Growing Up Jim Crow: How Black and White Southern Children Learned Race (review)

Until he entered elementary school, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s closest playmate was a white boy whose father’s store was located across the street from the King home in Atlanta. When the two boys entered separate schools, the child’s parents announced the end of the friendship with the explanation that “we are white and you are colored.” Nearly three decades later, King, now the father of two children, struggled with the same unresolved issue that had caused such heartache in his own childhood as he asked in his often quoted “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” what should you do “. . . when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, . . . when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son asking in agonizing pathos: ‘Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?’” (65).

It is this reality that Jennifer Ritterhouse addresses in her important study, Growing Up Jim Crow: How Black and White Southern Children Learned Race—a study that draws on a vast number of autobiographies and oral histories to illustrate how children—black and white—learned about race. In doing so, Ritterhouse validates the basic premise of C. Vann Woodward’s seminal 1954 book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, that the South had the choice of whether to follow the route of segregation and all the injustices that came with that option or an alternative way. Using Woodward’s “forgotten alternatives,” Ritterhouse explains, “Consonant with Woodward’s core idea that things could have been different in the South, in my usage this phrase describes the socializing process by which individual white southerners learned, both directly from their parents and other white adults and indirectly from observing the nature of their society, to forget nonracist impulses in favor of conventional ideas about racial difference that made life in their communities make sense. In placing so much emphasis on a window of forgotten alternatives that, admittedly, closed for virtually all white southerners at a very early age, I am undoubtedly guilty of much the same kind of optimism that motivated Woodward back in 1954. Like him, I believe that history can have a forward-looking purpose” (11).

Those “forgotten alternatives” were concealed by an “etiquette of race,” that could be traced back to the days of slavery when, “Slaves rarely sat and never kept a hat on in the presence of whites. They walked a few paces behind rather than beside their masters and mistresses. If they had occasion to go into town, they yielded the sidewalk to whites who met or overtook them, stepping completely out of the way and into the street if necessary to let white people pass” (30). Ritterhouse devotes much of her book to examples of the nature of this etiquette of race from both the black and the white perspectives. Many white children, like Sarah Patton Boyle, were taught to be friendly, gracious, and courteous to blacks as long as they did not become familiar, or uppity, “or act the least bit out of their place” (69). Lillian Smith learned that all beings were children of the same Divine Being, but “I also knew that I was better than a Negro . . . that a terrifying disaster would befall the South if ever I treated a Negro as my social equal . . .” (131–132). Albon L. Holsey recalled passing the home of a white man playing with his infant son on the front porch and the father pointing his way, “Look—nigger . . .Say ‘nigger,’ he repeated again and again” (71). Could this have been the same young boy who approached a black woman one morning asking “‘Are you a nigger?’ . . .His whole face was wreathed in smiles, and he...