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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 35.1 (2004) 161-163



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Managing White Supremacy: Race, Politics, and Citizenship in Jim Crow Virginia. By J. Douglas Smith (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2002) 411 pp. $55.00 cloth $19.95 paper

Close your eyes and conjure the image of the classic white southern opponent of black civil rights. What appears is the barrel-chested Mississippi sheriff, whose steely glare and tight-lipped scowl melt seamlessly into the jowls straining the inevitable mid-century collar and tie. That one does not think of Virginians Carter Glass, Colgate Darden, or Harry Byrd in this context has more to do with their style than the substance of their power: No twentieth-century southern state was more firmly under the thumb of a local oligarchy committed to white supremacy than Virginia. As few as 1,000 state and local officials controlled the state during the decades leading up to the Brown decision in 1954. (Drawing what must have seemed the most extreme comparison possible, Key once quipped that in contrast to Virginia, "Mississippi is a hotbed of democracy."1) Less colorful, and on the whole less violent than their Deep South Jim Crow collaborators, Virginia's white elite was nonetheless equal to the task of defending white privilege when its back was to the wall. Rather than comply with the Supreme Court's decision ending segregated schools, Virginians led the white South down the path of massive resistance to African-American civic equality.

Like North Carolina, white Virginia always considered itself a civilized exception to the more openly exploitive racial regimes of the cotton and sugar South. The essence of the "Virginia Way," Smith tells us, was the desire for "separation by consent." If only African-Americans had stood to the side, white paternalists would have seen "that the negro [had] decent living conditions, educational facilities, and absolute justice in the courts of law" (62). Voting was denied, but in this matter black Virginians were not much more mistreated than nonelite white Virginians, most of whom had been purged from the rosters between 1895 and 1902. This elite-sponsored system of paternalistic racism—what Smith calls "managed race relations"—worked reasonably well in Virginia through World War I but began to come unglued during the 1920s under pressure from black and nonelite white Virginians. Working in tandem, if at cross purposes, neither group was willing to trust its interests to Virginia's first families or to settle for second-class citizenship.

Drawing on a wide variety of sources, Managing White Supremacy [End Page 161] traces the evolution of the "Virginia Way" from emancipation through the mid-1950s. The bulk of the book focuses on the interwar period. In chapters ranging from Virginia's response to lynching to the adoption in 1926 of the Massenburg Bill (America's first public assemblages act), Smith keeps a sharp eye on the role of law in shaping race relations. Content with disfranchisement and public resources directed chiefly toward middle-class whites, Virginia's paternalists were unprepared for a drive by nonelite, more extreme white supremacists to bolster the state's Jim Crow laws in the 1920s. Defining themselves against the Klan, supporters of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs (founded in Richmond by John Powell, a concert pianist) vowed to achieve their segregationist goals through the law, thereby posing a significantly greater challenge to elite rule than the Klan's traditional flouting of the law and elite norms. Those gentle white moderates who considered additional Jim Crow statutes "unnecessary, humiliating, and violative of harmonious race relations" could only watch appalled as Powell and his supporters passed legislation redefining white racial identity, further penalizing interracial sex, shoring up residential segregation codes, and providing for involuntary sterilization. But as the Anglo-Saxon Club supporters noted at the time, Virginia's white elites did not have upwardly mobile blacks moving into their neighborhoods.

Already under assault from the radical white flank, managed race relations were challenged by black Virginians as well. Energized by the 1927 Supreme Court decision...

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