Southern Blacks Research Articles

New Negro Politics in the Jim Crow South by Claudrena N. Harold

Reviewed by: New Negro Politics in the Jim Crow South by Claudrena N. Harold Marcia Walker-McWilliams New Negro Politics in the Jim Crow South. By Claudrena N. Harold. Politics and Culture in the Twentieth-Century South. ( Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016. Pp. xii, 177. $54.95, ISBN 978–0-8203–3512-4.) Despite its broader origins and breadth, the New Negro era is frequently exemplified by the cultural arts and literary movement known as the Harlem Renaissance, where cosmopolitan urban artists and intellectuals freely expressed and promoted a new black cultural identity from the end of World War I through the early 1930s. Claudrena N. Harold's New Negro Politics in the Jim Crow South is an important addition to the field because it argues that black nationalist politics, labor activism, and political organizing among black southerners were also exemplary of the New Negro era. Harold's text pushes us to consider black people in the South in tandem with the characteristics of the New Negro—"self-assertion and self-possession, a cosmopolitan outlook, race pride, and a strong modernist sensibility" (p. 14). To support her argument linking black southerners to the New Negro era, Harold examines the organizing efforts of black workers and labor activists who fought for equal access to jobs and fair and equal treatment in the workplace while calling out rampant racism within the American Federation of Labor and challenging the right of members of the black elite to speak for the black working class. The efforts of black labor activists resulted in the influential yet short-lived National Brotherhood Workers of America (NBWA). Harold persuasively argues that the struggles of the black working class produced an economics-based black nationalist politics that paved the way for subsequent labor organizing in the South, including A. Philip Randolph's Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. The explosion of Marcus Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) also contributed to and benefited from a New Negro outlook in the South. Black southerners organized local UNIA chapters that built on a nascent working-class race consciousness. The New Orleans division of the UNIA, the most prominent of these chapters, started a free clinic, [End Page 202] an adult school, and community outreach programs and prepared black people for civic leadership. Harold expertly integrates a gendered analysis into the text through her exploration of black women's labor activism and political strivings after suffrage. She features women like Jeannette Carter, a journalist, civil rights advocate, and suffragist who sought to empower black women workers while supporting the black working class through organizations like the NBWA. Harold also highlights the blind spots of prominent black male labor leaders, noting, "A stark contrast existed between the strong cooperation between black women and men at the local level and the glaring omission of women's concerns in the political engagements of black men in more national settings" (p. 40). Further, Harold positions black women as embodying both the New Negro and the New Woman through their determination to vote. Despite intimidation and an outright disregard for their voting rights, southern black men and women organized voter registration and education drives and ran black candidates for political office. Additional chapters on black intellectual thought in the South and the impact of the 1927 Mississippi River flood on black southerners' consciousness provide deeper insight into the scope of New Negro politics. However, many of the activists, intellectuals, and organizing campaigns that Harold examines come from coastal Atlantic cities such as Jacksonville, Florida, New Orleans, Louisiana, and, most frequently, the Hampton Roads area of Virginia. To what extent were black protest activity and New Negro politics evident in more rural and interior portions of the South? New Negro southerners leveraged institutions like the black press and black colleges, but did they utilize other institutions like the black church? Ultimately, Harold's text necessarily expands our understandings of the New Negro era and black southerners, who a generation later became the architects of the civil rights movement. Marcia Walker-McWilliams Rice University Copyright © 2018 The Southern Historical Association

Christianity and Race in the American South: A History by Paul Harvey

Reviewed by: Christianity and Race in the American South: A History by Paul Harvey Matthew Harper (bio) Christianity and Race in the American South: A History. By Paul Harvey. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Pp. 260. Cloth, $40.00.) Readers will wonder how Paul Harvey fits so much into two hundred pages of text. Harvey calls his survey of four hundred years of southern racial and religious history “a deliberatively selective narrative” (2), but he does not reduce the South to one group of people or one period of time. Nor does he smooth out the region’s complexities. Early Spanish Catholics, Moravian missionaries, slave insurrectionists, proslavery theologians, labor organizers, blues musicians, skeptics, and prosperity gospel televangelists all appear in Harvey’s narrative. Few scholars could have written something so concise, comprehensive, and accessible. Paul Harvey calls this book the capstone of his writing career so far, a career that has led him to write ever broader surveys. In this volume, he does not offer anything surprising to specialists in southern religion, but he weaves decades of scholarship in the field into a concise and compelling story. Harvey frames the book around the region’s paradoxes. The central paradox is that a region of diverse “religious ideas and expressions result[ed] in a dominant establishment at once so productive of extraordinary cruelty and generative of explosively artistic forms” (3). The hegemony of conservative evangelical Protestantism masked, indeed existed because of, the region’s diversity of race, class, and creed. Sometimes Harvey’s description of racial hierarchy and revivalistic evangelicalism sounds like what an older generation of scholars bemoaned as the cultural captivity of southern Christianity. But that is not the impression one gets from reading the entire book. Harvey sees paradoxes everywhere, and he reminds us that southern religion was never as monolithic or parochial as it seemed. The first three chapters try to rescue the early South from our anachronistic stereotypes of the “Bible Belt.” Harvey reminds us of a time when the region was largely not Christian and lacked a regional identity. The early colonial South was a place of diverse Native American religions, Spanish Catholic and Anglican missions, Quakers and other dissenters. The Atlantic slave trade introduced diverse African religions, including Islam and Kongolese Catholicism. In early Virginia and Carolina, Harvey argues, race and Christianity mixed uneasily. “Christian” was a racial identity, and slave owners feared that Christian slaves threatened the racial order. Into that uneasy mix entered evangelical revivalists and American revolutionaries, both of whom introduced a dangerous egalitarianism. The tension between these egalitarian impulses and the region’s desire for social and [End Page 159] racial hierarchy, Harvey says, resolved in favor of the latter. The danger of evangelicalism and republicanism necessitated the creation of the white South’s conservatism, “with its emphasis on order and obedience” (34). Evangelical religion by 1830 became allied with white conquest, Indian removal, and the expansion of slavery. The dominance of proslavery white evangelical Protestantism was never as solid as it seemed, a point underscored when Harvey opens his chapter on the antebellum era with the evangelical preacher Nat Turner. Harvey traces the development of two related but contrasting theologies: proslavery thought and black liberation. Both of these theologies remain in play and in flux in Harvey’s fifth chapter, a quick survey of why theology mattered to white and black southerners’ experience of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Harvey argues that the way soldiers, preachers, and slaves looked for God’s hand in the war “probably lengthened and worsened the war once it came,” as religion “sacralized distrusts and hatreds” during the conflict and for decades later (99). Harvey also notes how proslavery theology morphed after emancipation into something more explicitly and “scientifically” racist. In Harvey’s telling, there was no wall of separation between churches and bloody conflicts over black political power. Harvey’s theme of paradox comes into clearest expression in his chapter on the Jim Crow era. In the early twentieth century, the South became “a problem”—think lynching, the Scopes trial, rural poverty—and “an idea”— think moonlight, magnolias, and Aunt Jemima. Intellectual critics derided the backwardness of white and black religion. Southern...

