New Negroes Versus the New South: African American Cultural and Intellectual Resistance to White Supremacy Jane Dailey (bio) Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow. New York: Penguin, 2018. 296 pp. $30.00. There was no “South” before the Civil War. There were slaveholding states, but there was no unitary region described as “the South” before the defeat of the Confederacy in 1865. It was “the conflict with the Yankee that created the concept of the South as something more than a matter of geography,” southern chronicler and armchair regional psychologist W. J. Cash observed in The Mind of the South (1941).1 According to Cash, a coherent regional collective identity was forged for the first time out of opposition to the victorious “North,” a term that stood for the Union Army, emancipation, and Reconstruction. The “South,” in other words, was everything the North was not. A notion of southern distinctiveness antedated the rise and defeat of the Confederacy, but the development of a narrative of southern distinctiveness was a post-emancipation phenomenon forged out of the ashes of what white southerners experienced as a catastrophic military defeat. Declensionist narratives of cultural destruction and existential peril have driven political transformation in the South at every stage since Appomattox. After the Civil War, such narratives about Reconstruction became a leading southern export, designed to convince the rest of the country that the war had been a tragic error, emancipation a mistake, Reconstruction a folly, and the Jim Crow South of legalized racial hierarchy and segregation a necessity. This “tragic era” story of the postwar South swamped competing narratives of the reconstitution of the Union and the incorporation of black men into politics and governance, and was used to justify the white terror and election fraud that was necessary—from the white point of view—to achieve disenfranchisement and American apartheid. Recognizing the narrative warfare of white supremacy, Henry Louis Gates notes in Stony the Road that “each generation of black people needed to invent their own New Negro” (p. 232) to further black goals and detach a growing cadre of elite African Americans from the masses of the freedpeople. Gates [End Page 264] focuses on his longtime fascination with the New Negro, which existed both in the form of actual people and as a representation, an argument against the destruction of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow. “[T]he New Negro,” Gates argues, “is one of the most important legacies of the Reconstruction era” (p. 231). His book, he explains, “is a close reading of the history of the use of this imagery in the larger war to kill Reconstruction through the end of the nineteenth century, and of the imagery embodying the counternarrative by black people” (p. xviii). The New Negro was intimately tied to political competition. Gates recognizes the fluidity and competitive nature of the world of late-nineteenth-century southern politics. The “Redeemers,” white supremacists who ripped political power from the freedmen in the 1880s and 1890s, focused instantly on black voting and its consequences. The importance of black male enfranchisement, and disenfranchisement, cannot be overemphasized. Frederick Douglass identified the stakes in May of 1865, less than a month after Confederate surrender at Appomattox: “Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot” (p. 24). The catastrophic consequences of disenfranchisement for southern blacks cannot be overstated. In the spring of 1867, less than one percent of black men could vote. By December, over 80 percent could.2 By the 1880s, more than two-thirds of all adult southern males still voted. That proportion rose to nearly three-quarters in the 1890s in states that had not yet limited the franchise. By the early 1900s, fewer than one man in three, white or black, voted in the South.3 As intended, voting restrictions had a hugely disproportionate effect on African Americans. If black men could not vote, they could not be elected to office; if they could not be elected to office, they could not shape or administer the laws that governed them. Sixty-four African Americans sat in Mississippi’s state legislature in 1873: none sat...
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May 21, 2020
Jiqing Chen + 5
Open Access