Making a New South: Race, Leadership, and Community after the Civil War (review)

In Making a New South, editors Paul A. Cimbala and Barton C. Shaw assemble an eclectic collection of essays in political, social, cultural, and labor history, all unified by the theme of race. In their individual essays, the authors address the public efforts of southern leaders to forge various, often contradictory, New Souths in rural and urban areas from Virginia to Texas in the century between the collapse of Reconstruction and the 1970s. "Despite the great variations in the particularities of their times, places and intentions," note the writers of the introduction, each of the leaders examined "labored to construct a new South in a cultural context in which racial distinctions pervaded virtually every other issue in public life" (6-7).

The definition of "leadership" is sufficiently flexible to include journalists, educators, preachers, reformers, and politicians of all ideological stripes, black and white, male and female, who, variously, strove to maintain prevailing hierarchies, to plot courses of gradual change, or to establish a truly "New" South where African Americans and workers of all races could enjoy the rights previously denied them. Leadership is also grounded in specific communities, enabling the authors to tease out the combination of local and national conditions which buffeted their subjects in their quests to remake the South. In an essay on white leadership in Columbus, Georgia, during the 1870s and 1880s, for example, Faye L. Jensen illustrates how broader shifts in the economy and in transportation conspired with the stodgy conservatism and disunity of the local elite to preclude the kind of urban growth which swelled competitors such as Atlanta and Birmingham.

Despite its strengths as a volume and the individual strength of many of the essays, Making a New South suffers from its uncompromising insistence upon southern distinctiveness. "For better or for worse," argues the introduction, the subjects of this book "knew that they were different; they knew they were southerners" (10). This is not, of course, an unusual or controversial claim but it leads inevitably to the rejoinder, "different from what?' This book's aggressively inward focus at times precludes what might be fruitful comparisons of the South with the North and West, comparisons which might challenge notions of southern distinctiveness and, at the least, illuminate its commonalities with the rest of the country. In her essay on housing segregation in Louisville in the 1950s, for example, Catherine Fosl insists that the city—bordering a northern state—"clung to a southern heritage" even though "Jim Crow was legislated in only a piecemeal fashion," making it "both southern and not southern." Rather than looking to housing controversies in other "not southern" cities, such as Chicago or Detroit in the same years, she keeps her narrative squarely focused on "southern intransigent resistance to racial change" (150). Such an approach reinforces discredited but pervasive assumptions that anti-black racism has been a uniquely southern problem. It asserts distinctiveness without actually testing it. Simultaneously—and unfortunately—it sanitizes the history of the rest of the country as well.