To Stand Aside or Stand Alone: Southern Reform Rabbis and the Civil Rights Movement by P. Allen Krause

Reviewed by: To Stand Aside or Stand Alone: Southern Reform Rabbis and the Civil Rights Movement by P. Allen Krause Josh Parshall (bio) To Stand Aside or Stand Alone: Southern Reform Rabbis and the Civil Rights Movement. By P. Allen Krause with Stephen Krause, edited by Mark K. Bauman. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2016. xviii + 402 pp. At the 1966 convention of the Central Conference of American Rabbis in Toronto, Hebrew Union College rabbinical student P. Allen Krause interviewed thirteen acting or former rabbis of Reform congregations in southern cities about the civil rights movement. Although Krause wrote a thesis based on his interviews and published some of his findings [End Page 163] (stripped of identifying information about the interviewees) in the American Jewish Archives Journal, the recordings and other research materials were partially sealed for twenty-five years. To Stand Aside or Stand Alone makes these interviews widely available as transcripts for the first time. Rabbi Krause returned to historical research around the time of his retirement in 2008 and, with encouragement from historian and editor Mark Bauman, developed the now fifty-year-old interviews into a book project. After Krause died in 2012, his son Stephen worked with Bauman to finish the manuscript, which supplements the transcripts with biographical sketches and brief local histories by Rabbi Krause as well as introductions to the interviews by Bauman. Both the author and editor provide important contextual information in their introductions, and Bauman's bibliographic essay situates the newly available primary sources in relation to the historiography of southern Jews and African American civil rights. Krause's interviews follow a standard format. Each rabbi discusses the development of local civil rights activism, the reactions of the non-Jewish white community in comparison to the views of local Jews, white Christian clergy's responses to the challenges of civil rights, their own participation or lack thereof in local struggles, and their opinions about the actions of national Jewish groups and northern Jewish activists. The rabbis' responses vary according to the hostility with which white communities reacted to the prospect of desegregation and also according to their own activities. Krause labels more progressive environments "The Land of the Almost Possible" and the most reactionary cities "The Land of the Almost Impossible." While differences in local political climate greatly affected the availability of potential allies among white Christian clergy and white civic leaders, the interviews demonstrate that rabbis' political perspectives, personal experiences with race and racism, and strengths and weaknesses as religious leaders all affected the actions that they took (or did not take) in regard to civil rights. For the most part, the interviews represent the experiences and activities of moderate progressive rabbis, and (as Krause intended) the book establishes them as part of the liberal contingent of the white South. Some, such as James Wax in Memphis and William Silverman in Nashville, publicly supported African American civil rights and were well known throughout their local communities for their progressive attitudes. A larger number promoted desegregation from their pulpits and worked behind the scenes with ministerial and civic groups to support civil rights reforms. Only a few of the rabbis expressed strong reservations about desegregation or reported no concrete civil rights action. With a few interesting exceptions, then, the rabbis featured in the book deserve credit for helping to smooth the path of desegregation in [End Page 164] their respective locales, even if courts, the federal government, and direct action by local protesters played more significant roles. At the same time, many of the interviews encapsulate the moderate liberal viewpoints of the time, which often second-guessed activists' tactics; predicated the extension of civil and economic rights on black southerners' adherence to white, middle-class norms; and exhibited a strong sense of racial and class-based paternalism. As a result, the rabbis' testimonies reflect the complicated tensions among liberal white southerners' empathy for African Americans, their internalized acceptance of segregationist logics, and the various risks—social, economic, and bodily—that constrained would-be allies in the civil rights struggle. Their stories become useful not merely as tools for praising or critiquing southern Jews and their rabbis but also for understanding how...

Nature's Return: An Environmental History of Congaree National Park by Hilary Green

Reviewed by: Nature's Return: An Environmental History of Congaree National Park by Hilary Green Daniel B. Thorp (bio) Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865–1890. By Hilary Green. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. Pp. 258. $125.00 cloth; $35.00 paper) Hilary Green's Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865–1890 adds nicely to our understanding of the extended nature of Reconstruction in the American South. Remaking the racial patterns of political, social, and economic life in the former Confederacy did not end with the departure of the Freedmen's Bureau and federal troops during the 1870s. Nor did the [End Page 544] full weight of Jim Crow laws immediately come crashing down on African Americans with the official end of Reconstruction in 1877. Rather, former slaves and their children continued pressing to gain the full privileges of citizenship—privileges to which they felt they were entitled and that they believed they had been promised at the time of their emancipation. As the title suggests, Educational Reconstruction considers this process through the lens of public education in the urban South. Specifically, Green focuses on the cities of Richmond, Virginia, and Mobile, Alabama, and explores the emergence and development of schools for African Americans through three distinct periods. The first two chapters detail the initial establishment of schools for freed-people by northern philanthropic societies, the Freedmen's Bureau, and freedpeople themselves. The next six chapters explore the transition to state-supported education that occurred after 1870 in both Richmond and Mobile and the "quality school campaigns" waged in each to effect improved conditions in the cities' racially segregated public school systems. Finally, an extended epilogue analyzes factors behind the failure of Congress to enact the Blair Education Bill in 1890 and the subsequent ascendancy of Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee model of industrial education for southern blacks. Green's research draws heavily on a variety of public records from the local, state, and federal levels; the archives of numerous religious and philanthropic organizations; and newspapers from Boston to New Orleans. From them she is often able to present the hopes and fears of African American educators, voters, and parents in their own words and demonstrate convincingly their belief that a quality education was essential to their campaign for full freedom and citizenship. That campaign, however, was never in the hands of African Americans alone. Green demonstrates convincingly that between 1865 and 1890 southern blacks found and worked with a changing array of white allies in their effort to secure a quality education for themselves and their children. These white allies did not control black efforts to improve their schools; in both Richmond and [End Page 545] Mobile African Americans knew what they wanted, articulated their demands clearly, and worked for them tirelessly. The presence and commitment of white allies was important, though. Indeed, Green maintains, it was the presence in Virginia of the Readjuster Party that explains why blacks in Richmond enjoyed greater success in their campaign for quality schools than their counterparts in Mobile did. Educational Reconstruction makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of southern society during the final third of the nineteenth century. It joins the work of scholars such as Steven Hahn and Michael Perman in demonstrating that black and white southerners continued to negotiate the boundaries of a new reality for years after federal troops left the region. In one regard, however, Green's interpretation of educational reconstruction may require a corrective. She views the triumph of Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee model as one of rural black southerners over their urban brother and sisters, yet in Southwest Virginia, at least, rural blacks also objected loudly to the shift from a more classical education to an industrial model. That notwithstanding, Hilary Green's Educational Reconstruction offers a valuable study of the long and determined effort made by black southerners to achieve educational equality in the decades immediately after the abolition of slavery. Daniel B. Thorp DANIEL B. THORP is an associate professor of history and an associate dean in Virginia Tech's College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences. He is the author of...

