The Uplift Generation: Cooperation Across the Color Line in Early Twentieth-Century Virginia by Clayton McClure Brooks (review)

Unlike most uplift generation studies that highlight African Americans, Clayton McClure Brooks's The Uplift Generation: Cooperation Across the Color Line in Early Twentieth-Century Virginia analyzes interracial activism, relationships among black and white Virginia uplifters, and their gradual recognition of accommodation as a failed tactic. White uplifters, who constructed and managed segregation, hailed from the paternal elite and practiced "'polite racism,'" a Virginia brand of white supremacy lathered in gentility and Lost Cause rhetoric (p. 12). They viewed segregation as a Progressive reform rather than the bedrock of African American inequality. They credited Virginia's lowest number of lynchings among the twelve states where lynchings occurred to their style of racial dominance. For "the 'better classes'" of African Americans, most of them Richmonders who embraced Booker T. Washington's accommodationist philosophy, uplift meant harnessing racism to make separate but equal as equal as possible (p. 210). They deployed interracialism for the first thirty years of the twentieth century, as segregation in Virginia toughened into one of the most restrictive systems in the nation, serving as a model to other states. Black uplifters acknowledged accommodationism's inability to deliver equal citizenship and end segregation. As interracialism failed, the state assumed control of segregation.

Prominent African American uplifters included John Mitchell Jr., editor of the Richmond Planet; career reformer Ora Brown Stokes; Maggie Lena Walker, president of Richmond's St. Luke Penny Savings Bank; and Janie Porter Barrett, founder of the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls, which trained its charges for domestic labor and garnered strong white support. They focused on child welfare, public health, and schools, trying to manipulate segregation's weaknesses to attack the racism that the system produced.

Virginia segregation developed within the context of national and international events. World War I spawned a W. E. B. Du Bois–esque belief that military service would be a powerful postwar weapon against segregation. But racism in Virginia, as in the nation, only intensified, and segregation squeezed tighter. When thousands of migrants left Virginia, many black uplifters criticized the strategy, arguing that economic progress was more likely at home than elsewhere and that white people's fears of migration could be exploited effectively. As the nadir deepened, black uplifters shifted their focus to voting, finally allowing that accommodation had wrought little. The passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 sparked white people's fears of black female voters threatening white supremacy in ways that uplifters could not.

In this lily-white atmosphere, black Republicans ran a "lily-black" candidate for U.S. Senate in 1921 (p. 156). The experiment proved instructional, demonstrating that interracialism would be useless in the fight for equal citizenship and that separate would never be equal. Aware of their complicity in perpetuating segregation but seemingly oblivious to the contentious national debate about accommodationism's usefulness, uplifters and their descendants limited interracial work. Segregationist critics of white uplifters rejected interracialism as a bygone strategy that no longer prevented black opposition.

This detailed study upends Virginia parochialism while documenting uplifters' embrace of Virginia exceptionalism. Brooks adds an insightful and sensitive analysis to the literature of uplift, segregation, and the civil rights movement. The Uplift Generation clearly delineates why accommodation was a compromised strategy primed for replacement in the 1920s.