupted these aspirations, bewildering the chaplain. “I can neither hear nor imagine the reason why these men desert to the rebels,” Turner wrote to the Christian Recorder. “Perhaps it is mere wife-love,” he speculated, “some of them having wives South to whom they feel much endeared, and not knowing any thing concerning their condition, it seems to prey upon their minds, until all fear, dread and manhood is lost. And thus they desert.” The chaplain dismissed Smith as unmanly for shirking his duty. But the chaplain failed to consider that soldiers could also prove themselves men acting on “wife-love.” Indeed, Smith and many of the nearly 140,000 Black southerners who enlisted had escaped slavery and, while committed to service, yearned to care for their families in bondage or refugee camps. When Union pickets captured Smith and questioned him, Smith spoke of his wife behind enemy lines, showing he valued his responsibilities as a husband at least as much as his duties as a soldier. In his desertion, he enacted a masculine self that was distinct from the prescribed code of manhood Turner referenced.1

Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South: African Americans and Law Enforcement in Birmingham, Memphis, and New Orleans, 1920–1945 by Brandon T. Jett

Reviewed by: Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South: African Americans and Law Enforcement in Birmingham, Memphis, and New Orleans, 1920–1945 by Brandon T. Jett Theresa Jach Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South: African Americans and Law Enforcement in Birmingham, Memphis, and New Orleans, 1920–1945. By Brandon T. Jett. Making the Modern South. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021. Pp. xiv, 235. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-7507-1.) In Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South: African Americans and Law Enforcement in Birmingham, Memphis, and New Orleans, 1920–1945, Brandon T. Jett looks at how African Americans responded to crime and policing in three southern cities from 1920 to the end of World War II. While James Forman Jr.'s Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (New York, 2017) explores this theme from the 1960s on, Jett provides an important look at a critical period in the development of policing in the Jim Crow South. As police forces expanded and professionalized, African Americans found ways to use the police to clean up their own neighborhoods. Focusing on agency, Jett shows that Black southerners were not just victims of police indifference or brutality. Using extensive police records, newspaper accounts of crime, court records, and witness statements, Jett gives voice to both victims and perpetrators of crime in Memphis, New Orleans, and Birmingham. Jett chooses these three southern cities for his study because they all were legally segregated, and they all greatly expanded their police forces, but had no Black police officers, during the period covered in the book. African American communities in these cities wanted police involvement in their neighborhoods to cut down on crime. Jett thoroughly delineates the ways African Americans manipulated the police to serve their own needs. While Black residents did not want the police to target them, they did want the police to treat them fairly and to prevent and punish crimes committed against them. The African American community was not only overpoliced but also underpoliced. The police saw African Americans as likely criminals and yet rarely went after those who committed crimes against them. Police often ignored or half-heartedly investigated crimes committed against African Americans. Jett argues that focusing on intraracial crime allows him to center the reactions of Black southerners rather than white fears of Black crime. He convincingly shows that both working-class and middle-class African Americans wanted the police to stop crime in their communities. They found ways to manipulate and use the police to their own ends. They sought fair administration and application of the law, due process, more police in their communities, and the hiring of Black officers. However, because Black communities had little formal political power, city governments were not responsive to their demands. Jett uses a multitude of sources to show that African Americans often used self-policing to combat crime. And significantly, he proves that the police needed the help of the Black community to arrest Black criminals. African Americans often went to the police station or called the police for help if they witnessed a crime. Witnesses turned over weapons and, in some cases, captured and held suspects. African Americans routinely did their own investigation before contacting the police and provided names, addresses, and other help in solving the crime. In fact, in many instances, they did the policemen's jobs for them. [End Page 799] Working within a Jim Crow system that demanded deference to white supremacy, African Americans found ways to combat crime in their neighborhoods. They would, at least on the surface, acquiesce to the system, in order to get the police to combat crime, trust Black witnesses, protect Black victims, and help return stolen property. Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South provides a much-needed and nuanced look at African American interactions with the police in the urban South. It adds an important perspective on how the Black community used its power and agency to compel the police to combat crime and protect their neighborhoods. Theresa Jach Houston Community College–Northwest Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association

Review: The Princess and the Prophet: The Secret History of Magic, Race, and Moorish Muslims in America, by Jacob S. Dorman

Review: <i>The Princess and the Prophet: The Secret History of Magic, Race, and Moorish Muslims in America</i>, by Jacob S. Dorman

Is the South Still Different?

