Race Cards and Gendered Playing Tables in the New South

Glenda Gilmore understands that standpoint matters. Family memory provided her with a glimpse into “the racial rituals” that formed “a space neither white nor black” that clubwoman and school founder Charlotte Hawkins Brown “convinced Greensboro [North Carolina] whites to participate in and accept” in the 1950s because Gilmore’s grandfather served as Hawkins Brown’s physician and her mother was secretary to Hawkins Brown’s attorney. Hawkins Brown would challenge segregation obliquely by telephoning before appointments so she could walk past both “white and “colored” waiting rooms to “a vestibule off of the doctor’s study” (p. 185). Placing educated African-American women at the center of southern political history allows Gilmore to move beyond this inheritance. She confesses: “I discovered—or created—a place quite different from the one I thought I knew as a native North Carolinian” (p. xvi).

Gender and Jim Crow is a stunning achievement. To underscore the race and gender of white men, while refocusing the narrative around the dreams of African-American women, the disappointments of their men, and their uneasy “interracial cooperation” with white women, more than uncovers the postemancipation world of the black “better classes” ¹ lost to racial apartheid. Gilmore reconstructs political history by situating “politics” in culture. Her re-reading of southern progressivism incorporates the voluntarism of African-American women as well as challenges the northern orientation of scholarship on women’s suffrage and social welfare. Immersed in black sources, Gilmore reinterprets white ones, revealing the interracial work erased by white clubwomen and the lies fabricated by “New White Men.” She builds upon the explosion of gender analysis in political history ² and the sophisticated scholarship on cultural identity and community development in black women’s history. ³ Grounding the dynamics of Jim Crow in the local, she convincingly complicates our portrait of disenfranchisement and its aftermath.

Three arguments dominate this narrative. First, African-American male political participation from 1890 to 1898 represents a movement toward greater inclusion: the balance of power between political parties in North Carolina and the Populist-Republican victory in 1896 kept black votes in contention and maintained some black men in political office. In support of the Woodward thesis, Gilmore argues that “racial repression at the turn of the century did not simply institutionalize the prevailing trend in race relations; rather, it profoundly reordered society” (p. xx). Second, upwardly mobile and middle-class New South men, Southern Progressives, formulated disenfranchisement and Jim Crow, later blaming the deficient “cracker” for acting on their verbal violence. These white supremacists reacted to white women’s movement into public space, urbanization, industrialization, and African-American advancement; they “responded to black power even as [they] capitalized on black weakness” (p. 118). Third, Gilmore ironically notes, “as black men were forced from the political, the political underwent a redefinition, opening new space for black women.” Women became “diplomats to the white community” as they sought through their church and civic voluntary societies to gain “some recognition and meager services from the expanding welfare state” (p. xxi). African-American women had regarded the voting of their men as a community, rather than an individual, act of citizenship, as Elsa Barkley Brown brilliantly has shown. ⁴ Now women would become the vanguard; their enfranchisement “forever altered white supremacy’s style and cleared a narrow path for black men to return to electoral politics” (p. xxi). Disenfranchisement and Jim Crow wore a gendered face, the neglect of which has obscured the gendered dimensions of black protest.

Two decades of women’s and African-American history have broadened our conception of the political beyond elections and parties to embrace social welfare and everyday survival strategies. Gilmore illustrates the ways that racialized gender—constructions of manhood and womanhood grounded in notions of racial identity—provide an analytical tool to understand society as a whole, not merely women’s history...