The Georgia Peach: Culture, Agriculture, and Environment in the American South by William Thomas Okie

Reviewed by: The Georgia Peach: Culture, Agriculture, and Environment in the American South by William Thomas Okie Whitney A. Snow The Georgia Peach: Culture, Agriculture, and Environment in the American South. By William Thomas Okie. Cambridge Studies on the American South. ( New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp. xvi, 303. Paper, $31.99, ISBN 978-1-107-41771-7; cloth, $34.99, ISBN 978-1-107-07172-8.) "Would you care for a Georgia peach?" (p. 1). This is the oft-repeated question that William Thomas Okie poses in The Georgia Peach: Culture, Agriculture, and Environment in the American South, an agricultural history [End Page 488] interspersed with personal reflections. Okie's goal is simple, to deduce why the peach has become associated with Georgia when it has never been the state's largest crop. His answer: timing. The peach gained notice "at a moment when the South was desperate for an improved reputation—a new face" (p. 5). It not only provided revenue but also beautified the landscape, spawned festivals that aided tourism and fueled local identity, and seemed reminiscent, at least to large growers, of the plantation. The various chapters flow smoothly as Okie has a talented way of providing context while presenting absorbing descriptions of individuals. In chapter 1 he traces the history of the peach from the colonial age to modern times and pays close attention to its role in the antebellum era. He gives a stellar review of horticultural history, arguing that the two primary concepts were culture and taste or the "way of thinking about and perceiving more precisely the biological relationships we all have" (p. 21). Belgian immigrant Prosper Jules Alphonse Berckmans, the founder of the Georgia State Horticultural Society, is the primary subject of chapter 2. The life of Georgia native Samuel Henry Rumph is the focus of chapter 3. Okie sees Rumph's life as an "allegory for the rise of the New South" because Rumph realized that one did not have to forsake rurality and tradition in order to embrace industrialization and commercialism (p. 64). In chapter 4, Okie delves into the life of John Howard Hale, a Yankee whom he credits with creating the Georgia peach industry. The next three chapters describe the mounting difficulties the peach industry encountered as it matured. In chapter 5 Okie shows that as the peach became a popular crop, overproduction, pests, and weather contributed to striking price fluctuations and a growing need for funding, which was scarce. In an attempt to control prices, many growers joined cooperatives, but standardization was slow. The next chapter mainly discusses Henry Alexander Hunt Jr., Otis Samuel O'Neal, and the Fort Valley High and Industrial School and their vision of farming as the future of black southerners. In chapter 7 Okie describes how black migration left peach growers dependent on "neighbor labor," prisoners of war, immigrants, children, and, later, Mexican guest workers (p. 182). This unconventional work has many attributes and makes a solid contribution to southern agricultural history. Okie's analysis of black people's roles in peach history is utterly fascinating and a constant presence. Many of his quotations are rather astute, sometimes cute, and only occasionally corny. The peach-themed poems and songs scattered throughout the book are entertaining. While the author emphasizes that "this is not a commodity study," it would nevertheless have been helpful to include some historiography on similar works (p. 2). At times, the writing is too philosophical and reflective, coming off as a mix between a historical monograph and a Bill Bryson travelogue, but perhaps that was the author's intent. To paraphrase Okie, who closed a chapter with, "don't just eat the cobbler at the Peach Festival. Enjoy it" (p. 218), don't just read this book. Devour it. [End Page 489] Whitney A. Snow Midwestern State University Copyright © 2018 The Southern Historical Association

Black Chicago's First Century: 1833–1900 by Christopher Robert Reed

Reviewed by: Black Chicago's First Century: 1833–1900 by Christopher Robert Reed Brian McCammack Christopher Robert Reed, Black Chicago's First Century: 1833–1900. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2017. 600 pp. $45.00. Originally published in 2005, the first paperback printing of Christopher Robert Reed's Black Chicago's First Century: 1833–1900 in 2017 aims to establish "a long-term, comprehensive saga of continuous African American community life, including both setbacks and accomplishments" (3). The monograph begins with a historiographical introduction that discusses the dearth of scholarship on nineteenth-century black Chicago, examines at length the source material Reed uses to tell his story, and ventures some overarching arguments about black Chicago's class structure that borrows from St. Clair Drake's sociological research. A prologue examining the area's first permanent settler, black trader Jean Baptiste Pointe Du Sable, precedes five chronologically-organized chapters, each of which begins with a brief section on the city's black demographics before examining various aspects of the community including labor, politics, intra-and interracial relations, and associational culture (religion, club life, leisure, and the like). Composing a history of nineteenth-century Chicago—particularly of the antebellum decades when black Chicagoans numbered fewer than one thousand (always around 1 percent of the city's total population during the nineteenth century, even with the influx of black southerners after the Civil War)—poses some methodological problems because the source material is somewhat scant. Reed's narrative relies heavily on a handful of published reminiscences of early settlers (sometimes at a distance of half a century or more) as well as the federal pension records of black Civil War veterans (which provided accounts of as many as two hundred black Chicagoans' lives); as he puts it, "First-person accounts based on memory are herein accorded special treatment as representative of particularized, valued experience" (25). This methodology has its benefits and drawbacks. The first-hand accounts Reed highlights help offer unparalleled insights into the lived experiences of notable black Chicagoans like abolitionist and businessman John Jones and the activist and clubwoman Fannie Barrier Williams. But memories are malleable and experiences vary widely; here they tend toward what is perhaps an overly optimistic account of inter- and intra-racial harmony—a saga that emphasizes accomplishments over setbacks—crafted largely by the comparatively small black middle- and upper-classes. That is not to say that Black Chicago's First Century sanitizes or ignores intra- and especially interracial conflict. Indeed, one the book's strengths [End Page 56] is the glimpse it offers of emerging class stratification and respectability politics in the black community. Even stronger are accounts of the Illinois Black Laws, the rise of anti-black sentiment during the Civil War, the painful struggles of black working-class Civil War veterans, the exploitation and subjugation of those who held service jobs in the restaurant industry or for the Pullman Company, and the emergent pattern of residential race segregation dating to the city's founding. All of this points to the myriad ways in which the race discrimination that would plague black Chicagoans in the Great Migration era actually originated decades earlier, somewhat paradoxically in a city that also had been a hotbed of abolitionist sentiment. But the dissonance between those struggles and rosier first-hand accounts are not entirely resolved and leave the reader wondering how to square these seemingly disparate histories. Contentions that "a cultural like-mindedness among African Americans provided the group with a cohesive base for unified action against external constraints" (59) and, later, that "Impoverishment produced interracial commiseration" (391), for instance, are thinly supported—even contradicted elsewhere—and risk casting this pre-Great Migration era as an idyllic period of intra- and interracial harmony before the flow of black Southerners further exacerbated tensions. Representative of this central narrative tension is Reed's account of black Chicagoans' involvement in the 1893 World's Fair (for Reed's more extensive treatment of the Fair, see All the World is Here! The Black Presence at the White City). Consistent with the monograph's more general tone of optimism, Reed argues that "African Americans claimed and won a meaningful role as workers, patrons, lecturers...

