Virginia’s racial New South, Jim Crow and Desegregation begins with six books. “Before Jim Crow” addresses the post-Civil War politics of race and “Freedpeople in the Tobacco South” examines the political economy in 24 Virginia counties. “Managing White Supremacy” investigates race, politics and citizenship in Jim Crow Virginia through the first half of the 20th century, and “Lynching in the South” compares Virginia and Georgia during the same time. “Speak Now Against the Day” points to white reluctance to engage in desegregation, and “Simple Justice” explores exactly how the Supreme Court came to overturn “separate but equal” in public schooling.
See more reviews on African-American Virginia history at Virginia Social and Ethnic History. General surveys of Virginia History can be found at Virginia History Surveys. Virginia history divided by time periods can be found at the webpage Books and Reviews.
Before Jim Crow
Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Post emancipation Virginia was written by Jane Daily in 2000. The book focuses on the years 1879-1883 and the intersecting forces of race and gender. The chapter on the Danville race riot stemming from a bump on the sidewalk is a telling example of where the freedmen and women with “acts of self definition” that provoked violent white reaction.
Daily concludes Jim Crow in Virginia did not begin until after the 1902 Constitution. “Before then…nothing was sure and, it often seemed, anything was possible,” from the political efforts of the Republicans, Readjusters, Knights of Labor and Populists. Learn more to buy “Before Jim Crow” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.
Freedpeople in the Tobacco South
Freedpeople in the Tobacco South: Virginia, 1860-1900 was written by Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie in 2001. He examines the postwar political economy of Virginia’s emancipated tobacco workers, from their interactions with former masters to define free labor to larger market forces of the global capitalization of the tobacco industry.
Even though confronted with political and workplace, Conservative victory at the polls, and the decline of the Freedman’s Bureau, African-American tobacco workers in Virginia maintained a certain economic independence. The 1873 Panic and its extended depression, competition from western and international tobacco producers, and loss of demand for dark tobacco with the rise of the cigarette industry, all led to a manufacturing monopoly seizing control of tobacco.
Both the collapse of legal protections to sharecroppers afforded by crop lien laws and the emergence of the monopolistic American Tobacco Company led to a temporary rise in farmers’ alliances and elected representatives. Though these faltered in the long run, younger African-Americans migrated to urban Virginia, West Virginia mines and Northeast cities and sent home money. Falling prices in the 1890s forced many white planters to sell off parcels of their acreage, and older black generations were able to gain a plot of land so that by 1900, more than a quarter of African-Americans in the dark tobacco belt were independent farmers. Learn more to buy “Feedpeople in the Tobacco South” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.
Managing White Supremacy
Managing White Supremacy: Race, Politics and Citizenship in Jim Crow Virginia was written by J. Douglas Smith in 2003. He examines race relations in Virginia over the first half of the 20th century. In the early decades, there was a façade of good race relations among paternalistic whites and the “better class” of blacks. While Klu Klux Klan violence was anathema, overzealous white supremacists such as John Plecker turned to Anglo-Saxon Clubs to reinforce the color line. The 1924 Racial Integrity Act redefined race with a “one drop rule” and outlawed racial intermarriage.
Smith describes the challenges to the segregation system by both whites and blacks. Despite the protests of the black Virginia press led by the Richmond Planet and the Norfolk Journal and Guide, along with notable whites such as Louis Jaffe of the Norfolk Virginia-Pilot, the 1926 Public Assemblages Act mandated racial segregation in all public places.
By the late 1930s and early 1940s, there was more Virginian black initiative in bring about social change, using court cases to challeng Richmond’s racial segregation ordinances, library segregation in Alexandria, unequal teacher salaries in Norfolk and exclusion from the University of Virginia. Leaders such as Oliver W. Hill and Samuel W. Tucker demanded rights as citizens. Although white Virginians such as Virginius Dabney of the Richmond Times-Dispatch recognized the inequalities that had grown up under “separate but equal”, it took African-American leadership to attain an end a legal regime of second-class citizenship. Learn more to buy “Managing White Supremacy” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.
Lynching in the New South
Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930 was written by W. Fitzhugh Brundage in 1993. He tracks the course of mob violence as the extreme form of racial control, although whites were also lynched. Lynchings as planned attacks against individuals were most often carried out against accused murderers, but sexual crimes or even verbal offences sometimes met with retribution for motives of chivalry and honor.
Over a fifty-year period, Brundage studies the 86 lychings in Virginia and the 460 in Georgia, describing the complex and contradictory character of the violence as it varied geographically within states and across time. Rarely occurring in towns or cities with rapid economic transformation, it flourished as a means of social control within the boundaries of the plantation South where there was sharecropping, mono-agriculture and strict segregation. Racial violence there was initially unopposed either by institutions or individuals.
One-third of the book is devoted to the opposition to lynching and its eventual disappearance. In Virginia, there was a strong conservative white opposition to lynching, perhaps more due to a concern for law and order than racial justice. In Georgia, Progressive reformers along with religious and civic organizations mobilized against it. Learn more to buy “Lynching in the New South” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.
Speak Now Against the Day
Speak Now Against The Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement was written by John Egerton in 1994. He studies the American South from the election of Franklin Roosevelt in November 8, 1932, until the Brown v. Board of Education ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court. Jim Crow continues from 1932-1938. From 1938-1945, initiatives for improvement in race relations are introduced by new organizations, federal programs and labor unions. The white majority had an opportunity to change race them voluntarily from 1945-1950, but reaction stifled reform from 1950-1954.
Egerton explores the stances made by four major newspaper editors: Virginius Dabney in Richmond, Ralph McGill in Atlanta, Hodding Carter in Greenville, Mississippi, and Jonathan Daniels in Raleigh. The roles of Lillian Smith in Atlanta and Lucy Randolph in Richmond are developed.
Editor McGill counseled that a dramatic change in race relations could only come with a change in the human heart unclogged by institutional obstruction, one courageous person at a time. Learn more to buy “Speak Now Against the Day” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.
Simple Justice
Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality was written by Richard Kluger in 2004. Kluger interviewed many of the principal participants including the African-American litigants, plaintiff strategists, Supreme Court Justices and their clerks.
The book begins by describing the social and historical context of the earlier “separate but equal” Supreme Court doctrine for public schooling. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) led by Thurgood Marshall attacked segregated schools as unconstitutional in themselves rather than insisting on the equality of white and black schools.
The second section explores the process of the Supreme Court achieving a unanimous decision. Only four were prepared to rule segregated schools unconstitutional. Only Frankfurter insisted on unanimity. The death of Chief Justice Vinson led to his replacement with Earl Warren by President Dwight Eisenhower.
Warren marshaled a unanimous decision that was “short, readable by the lay public, non-rhetorical, and, above all, non-accusatory.” Learn more to buy “Simple Justice” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.