The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation.

Abstract

This wide-ranging study examines the changing perceptions of blacks held by Southern whites and the consequences that those shifts had on the region's race relations. Joel Williamson, a native southerner and a historian whose career has been devoted toquestions of race, focuses on the years from 1877 to 1915. At the start of this period, says Williamson, a paternalistic, conservative mentality was the dominant white racial view. A holdover from the era of slavery, conservatism posited a hierarchical social order in which everyone, white as well as black, had a defined place. Conservatives viewed blacks as inherently inferior to whites and their place as subordinate to whites. But they regarded blacks as human· and saw a role for them in the South. In 1877, at the end of Reconstruction, Southern blacks were in fact subordinate to whites politically, economically, and socially. Conservatives were largely content with that status quo and had no desire to push blacks further down than they already were. Beginning in 1889, however, a racism emerged and flourished among Southern whites, and it represented a major tum for the worse in racial thought. To the radical mind, blacks were essentially bestial. Slavery had had a civilizing influence on the race, radicals believed, but with emancipation blacks had begun retrogressing to their natural state of savagery. The single most awful evidence of this decline for the radicals was a supposed increase in rapes of white women by black men. The black beast was a menace who had no place in the South, radicals argued, and at some undetermined future time the race would be eliminated from the region. Racial radicalism swept through the tum-of-the-century South with tremendous force, reaching its height between 1897 and 1907. In the grip of radical fear, whites became very aggressively antiblack, seeking ways to control the race as it deteriorated. The South witnessed a dramatic upsurge in the lynching of blacks, a