The Ground on Which I Stand: Tamina, a Freedmen's Town by Marti Corn

Reviewed by: The Ground on Which I Stand: Tamina, a Freedmen's Town by Marti Corn James M. Sorelle The Ground on Which I Stand: Tamina, a Freedmen's Town. By Marti Corn. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2016. ix + 134 pp. Illustrations, resources, index. $40.00 cloth. For generations following the Civil War, the vast majority of black southerners were bound within a framework of dependency characterized by tenancy, sharecropping, and, as Douglas Blackmon has reminded us, "neo-slavery." At the same time, however, many freedmen and their descendants, cherishing dreams of economic self-sufficiency, readily embraced opportunities for landownership. Readers familiar with the research of historians Kenneth Hamilton, Thad Sitton, and James H. Conrad know that African Americans often were the agents of their own economic independence as they established all-black towns, colonies, and communities in Mississippi, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and beyond. In The Ground on Which I Stand, a volume in Texas A&M University Press's Sam Rayburn Series on Rural Life, documentary photographer Marti Corn introduces her readers to the residents of Tamina, a historically black settlement located in Montgomery County, Texas, ten miles south of Conroe and thirty miles north of Houston along the Interstate 45 corridor. Established in 1871 on acreage owned by a transplanted New Yorker who was willing to sell land to African Americans, Tamina (originally Tammany) was populated largely by freedmen drawn from various southern states to the logging industry and sawmills north of Houston. Here they built their homes, churches, a school, and a general store and developed a strong sense of community that persists among current residents, several of whom are descended from the first settlers. Marti Corn [End Page 119] discovered this community when she moved to Montgomery County in 1998 and has observed in recent years that Tamina's residents, embracing a sense of place and pride of heritage, have attempted to resist real estate developers from surrounding upscale communities who have threatened the future of the town. The Ground on Which I Stand is part ethnography, part oral history, and part photographic essay. Corn's seventy-four color photographs of the people and physical structures that comprise contemporary Tamina are the stars of the volume and help make up for a limited narrative line and long quotations from interviews with residents that in too many instances are less revealing than one would have hoped. While not always captioned, the photographs as a whole are stunning in their composition, simplicity, and, especially, in their ability to capture the dignity of the community's human subjects. Readers may reasonably question whether the story of Tamina belongs in a journal dedicated to the Great Plains, but specialists in African American and Texas history will benefit from this book as it explores from a new vantage point the continuing legacy of emancipation in the Lone Star State. James M. Sorelle Department of History Baylor University Copyright © 2018 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

For Their Own Cause: The 27th United States Colored Troops by Kelly D. Mezurek

Reviewed by: For Their Own Cause: The 27th United States Colored Troops by Kelly D. Mezurek Douglas R. Egerton For Their Own Cause: The 27th United States Colored Troops. Kelly D. Mezurek. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2016. ISBN 978-1-60635-289-2. 354 pp., cloth, $37.95 By the war's end, 178,975 African Americans, constituting roughly one-twelfth of all the soldiers who fought for the United States, had filled 145 infantry regiments, seven cavalry units, thirteen artillery groups, and one engineering battalion. An astonishing 74 percent of northern black men of military age enlisted to fight for a nation that denied them citizenship. Despite this, the black soldiers who [End Page 218] donned blue have been curiously understudied. Classic studies by Benjamin Quarles and Dudley Taylor Cornish are now more than half a century old, while important recent studies by Joseph Glatthaar and John David Smith examine black soldiers within the context of their relationship with white officers or their commander in chief. Very few studies focus on a single black unit. Kelly Mezurek's impressively documented and clearly written study of the 27th USCT does far more, however, than merely address that unfortunate omission. Unlike the fabled 54th Massachusetts, the 27th was neither a pioneering unit nor did it see a good deal of action (although several of its companies played a supporting role in the disastrous Battle of the Crater). Whereas 140,313 of the USCT soldiers were black southerners born into slavery, the Ohioans who volunteered for the 27th had been free for all or most of their lives. It was not even the first Ohio-based USCT regiment, an honor that went to the 5th. But its wartime experience, Mezurek demonstrates, was in many ways far more typical of life in the USCT than that of more celebrated regiments. Its soldiers did more than their share of fatigue duty, and when they returned home no grand parade welcomed their return. No bronze relief sculpture was erected in their memory. A good many volumes explain why white soldiers, both North and South, fought for their respective nations. Mezurek's study does that as well, but it also chronicles what these soldiers' lives were like. During the antebellum years, midwestern whites were especially hostile to black residents and immigrants and had little interest in supporting black enlistments if that might lead to voting rights and citizenship. Governor William Dennison, an antislavery Republican, rejected black volunteers in the days after Sumter, and when African Americans forged ahead and set up a recruiting station in Cincinnati, a mob tore down their American flag. They reported the incident to a policeman, who snapped, "We want you damned niggers to keep out of this; this is a white man's war" (29). His 1862 successor, David Tod, a National Union man, was not much better, and as a result, black men who wished to serve had to catch the train for Massachusetts, where so many joined the 54th and 55th that they comprised the third largest contingent in the former and the largest state group in the latter. Only after a declining number of white volunteers forced Tod's hand did the governor reluctantly agree to black enlistments. The average age of those who signed on was just under twenty-five years, similar to northern white enlistees and other USCT units. A majority of soldiers in the 27th resided in rural areas or small towns. But while only 27 percent of them were born in Ohio—compared [End Page 219] to 60 percent of whites—a far higher percent of them were American-born than were white troops. Only five men in the regiment were foreign-born, and then only in nearby Canada. Most had lived in the state for years, and after their regiment was mustered out in September 1865, they returned to and remained in the Buckeye State. The 27th began its service in April 1864, two months before Congress equalized pay for soldiers regardless of race. Rural men who served as farm laborers at best earned $1 per day, and there was rarely any guarantee of a steady income. As a result, many...

Hazel Brannon Smith: The Female Crusading Scalawag by Jeffery B. Howell

Reviewed by: Hazel Brannon Smith: The Female Crusading Scalawag by Jeffery B. Howell Erin K. Devlin Hazel Brannon Smith: The Female Crusading Scalawag. By Jeffery B. Howell. ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017. Pp. viii, 245. $35.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-1079-3.) Hazel Brannon Smith: The Female Crusading Scalawag is a biography of Hazel Brannon Smith, a white newspaper editor in Holmes County, Mississippi, who earned national acclaim as one of the first women to win a Pulitzer Prize as a result of her editorial positions during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Jeffery B. Howell chronicles the entirety of Smith's career, tracing the evolution of her views on southern race relations and her consistent commitment to freedom of speech and law and order. Howell contends that Smith's early career laid the groundwork for her fight against the White Citizens' Council in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education (1954). In the 1940s Smith consistently denounced lawlessness in her campaign against bootleg liquor. She viewed the actions of the Citizens' Council to maintain segregation through intimidation, violence, and economic retaliation as another expression of reckless disregard for the rule of law that threatened not only the civil rights of African Americans but also the civil liberties of white southern moderates like herself. Howell suggests that these concerns, rather than a liberal critique of Jim Crow, drove Smith to speak out against the Citizens' Council. During the first two decades of her career, "she ardently supported segregation" (p. 4). Although she decried overt violence and called for the equalization of public services, Smith believed that white and black southerners alike preferred racial separation. In her editorials in the late 1950s, Smith supported the state's legislative efforts to circumvent the implementation of the Brown decision and even applauded the establishment of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission. [End Page 216] However, Smith alienated the white establishment when she spoke out against the Citizens' Council's tactics. The Citizens' Council sought to put Smith out of business by calling on advertisers to boycott her papers and by establishing a rival publication. The once popular editor became a social pariah, and she bridled at the Citizens' Council's efforts to quash her editorial voice. Rather than being intimidated, Smith took a more progressive stand in the early 1960s by calling for the repeal of Jim Crow segregation statutes and printing copies of NAACP publications like the Mississippi Free Press. Howell demonstrates how out of step Smith was with white public opinion by comparing her editorials and columns with those run by her competitors at the Lexington (Mississippi) Holmes County Herald, the Jackson Daily News, and the Jackson Clarion-Ledger. However, it would have been useful to analyze Smith's writing alongside the perspectives promoted by the black press. Smith maintained that abolishing formal segregation statutes would not overthrow "local customs and traditions" and opined that de facto segregation would continue to preserve most facets of the so-called southern way of life (p. 135). Howell describes Smith as an ally of the civil rights movement who helped facilitate racial change in Mississippi and was called an integrationist, yet he notes that Smith never described herself as such. Howell maintains that the label was less important than Smith's calls for "equal justice, fair treatment, freedom of expression and association, and racial harmony," and he suggests that she must have understood that "freedoms" could not exist "without some measure of societal integration," despite her own statements to the contrary (pp. 136, 160). Ultimately, Howell's portrait of Hazel Brannon Smith reveals both the editor's important contributions and the limitations of white southern moderation in the twentieth century. Erin K. Devlin University of Mary Washington Copyright © 2018 The Southern Historical Association

