A history of the paradoxical time when the state's technology advanced and race relations deteriorated

A history of the paradoxical time when the state's technology advanced and race relations deteriorated

In the years after Reconstruction, racial tension soared, as many white southerners worried about how to deal with the millions of free African Americans among them -- an issue they termed the "negro problem." In an attempt to maintain the status quo, white supremacists resurrected old proslavery arguments and sought new justification in scientific theories purporting to "prove" people of African descent inherently inferior to whites. In Portrait of a Scientific Racist James G. Hollandsworth, Jr., reveals how the conjectures of one of the country's most prominent racial theorists, Alfred Holt Stone, helped justify a repressive racial order that relegated African Americans to the margins of southern society in the early 1900s. In this revealing biography, Hollandsworth examines the thoughts and motives of this renowned man, focusing primarily on Stone's most intensive period of theorizing, from 1900 to 1910. A committed and vocal white supremacist, Stone believed black southern workers were inherently lazy, a trait he attributed to their African genes and heritage. He asserted that slavery helped improve the black race but that opportunities still existed during Reconstruction to mold the freedmen into efficient workers. Stone's central -- yet unspoken -- goal was to devise a way to maintain an obedient, productive labor force willing to work for low wages. Writing from both Washington, D.C., and his cotton plantation in the Mississippi Delta, Stone published numerous essays and collected more than 3000 articles and pamphlets on the "American Race Problem" -- including those written by bitter racists and enthusiastic "race boosters." Though Stone lacked the credentials typically associated with scholarly experts of the time, he became an authority on the subject of black Americans, in part because of his close friendship with fellow scientific racist and statistician Walter F. Willcox. An early member of the American Economic Association and other academic groups, Stone went on to serve as head scholar of a division for race studies within the Carnegie Foundation. Interestingly, Stone recruited W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington to collaborate with him on a major study for the Foundation, continuing his tendency to incorporate all perspectives into his study of race. Hollandsworth uses Stone's extensive correspondence with Willcox, Du Bois, and Washington, as well as his personal writings -- both published and unpublished -- to reveal the secrets of this misguided, yet fascinating, figure.

Following the collapse of Reconstruction in 1877, African Americans organized a movement—distinct from the white Populist movement—in the South and parts of the Midwest for economic and political reform: Black Populism. Between 1886 and 1898, tens of thousands of black farmers, sharecroppers, and agrarian workers created their own organizations and tactics primarily under black leadership. As Black Populism grew as a regional force, it met fierce resistance from the Southern Democrats and constituent white planters and local merchants. African Americans carried out a wide range of activities in this hostile environment. They established farming exchanges and cooperatives; raised money for schools; published newspapers; lobbied for better agrarian legislation; mounted boycotts against agricultural trusts and business monopolies; carried out strikes for better wages; protested the convict lease system, segregated coach boxes, and lynching; demanded black jurors in cases involving black defendants; promoted local political reforms and federal supervision of elections; and ran independent and fusion campaigns. Growing out of the networks established by black churches and fraternal organizations, Black Populism found further expression in the Colored Agricultural Wheels, the southern branch of the Knights of Labor, the Cooperative Workers of America, the Farmers Union, and the Colored Farmers Alliance. In the early 1890s African Americans, together with their white counterparts, launched the People's Party and ran fusion campaigns with the Republican Party. By the turn of the century, Black Populism had been crushed by relentless attack, hostile propaganda, and targeted assassinations of leaders and foot soldiers of the movement. The movement's legacy remains, though, as the largest independent black political movement until the rise of the modern civil rights movement.

Your Heritage Will Still Remain details how Mississippians, black and white, constructed their social identity in the aftermath of the crises that transformed the state beginning with the sectional conflict and ending in the late nineteenth century. Michael J. Goleman focuses primarily on how Mississippians thought of their place: as Americans, as Confederates, or as both. In the midst of secession, white Mississippians held firm to an American identity and easily transformed it into a Confederate identity venerating their version of American heritage. After the war, black Mississippians tried to etch their place within the Union and as part of transformed American society. Yet they continually faced white supremacist hatred and backlash. During Reconstruction, radical transformations within the state forced all Mississippians to embrace, deny, or rethink their standing within the Union. Tracing the evolution of Mississippians' social identity from 1850 through the end of the century uncovers why white Mississippians felt the need to create the Lost Cause legend. With personal letters, diaries and journals, newspaper editorials, traveler's accounts, memoirs, reminiscences, and personal histories as its sources, Your Heritage Will Still Remain offers insights into the white creation of Mississippi's Lost Cause and into the battle for black social identity. It goes on to show how these cultural hallmarks continue to impact the state even now.

Addressing one of the most controversial and emotive issues of American history, this book presents a thorough reexamination of the background, dynamics, and decline of American lynching. It argues that collective homicide in the US can only be partly understood through a discussion of the unsettled southern political situation after 1865, but must also be seen in the context of a global conversation about changing cultural meanings of 'race'. A deeper comprehension of the course of mob murder and the dynamics that drove it emerges through comparing the situation in the US with violence that was and still is happening around the world. Drawing on a variety of approaches - historical, anthropological and literary - the study shows how concepts of imperialism, gender, sexuality, and civilization profoundly affected the course of mob murder in the US. Lynching provides thought-provoking analyses of cases where race was - and was not - a factor. The book is constructed as a series of case studies grouped into three thematic sections. Part I, Understanding Lynching, starts with accounts of mob murder around the world. Part II, Lynching and Cultural Change, examines shifting concepts of race, gender, and sexuality by drawing first on the romantic travel and adventure fiction of the era 1880-1920, from authors such as H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Changing images of black and white bodies form another major focus of this section. Part III, Blood, Debate, and Redemption in Georgia, follows the story of American collective murder and growing opposition to it in Georgia, a key site of lynching, in the early twentieth century. By situating American mob murder in a wide international context, and viewing the phenomenon as more than simply a tool of racial control, this book presents a reappraisal of one of the most unpleasant, yet important periods of America's history, one that remains crucial for understanding race relations and collective violence around the world.

An explosive, long-forgotten story of police violence that exposes the historical roots of today's criminal justice crisis "A deeply researched and propulsively written story of corrupt governance, police brutality, Black resistance, and violent white reaction in turn-of-the-century New Orleans that holds up a dark mirror to our own times."—Walter Johnson, author of River of Dark Dreams On a steamy Monday evening in 1900, New Orleans police officers confronted a black man named Robert Charles as he sat on a doorstep in a working-class neighborhood where racial tensions were running high. What happened next would trigger the largest manhunt in the city's history, while white mobs took to the streets, attacking and murdering innocent black residents during three days of bloody rioting. Finally cornered, Charles exchanged gunfire with the police in a spectacular gun battle witnessed by thousands. Building outwards from these dramatic events, To Poison a Nation connects one city's troubled past to the modern crisis of white supremacy and police brutality. Historian Andrew Baker immerses readers in a boisterous world of disgruntled laborers, crooked machine bosses, scheming businessmen, and the black radical who tossed a flaming torch into the powder keg. Baker recreates a city that was home to the nation's largest African American community, a place where racial antagonism was hardly a foregone conclusion—but which ultimately became the crucible of a novel form of racialized violence: modern policing. A major new work of history, To Poison a Nation reveals disturbing connections between the Jim Crow past and police violence in our own times.