For several decades southern Democrats constituted a conservative bloc within the Democratic caucus in the House of Representatives. After the enfranchisement of southern blacks in the J 960s and the development of a two party system in the South, many southern Democratic representatives began to compile more moderate voting records. By the 1980s, some scholars were emphasizing the greater unity of the Democratic caucus. This paper examines regional differences among House Democrats in several policy areas. It is argued that, on most issues, the Southern Democratic delegation is still a distinctly conservative bloc within the Democratic caucus.

Extraordinary violence and the congressional struggle to create free, fair, and open elections in the nineteenth-century U.S.

ABSTRACT The expansive, locally run, and uproariously violent United States was a testing ground for basic questions of democracy in an age of expansion, emancipation, and proletarianization. Over the nineteenth century, the U.S. led the way in extending the vote and in efforts to retract the vote from those who already had it, and thus became a key site for establishing the ways that democracies would respond to violence intended to recast vote outcomes. The effort to define the line between legitimate and illegitimate political violence and to establish the remedies of election contests to overturn disputed returns helps us see the complicated, sometimes paradoxical, relationship between voting processes and political outcomes. Over the late nineteenth century, U.S. elections were outrageously violent and also surprisingly open to working-class engagement, including of freedmen. Violence both oppressed Black southerners and offered them a path to victory. Reducing violence in politics was crucial for opening access to women, denied the vote virtually everywhere in the United States in the nineteenth century, and physically frailer men, and it was also crucial for eliminating Black participation in formal politics throughout the south. The system that emerged in the early twentieth century, purged of most election-day violence (but rooted upon constant threats of violence otherwise) and of contested elections was both fairer on its face and grotesquely more restrictive in practice. From these juxtapositions arise questions that still trouble the United States today, questions about the line between a valid and an unfair election, and remedies for injured voters.

School Desegregation and Black Teacher Employment

Abstract Before the racial integration of schools in the southern United States, predominantly African American schools were staffed almost exclusively by African American teachers as well, and teaching constituted an extraordinarily large share of professional employment among southern Blacks. The large-scale desegregation of southern schools that occurred after passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act represented a potential threat to this employment base, and this paper estimates how student integration affected Black teacher employment. Using newly assembled archival data from 759 southern school districts observed between 1960 and 1972, I estimate that a school district transitioning from fully segregated to fully integrated education, which approximates the experience of the modal southern district in this period, led to a 41.7% reduction in Black teacher employment. Additional results, including event-study specifications and models with extensive controls for concurrent policy changes, strongly suggest that these employment reductions were a causal effect of integration and not due to school district self-selection into desegregation. To study the broader impacts of reduced teaching employment, I estimate race-specific changes in occupations and earnings in the decennial Censuses and find that displaced southern Black teachers either entered lower skill occupations within the South or migrated out of the region to continue teaching and that integration-induced displacement led to substantial earnings reductions.

World War II and Black Economic Progress

During the 1940s, a substantial share of southern Black men moved from low-skilled to much better paying semiskilled jobs. Using newly digitized military data, I show that counties with higher World War II casualty rates among semiskilled White soldiers saw an increase in the share of semiskilled Black workers. These deaths opened new employment opportunities for Black southerners and, together with learning effects by employers, can explain 35% of the occupational upgrading at mid-century. I provide evidence that the casualty-induced labor shortages reduced racial barriers to entry, leading to a positive selection of Black workers into semiskilled employment.

Historical prevalence of slavery predicts contemporary American gun ownership.

American gun-owners, uniquely, view firearms as a means of keeping themselves safe from dangers both physical and psychological. We root this belief in the experience of White Southerners during Reconstruction-a moment when a massive upsurge in the availability of firearms co-occurred with a worldview threat from the emancipation and the political empowerment of Black Southerners. We show that the belief-complex formed in this historical moment shapes contemporary gun culture: The prevalence of slavery in a Southern county (measured in 1860) predicts the frequency of firearms in the present day. This relationship holds above and beyond a number of potential covariates, including contemporary crime rates, police spending, degree of racial segregation and inequality, socioeconomic conditions, and voting patterns in the 2016 Presidential election; and is partially mediated by the frequency of people in the county reporting that they generally do not feel safe. This Southern origin of gun culture may help to explain why we find that worries about safety do not predict county-level gun ownership outside of historically slave-owning counties, and why we find that social connection to historically slaveholding counties predicts county-level gun ownership, even outside of the South.