School Desegregation and Black Teacher Employment

Prior to 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 occurring 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 781 southern school districts observed between 1964 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 31.8% reduction in black teacher employment. A series of tests indicate that these employment reductions were not due to school district self-selection into desegregation or unobserved district characteristics associated with desegregation. Additional analyses estimate changes in the occupational distribution by race in the 1960 and 1970 Decennial Censuses and indicate that displaced southern black teachers either entered lower skill occupations within the South or migrated out of the region to continue teaching, and that southern school districts compensated for reduced black teacher employment by employing fewer total teachers and by increasing their recruitment of white teachers, especially less experienced white teachers and white male teachers. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

“당신 같은 놈팡이 난 필요 없어” : 허스튼의 Woofing에 재현된 여성의 서사, 여성의 공간, 여성의 힘

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), an African-American female writer and anthropologist in the Harlem Renaissance era, had a great interest in the verbal patterns of Southern blacks. Among the black language patterns collected and recorded during her field trips for anthology projects is the verbal contention style called ‘woofing,’ which best expresses the African-American folks’ volubility and sense of humor. In Huston’s literature the woofing frequently happens in verbal contest between black men and women, and mostly employed as a narrative strategy to empower women in the course of the sex battle. It mostly turns out that black women, the physical and social weak in the patriarchal culture of black society, are endowed with the verbal ability and consequently take the lead in most of the verbal contention situations. Hurston’s one-act play Woofing (1931), in particular, highlights the African-American folks’ verbal aspects of woofing as what Cheryl A. Wall calls the means by which women gain access to power. This study examines the verbal contention pattern of African-American folks in the play, especially focusing on the situation of sexual confrontation between black men and women. Furthermore, this study extends to discussion on related implications found in the play such as women

African Americans and American Values: Does South Matter?

ObjectiveThis article examines the effects of southern culture on the attitudes and political predisposition of southern African Americans.MethodUsing unique survey data, with large oversamples of African Americans, this article explores whether southern blacks have a more positive opinion of the American system than African Americans who reside outside the south.ResultsWe find a “southern effect” occurs among African Americans. Southern blacks express more support for traditionally defined American political and social values than nonsouthern blacks; however, this gap is less than a third the size of the regional gap among whites.ConclusionTogether, these findings suggest a complex interplay of race and region on political values and raise profound normative concerns. A group that arguably stands at a greater disadvantage in the political system expresses higher levels of support for that system.

Paths Out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America’s Deep South, 1944–1972. By Robert Mickey. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.

<i>Paths Out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America’s Deep South, 1944–1972</i>. By Robert Mickey. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.

You Can't Eat Freedom: Southerners and Social Justice after the Civil Rights Movement by Greta de Jong

Reviewed by: You Can't Eat Freedom: Southerners and Social Justice after the Civil Rights Movement by Greta de Jong Crystal R. Sanders (bio) You Can't Eat Freedom: Southerners and Social Justice after the Civil Rights Movement. By Greta de Jong. ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Pp. vii, 305. $34.95 cloth; $33.99 ebook) Greta de Jong's You Can't Eat Freedom is a tour de force of rural black southerners' lives after the passage of 1960s civil rights legislation. De Jong broadens the African American freedom struggle narrative by focusing on what happened in the plantation counties of Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana after Jim Crow signs came down and federal voter registrars arrived. She shows that the hard-fought political achievements of the period did not bring about immediate meaningful changes in the lives of working-class African Americans because they lacked economic security. The fight for first-class citizenship coincided with agricultural mechanization, and white landowners fired black sharecroppers who challenged the racial status quo. Thus, the rural black antipoverty struggles of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s were intricately connected to earlier civil rights struggles. The first chapter of You Can't Eat Freedom provides an overview [End Page 699] of the hardships black plantation workers faced as the agricultural economy shrunk after 1950. Non-farming employment was scarce because of racial discrimination, and no safety net existed for black workers. The social welfare system in these Black Belt counties was arbitrary and punitive. People rarely received the full amount of aid they were entitled to, and civil rights activists were denied assistance outright. In the first section, de Jong makes an important historiographical contribution to arguments about agricultural mechanization and modernization in the post–World War II period. According to de Jong, black displacement in the 1960s was not solely the inevitable outcome of workers whose labor had become expendable. Rather, it was the deliberate attempt on the part of white supremacists to foster the out-migration of a group whose population numbers posed a threat to the region's political status quo after the passage of voting rights. Leaving the South, however, was not a preferred option for many African Americans. Each of the subsequent seven chapters focuses on ways that African Americans responded to their displacement and bleak economic situation. The determination of black residents to stay in the only area they had ever known led to a variety of initiatives. In 1966, evicted sharecroppers took over an abandoned Air Force base in Mississippi in an attempt to pressure federal officials to act. They also championed the War on Poverty, which allowed the nation's poorest citizens to create solutions to local problems using federal funds. White state and county officials weakened the reach and success of such programs because they threatened their undemocratic political dominance. One of the rural black poor's most innovative and understudied responses to labor displacement was the creation of cooperatives. De Jong shows that community-owned businesses insulated their owners from economic exploitation, fostered economic independence, and undergirded the ongoing freedom movement. Those who had been evicted from plantations or lost their jobs because of their political work now had opportunities for employment outside of the local [End Page 700] white power structure. There were psychological benefits, too. Participation in black cooperatives "increased black farmers' confidence in their own abilities and gave them the freedom to make their own decisions" (p. 91). In some cases, such as that of the Southwest Alabama Farmer Cooperative Association, black southerners received funding and technical support from federal government agencies. Like the antipoverty programs, however, the cooperatives faced stiff opposition from white supremacists and wavering federal support. By the 1970s, the nation's political climate became antagonistic toward federal intervention in the economy. Beginning with the Nixon administration, the federal government retreated from its commitment to empowering the poor and decentralized antipoverty programs. De Jong convincingly asserts that the consequences of blind faith in market forces reverberated not just in the rural South but, also, throughout the nation. You Can't Eat Freedom is a must read for scholars interested in southern history, civil rights history, or...

