Imagining Jim Crow

In The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955), C. Vann Woodward argued that a deeper understanding of the history of post-Reconstruction segregation would help southerners to see their institutions and social arrangements as fluid rather than “inviolable by nature.” In proposing this new narrative, Woodward was trusting that a clearer picture of segregation’s past would allow for a better future, one that did not embrace racial hierarchy as essential to southern identity. Two new studies remind us that, more than fifty years after Woodward, we are still wrestling with Jim Crow’s legacy. In many ways, Andrew Leiter’s In the Shadow of the Black Beast: African American Masculinity in the Harlem and Southern Renaissances and Brian Norman’s Neo-Segregation Narratives: Jim Crow in Post-Civil Rights American Literature demand to be read together. One should begin with Leiter, who in a series of carefully-argued chapters builds a persuasive case for how the “the black beast image,” which “developed slowly out of slavery and crystallized in white minds over the last decade of the nineteenth century,” was eventually deployed in the early twentieth century by black and white writers alike to challenge the fundamental assumptions of Jim Crow. If Leiter is concerned with the role that one image played in the development of and discourse about segregation, Norman is interested in how the Jim Crow era is represented in narratives written after the civil rights movement and the dismantling of du jure segregation. According to Norman, “post-civil rights writers” fashion narratives about the Jim Crow era because those writers can “draw on the perceived clarity of that period to highlight and explain more elusive systems of racial disenfranchisement and division” existing in the present. As a result, a new genre has emerged, the “neo-segregation” narrative, and Norman argues eloquently for the importance of this genre in both contemporary literary history and current racial discourse.

Leiter opens by arguing that, after Reconstruction, interracial sex was depicted differently in literature about the South. While abolitionists had trafficked in images of the lustful slave owner to combat the peculiar institution, southern writers after the war found a new weapon (the black beast image) in their fight to establish a new institution (segregation). “Gone was Stowe’s image of brute masters satisfying their lusts upon helpless enslaved women,” Leiter writes. “In its stead appeared the image of degenerate black men roaming the southern countryside looking to ravage unprotected white virgins.” The “black beast at the center of white unity and supremacy” was propagated best by Thomas Dixon, and Leiter persuasively argues that Dixon’s novels played a crucial role in solidifying segregation’s status as an inviolable social arrangement necessitated by black bestiality.

Leiter’s second chapter gets to the heart of his project: juxtaposing how writers from the Harlem and Southern Renaissances engaged this inherited image of African American bestiality. Leiter begins with Walter White and James Weldon Johnson and their “literary efforts to redeem black masculinity.” Although White effectively exposed as unfounded the mass hysteria over black sexuality and transferred “the image of bestiality onto the white race,” Johnson’s redemption of black masculinity was more problematic. Unintentionally echoing Dixon’s novels, several interracial relationships in the Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man suggest that “the black male and white female cannot share the same sexual space without incurring disaster.” In his next chapter, Leiter proposes a most intriguing juxtaposition: George Schuyler’s Black No More and William Faulkner’s Light in August. According to Leiter, both works “envision whiteness as a contested space,” and both authors propose “the same dual notion of a black sexual threat that simultaneously exists and does not exist” (in Schuyler because “any concept of racial identity is ridiculous...