Race in the American South: From Slavery to Civil Rights (review)

J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 9 61 most to Blocton residents, who will appreciate the celebratory accounts of local accomplishment and detailed inclusion of notable residents. CATHERINE GYLLERSTROM Auburn University Race in the American South: From Slavery to Civil Rights. By David Brown and Clive Webb. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007. vi, 392 pp. $75.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-8130-3202-3. $24.95 (paper). ISBN 9780 -8130-3203-0. With varying degrees of success, Race in the American South surveys the history of race—defined as “the constellation of (empirically false) ideas about the supposedly essentialist and determinative physical and mental attributes of distinct human types” (p.7)—and racism, the system of institutional oppression built upon those ideas. The authors repeat the truism that “while southern history was never only about race, race and racism were critical to the historical development of the South” (p. 8), but they primarily aim to synthesize the enormous body of literature devoted to race and racism in southern history. The authors trace the evolution of racial ideas in the South from the intersection of African, European, and Native American peoples in the seventeenth century to contemporary issues with strong racial overtones, such as poverty or the display of the Confederate battle flag. The book shows that class, gender, and religion initially shaped identity more than ideas about race, until the late eighteenth century when racial ideologies were conceptualized “with considerable force and urgency in regions with slaves” (p. 73). Southern whites had often presumed superiority over Africans and Native Americans, but they previously did so without fully developed racial ideologies. The advent of scientific racism, the enslavement of most Africans, and the expulsion of Native Americans from the South seemed to legitimate notions of white supremacy, as race emerged as a powerful, if not pervasive, historical force. The authors identify the 1830s as the decade when the South “came of age as a fully functioning white supremacist society” (p. 101). After a chapter on the Civil War and emancipation, the second half of the book focuses on the political ramifications of racial ideologies that privileged whiteness, but the narrative varies little from textbooks that survey African American history. As one might anticipate, Alabama ap- T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 62 pears frequently in these chapters. In addition to several vignettes from the 1930s and 1940s that illustrate how race informed southern labor tensions, civil rights protests in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma are described in some detail. A fairly thorough chronology appears after the text, followed by a bibliographic essay that notes pertinent studies of race and racism in the South. The book’s greatest strength may be the historiographical summaries interspersed throughout the text. Topics that have generated significant debates—the origins of racial ideas, the agency of slaves in fashioning their communities, white paternalism, the complicity of white yeomen in slavery and segregation, and the establishment of de jure segregation —are highlighted. The authors also point toward several areas that warrant further research, such as the process by which Native Americans sometimes embraced racial categorizations or how scientific racism was disseminated to poor whites in the antebellum South. A book of this nature inevitably excludes contributions that other historians regard highly, and several excellent volumes on Alabama history are omitted from the text, endnotes, and bibliographic essay. For example , the authors briefly describe the infamous Scottsboro affair of 1931 and the admission of Autherine Lucy to the University of Alabama in 1956, but Dan Carter’s Scottsboro (Baton Rouge, 1969) and E. Culpepper Clark’s The Schoolhouse Door (New York, 1993) are not mentioned. Given the emphasis on Alabama during the civil rights movement, the omission of Glenn Eskew’s But for Birmingham (Chapel Hill, 1997), David Garrow’s Protest at Selma (New Haven, 1978), and J. Mills Thornton’s Dividing Lines (Tuscaloosa, 2002) is more perplexing. The text also loses focus in the latter chapters, opting for descriptions of legal changes rather than explanations for how ideas about race evolved. For example, the conclusion indicates that...