Front Porch

Front Porch Harry Watson, Editor Click for larger view View full resolution Improbably, the story from this issue that touches me most directly comes from the Love Valley Rock Festival of 1972. Here and now, I will finally admit in public that your straitlaced editor was in personal attendance for his very own brush with hippiedom. Hard as it is to believe, my own memories thus stretch from family stories of Reconstruction to the Summer of Love and beyond. Love Valley Rock Festival, courtesy of Ed Buzzell Photography. In Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun, the character Gavin Stevens famously declares that "The past is never dead. It's not even past." Stevens's judgment on the power of history seemed profound when I first read it, back in college. It's still true today, but now it's become a platitude, a staple of presidential speeches and Woody Allen movies that raises more questions than it answers. "What past?" we have to ask. Better yet, "Whose past?" And what makes the southern past more living or more present than everyone else's? Is life in the South like a real-life version of Bill Murray's popular comedy, Groundhog Day, in which Jamestown, Pickett's charge, and Freedom Summer keep happening over and over? No, no, thankfully, that's impossible. But William Faulkner knew something about how some southerners can't seem to get the past out of their heads. It keeps playing in a loop, like a nasty [End Page 1] earworm, whining a constant jingle of resentment and regret that keeps driving its victims to reenact old battles in new uniforms. Historians like to think that uncovering the past is part of the process of healing from it, and changing the earworm's tune. If the undying past is all in our heads, then it's not so much a product of what happened, but what we remember about it. Or rather, which version of the past we remember, for controlling memory is a major part of shaping the present and the future. But controlling or steering public memories is a lot harder than rewriting the history books, because memory is such a crucial part of who we are. It's like the horror of amnesia: who would you be if you couldn't remember anything? And as any detective will tell you, memories are notoriously tricky. One witness sees a tall suspect, another sees a short one. One swears he saw a knife, another is sure it was a gun. And so on. The consequences spread far beyond courtrooms and tv dramas. Once when I was ten or so, my father told me about Reconstruction. It wasn't a lesson from the books; it was raw personal memory, surely passed from his own father, who was born when a sprinkling of federal troops still "occupied" South Carolina. Grandfather must have heard a lot about it from his own family, so Dad's memories of Reconstruction were almost as vivid—and certainly as subjective—as if he had been there himself. "That was when white men couldn't vote!" he hissed at me, eyes blazing with undimmed outrage. His passion took me aback, because Dad almost never got upset, especially about history or politics. His feelings were new to me that day; I did not sense hate, but fury and humiliation at his forebears' disgrace. My father's memory was mistaken. No racial test ever took the ballot from white southerners. President Andrew Johnson pardoned ordinary Confederates and affirmed their political rights within six weeks of Appomattox. He excluded Confederate leaders, and so did the Fourteenth Amendment three years later, but these barriers soon fell. Only black southerners ever suffered racial disfranchisement, first before Emancipation and again before the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Now the day would come, I'm glad to say, when my father proudly voted for black political candidates himself, but the pain and outrage he "remembered" from South Carolina's experience of "Negro rule" were just as real as if the freed-men and carpetbaggers had personally stripped away his own rights. And Dad's feelings were certainly not unusual. For much...

Leisure, Plantations, and the Making of a New South: The Sporting Plantations of the South Carolina Lowcountry and Red Hills Region, 1900–1940 ed. by Julia Brock and Daniel Vivian

Reviewed by: Leisure, Plantations, and the Making of a New South: The Sporting Plantations of the South Carolina Lowcountry and Red Hills Region, 1900–1940ed. by Julia Brock and Daniel Vivian Tycho de Boer Leisure, Plantations, and the Making of a New South: The Sporting Plantations of the South Carolina Lowcountry and Red Hills Region, 1900–1940. Edited by Julia Brock and Daniel Vivian. New Studies in Southern History. ( Lanham, Md., and other cities: Lexington Books, 2015. Pp. viii, 214. $85.00, ISBN 978-0-7391-9578-9.) Leisure, Plantations, and the Making of a New South: The Sporting Plantations of the South Carolina Lowcountry and Red Hills Region, 1900–1940is a collection of essays that gives greater prominence to the creation, operation, and function of "sporting plantations"—southern estates purchased by wealthy northerners during the early twentieth century and transformed from agricultural plantations into hunting reserves and luxurious winter abodes. Editors Julia Brock and Daniel Vivian argue that these transformed plantations, concentrated in the South Carolina Lowcountry and Florida's Red Hills region, "represented a greater innovation than [is] generally recognized" (p. 3). Historians have acknowledged the purchase of southern plantations as a curious side note to large-scale northern investment in the postbellum South's economy. But scholars have paid scant attention to how the creation of sporting plantations imposed a sportsman's ethic, with its attendant game laws, on southern hunting culture; brought modern architectural and landscaping styles to old plantations; and instilled a romantic vision of antebellum plantation life on the modernizing New South. Many of the collection's essays suggest that the transformation of large-scale farms into even larger-scale hunting plantations—financier Bernard M. Baruch, for example, "amassed a 14,500-acre estate"—really constituted the making of a new Old South (p. 8). In fact, Drew Swanson's essay, a bit of an outlier as it focuses on the preservation of Wormsloe plantation as a historic site in the Georgia Low-country, explicitly argues, as the title indicates, that "tending the new Old South" entailed the cultivation of a "plantation image" and the creation of [End Page 725]elaborate botanical gardens as a tourist attraction (p. 83). Daniel Vivian's "'Plantation Life': Varieties of Experience on the Remade Plantations of the South Carolina Lowcountry" similarly shows how northern elites who were engaged in the creation of sporting plantations imagined and thus partly invented what southern "plantation life" had been and therefore ought to be, changing sites of agricultural production into sites of upper-class leisure. As Vivian remarks, "Elegant architecture, elaborate landscaping, and plentiful labor signified their role as venues for socializing, entertaining, recreation, and ritualized performances" (p. 21). To be sure, as Matthew A. Lockhart indicates, several northern plantation owners, with the help of skilled black labor, continued to grow rice on their Lowcountry estates, but this cultivation served the purpose of attracting ducks and other waterfowl for hunting—the exact opposite of the endless struggle to keep waterfowl and bobolinks from eating the rice crop during antebellum days. In addition, Jennifer Betsworth's contribution, "Reviving and Restoring Southern Ruins: Reshaping Plantation Architecture and Landscapes in Georgetown County, South Carolina," shows how northern investment in southern estates involved the employment of northern architecture and landscaping firms, which tended to build additions to existing homes, replace burned-down structures with entirely new buildings, and lay out plantation landscapes that were grander and more majestic than what had existed during the antebellum era. As such, northern elites helped invent and develop a quasi-aristocratic way of life, as well as sites on which to enact it, that have since been read back into the southern past. What is less clear from this collection is whether northern elites helped shape race relations in the postwar South or merely affirmed the existing racial order by assuming a paternalist stance toward the black southerners they employed, which may have helped shape a more benevolent memory of slavery. Two of the essays—Hayden R. Smith's "Knowledge of the Hunt: African American Guides in the South Carolina Lowcountry at the Turn of the Twentieth Century" and Robin Bauer Kilgo's "Life and Labor on the...

Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction by Elaine Frantz Parsons

Reviewed by: Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction by Elaine Frantz Parsons Andrew F. Lang (bio) Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction. By Elaine Frantz Parsons. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Pp. 400. Cloth, $34.95.) Elaine Frantz Parsons’s Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction appears at an auspicious cultural moment. As the nation continues to grapple with the tragic 2015 massacre in Charleston, South [End Page 150] Carolina, moviegoers witness in Free State of Jones (2016) a snapshot of the Civil War that confronts diluted Lost Cause narratives. In this fraught time, Parsons’s book challenges academic audiences to reconsider the origins, meaning, and dark history of the Ku Klux Klan. Just as we cannot escape the historical connections to Charleston while engaging the ugly power of racial violence on the silver screen, Parsons exposes readers to the troubling realization that the Klan was not a local or regional institution. Rather, it was an American idea, drawn from national culture and sustained by national custom. The events of the past two years, both real and in the theaters, have lent weight to this reality, which Parsons depicts with blunt revelation. Parsons’s account of the Klan is as much a cultural history as it is an institutional history, a refreshing departure from a vast literature that has long cataloged the political, social, and economic implications of Reconstruction violence. While Parsons is certainly interested in these various dimensions, she is more concerned with how the Klan acted, from where it derived its peculiar customs, how it performed its ritualistic violence, and, most troublingly, how it functioned as an American institution. Although she underscores that the Klan emerged as a response to Confederate defeat and the disquieting conditions of a postemancipation order, Parsons’s cultural approach portrays the Klan not only as a group that conducted sporadic, local night-riding attacks, but also as a ubiquitous, insidious manifestation of the American imagination. The Klan may not have spread its terror to every corner of the South, but its discursive spirit was felt across the postwar landscape, its existence validated in both discourse and image. Ku-Klux thus revises several historiographical premises about the Reconstruction era, carrying immense promise for future scholarship. First, while the Klan may have lacked a coherent organizational scheme, Parsons suggests that this omission misses the point about the Klan’s power as an idea. The forms of collective violence scattered throughout pockets of the South became well publicized in the press, shaping how future victims might react to political conditions. In fact, the Klan relied on media coverage as a weapon just as powerful as torches or guns. The specter of violence—not only the tangible act itself—“limited how all black southerners and their white allies used public space and resources, participated in political life, and defended their interests” (7). Second, Parsons argues forcefully and convincingly that the Klan was not the product of a backward and dying South. Instead, its original founders and members hailed from urban centers, practiced professional livelihoods, and retained an ambivalence about the region’s plantation culture. [End Page 151] Indeed, the Klan promised a hopeful future to a class of vengeful white southerners who worried that radical political and social changes threatened to disrupt a stable white society. Integrating their costumes, language, and practices within the era’s popular culture—all of which they attached to systemic violence—gave the Klan a national, modernizing legitimacy. Northerners also could see in the Klan an image of themselves, they could read the language of the Klan as an American discourse, and they could relate to the Klan’s carnival dress, minstrel obsession, and burlesque tradition. And herein lay one of the many tragic ironies that the Klan inspired. Northerners did not create the Klan, and they rarely participated in its physical practices. But in a twisted process of sectional reconciliation, “the Klan simultaneously took the form of white southern resistance to northern authority while serving as white southerners’ contribution to a unified culture” (12). Parsons makes a powerful, devastating case that the Klan could not have thrived without northern...

Corazón de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South since 1910 by Julie M. Weise

Reviewed by: Corazón de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South since 1910 by Julie M. Weise Daniel S. Margolies Corazón de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South since 1910. By Julie M. Weise. David J. Weber Series in the New Borderlands History. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. [xiv], 344. Paper, $32.50, ISBN 978-1-4696-2496-9.) Corazón de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South since 1910 “recovers and recounts” the experiences of Mexican and Mexican American working people in the South while offering a framework for understanding “race, class, citizenship, and national belonging” in the region, and in the United States and Mexico more broadly (p. 3). By focusing on the changes brought by a diverse group [End Page 205] of Mexicanos over a century, Julie M. Weise argues counterintuitively that “from the perspective of Mexican American history, there is no regional continuity of racial exclusion in the U.S. South” (p. 13). Weise focuses on race and labor and links the experiences and mobilities of Mexican working people with the concurrent out-migration of white and black southerners. She explores the dynamic interplay between Mexican aspirations and struggles for autonomy in the South, and the responses of the array of southerners with whom they interacted. Weise correctly pitches the story at the granular, individual level and eschews any normative fusion of the perspectives of all the groups and institutional structures she examines. This book has five case studies across time and space, focusing on New Orleans, the Mississippi Delta, the Arkansas Delta, rural Georgia, and Charlotte, North Carolina. Each chapter combines individual stories with an exploration of the social and economic lives of migrants in new systems of local culture and power. Weise touches on everything from sartorial choices to music, religion, spatiality of housing, labor structures, racial and class formations, and strategies of resistance. It is a complicated tale, which, if not as entirely innovative in coverage as it claims, is engagingly told. Weise has done impressive transnational archival research in Mexico and across the United States, while tapping the large literature related to the southern themes with which her story intersects. She makes use of interviews and a fair number of images, which, for reasons that are not entirely clear, she terms “nontraditional forms of evidence ...to comprehend the imaginative lives that migrants led outside the surveillance of local, national, or international institutions” (p. 7). It is unclear why the use of oral histories, interviews, and images should be presented as a novel or transgressive approach when it is really quite common, especially in works examining contemporary eras and issues of migration and labor. Indeed, the same approach is readily apparent in the quite large interdisciplinary literature on Latino immigration to and experience in the South in the works of scholars like Altha J. Cravey, Holly R. Barcus, José María Mantero, Leon Fink, Hannah Gill, and Mary E. Odem, among many others too numerous to mention. The photographs Weise has unearthed, including many from family collections, are striking. Some photographs are used in illuminating ways, such as in the arresting albums of farmworkers in Georgia. In other instances, the book indulges in unfortunate American studies–style approaches by investing pictures with a causal significance that is rather elusive or nonexistent. For example, in an otherwise persuasive and well-supported chapter on Charlotte, where “racial difference disrupted spaces imagined to be nearly all white,” Weise presents two elementary school class photographs and writes that the content of the pictures themselves produced changes (p. 181). Ironically, using these pictures in this manner invites a racial gaze that in some ways inadvertently echoes the discussion in the text. Corazón de Dixie is an ambitious project, and it is accomplished with thorough research and clear writing. Weise resituates the history of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the South and within southern historiography to [End Page 206] broaden understanding of the experience of Mexican working people across the region. Daniel S. Margolies Virginia Wesleyan College Copyright © 2017 The Southern Historical Association

Backwater Blues: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African American Imagination by Richard M. Mizelle Jr.

Reviewed by: Backwater Blues: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African American Imaginationby Richard M. Mizelle Jr. Ezelle Sanford III (bio) Backwater Blues: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African American Imagination. by Richard M. Mizelle Jr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Pp. 224. $25. Taking its name from famed blues singer Bessie Smith's 1927 single, Richard Mizelle's innovative synchronic history Backwater Bluesrecovers the voices and experiences of African Americans during one of the most destructive environmental disasters in American history. The 1927 Mississippi River flood devastated communities in seven states as excessive rain created a slow-moving disaster. Patchworks of levees, not yet standardized and coordinated by the Army Corps of Engineers, failed from natural forces and human intervention. The river flooded areas along its main corridor, as well as its backwaters—those places and people long forgotten and marginal. Contrary to existing scholarship which analyzes the flood in the context of policy, environmental disasters, and the shaping of the Yazoo Mississippi Delta, Mizelle combines alternative sources, namely blues music and historical fiction, with traditional primary sources to fully explore key questions related to the African American experience. In this way, Mizelle makes similar moves as in Robin D. G. Kelley's Race Rebels(1994) and Keith Wailoo's Dying in the City of the Blues(2001), finding new ways to excavate experiences often not chronicled in traditional archives. Central to this study is how environmental disaster exposes the troubled relationships between race and place, protection and vulnerability, wealth and power, and citizenship and non-citizenship. Mizelle begins by making a case for blues as a valid source of counter-hegemonic expression. African Americans simultaneously expressed vulnerability and close relationships to the environment in the medium which created a shared memory around the disaster. He then moves to a close analysis of two essays penned by author Richard Wright. These essays depict the "limited options of Black people" (p. 69), where decisions made to survive were not easy and could themselves result in death. Chapter 3 is, perhaps, the most fascinating. Mizelle asks who is charity for and what does it do? Analyzing the militarization of charity and flood relief, the author documents how the American Red Cross, the main disaster relief organization preceding the growth of federal power, was used as a means to control black movement and black labor. The Red Cross camps were often undesirable places to take refuge. Men were forced to labor on failing levees, a dangerous job in itself, while trapped in a system of debt peonage. Conditions in the camps were unsanitary and the refuge from the violence of nature exposed southern blacks to the violence of men. Given the extraordinary circumstances, Mizelle maintains that these camps were "microcosms of daily survival" (p. 127). [End Page 590] African Americans not affected by the disaster learned of these horrific conditions through the black press. Efforts led by the NAACP channeled financial resources to organizations which could directly benefit their southern counterparts. Roy Wilkins and George Schuyler traveled south undercover to investigate relief camps and levee labor conditions. Efforts like the NAACP's mobilized black support and began a program of federal policy reform that would continue into the New Deal. More than this, the NAACP elucidated the political violence experienced by African American flood survivors. Finally, Mizelle demonstrates how the disaster influenced black mobility. Using the development of Frenchtown, an ethnic enclave of relocated Louisiana Creoles in Houston, Texas, Mizelle makes a case for a "racial flood diaspora" (p. 12). The specter of Hurricane Katrina looms large over this text. Though Mizelle does not make many direct comparisons, the questions explored here lend themselves to understanding the cultural and political implications of the disaster. In particular, he examines the multiple (violent) uses and purposes of artificial levees as experienced by black people. Though Mizelle is creative in excavating non-traditional sources, sometimes his work errs on the side of source analysis, which detracts from his larger analytical and narrative work. This is understandable for those who are unfamiliar with myriad blues forms; Mizelle contextualizes them very well. Overall, this small book excellently executes large ambitions as...

Defending Black Suffrage: Poll Taxes, Preachers, and Anti-Prohibition in Texas, 1887–1916

Defending Black Suffrage:Poll Taxes, Preachers, and Anti-Prohibition in Texas, 1887–1916 Brendan J. Payne (bio) On Tuesday, July 9, 1912, the African American Baptist preacher John B. Rayner penned an irate letter to a prominent agent of the Texas Brewers' Association (TBA). The TBA had bankrolled and coordinated anti-prohibition activities for brewers and distillers throughout Texas to the tune of over a million dollars for more than a decade, but this minister was not writing to condemn the brewers for their iniquitous enterprise. Instead, he admonished them for failing to adequately compensate him for his unstinting labors in their behalf. A self-described "protagonist in the cause of anti-prohibition," Rayner listed his sacrifices for the cause over the previous seven years. He had, he wrote, "wet a score of dry counties in Texas or kept them from drying"; exercised "Machiavellian diplomacy" against African American "religious, educational and business gatherings" to mute prohibition advocacy; worked "to make the colored pastors … political friends" of the brewers; "stood undaunted before the frowns of religious women"; and "endured the imprecations of mad prohibitionists." By herculean effort, Rayner had mobilized tens of thousands of voters over the previous several years, including "the colored farmers," who "saved the State from the blighting hand of the prohibitionists" in the narrowly decided 1911 election, which kept alcohol legal in parts of Texas for the better part of a decade. Rather than profiteering from his anti-prohibition activism, Rayner had "been forced to lose personal property and mortgage the best of my property." Despite his losses, he claimed he could forgive or ignore the brewers' slights "when the [End Page 815] liberty of man is in danger," because he fought out of "my fidelity to that liberty."1 Rayner's letter illumines how African Americans, who have been largely absent from scholarly accounts of prohibition, could and did vitally participate in the contest even after the imposition of poll taxes across the South. This finding raises challenges for studies contending that African Americans' disenfranchisement aided the rise of prohibition. Howard N. Rabinowitz and Richard F. Hamm contend that African Americans' tendency to vote against prohibition, especially in close elections, provided a major argument for their disenfranchisement, which in turn helped prohibition succeed in the South.2 Ann-Marie E. Szymanski sums up the scholarly consensus: "the disfranchisement of blacks principally enhanced the opportunities for dry success by eliminating one of the leading rationales for Democratic unity in the South." Yet Szymanski also claims that African Americans' impact on prohibition elections in the South is difficult to verify since drys lost statewide referenda in Alabama (1909), Florida (1910), Texas (1911), and Arkansas (1912) "despite the diminished voting power of southern blacks."3 The same evidence could also suggest that wets won precisely because African Americans continued to vote despite those states' restrictive voting laws. A look at one such state, Texas, provides definitive answers. This article uses Texas as a case study to gauge African Americans' impact on prohibition elections before and after the institution of poll taxes. It focuses on the three decades between Texas's first statewide prohibition election in 1887 and the state attorney general's crackdown on the brewers' political influence in 1916, which spelled the end of [End Page 816] significant black participation in the contest. African Americans, though divided, voted mostly against prohibition, and both sides engaged in the effort for a variety of reasons: the protection of black suffrage and upholding racial dignity; success as vote-getters; deep religious and political convictions; and material advancement. These motivations sometimes conflicted, and priorities shifted over time, especially in the face of poll taxes. Yet for a time, African Americans played a decisive role in Texas prohibition contests. This article complements a recent, nuanced account of black Texans on prohibition in Joseph L. Locke's Making the Bible Belt: Texas Prohibitionists and the Politicization of Southern Religion (2017). He observes that African Americans on both sides of the issue sought to advance their race, and the black majority of wet voters sometimes decided prohibition elections. Yet overall Locke focuses on white prohibitionists, who increasingly blamed black...