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

Nowhere in America have whites and blacks been closer together, yet further apart than in the South. This dilemma of racial proximity not only characterized slavery, but Jim Crow. Clayton McClure Brooks' The Uplift Generation, a stimulating interpretation of cross-racial activism in Virginia between 1900 and 1930, is one of the latest accounts to grapple with the quandary of the South's shared racial history. Brooks' explanation of interracial activism in the Old Dominion, reputed for its strange juxtaposition of racist civility and severe Jim Crow laws, also represents recent attempts to add nuance to the area's history—and its dilemma of proximity—by telling regional and local stories.

Using a variety of archival sources, personal accounts, newspapers, and journals, this book sets out to explain the exceptional nature of Jim Crow in Virginia. Interracialism among the Commonwealth's elites was not merely common; it represented the "lingering paternalism" left over from the antebellum period and Lost Cause. By 1900, whites' insistence on maintaining control over black lives shaped segregation. Yet segregation, in Brooks estimation, differed in Virginia because African Americans—who worked within the context of contemporary race relations—were instrumental in molding and shaping the Jim Crow system too. Cross-racial activism, a fragile alliance whereby blacks allowed whites to act as their political liaisons, may have demonstrated Virginians' commitment to "polite racism," but it eventually crumbled under the weight of racial disparities.

Over the course of seven chronological chapters, cross-racial activism comes undone. If the first portion of this book outlines the "nebulous ties" that blacks and whites forged as they crafted the Jim Crow system, the midsections demonstrate how blacks believed that segregation might stimulate independence from white paternalism. Both black (e.g. Maggie Lena Walker) and white (e.g. Mary Munford) women not only met the challenges of social vulnerability, they also spearheaded the bureaucratization of Jim Crow during the Progressive era. During the 1910s, the Great Migration, and the rise in vigilante violence after World War I compromised the fabric of polite racism. In the end, Brooks contends, "… residential segregation diffused class divisions among African Americans by forcing wealthy and poor alike to live under shared inequities" (p. 64). As deepening economic marginalization and epidemiological concerns consumed black communities, African American leaders rejected their position as cue-takers. The rejection of paternalism during the end of the 1920s marked the end of interracialism.

Ultimately, this book's strength, the deep delineation of racist civility in Virginia, may also be its most glaring weakness. There is an implicit gamble in telling regional/local histories (a gamble this author knows well). Many regional stories often fail to negotiate the space between particulars and broader context. On the one hand, Brooks has done well in showing how Virginia's African Americans were not simply acted upon by white elites—they were, in limited capacities, the architects of Jim Crow. Yet, this book focuses on a handful of leaders in Richmond to the detriment of Virginia broadly. Even Brooks acknowledges that "few individuals … joined cross-racial activism initiatives" (p. 26). While Brooks is careful to bring in cross-racial activists from rural and urban Virginia (namely, Norfolk), the thrust of this book is to be found in the former capital of the Confederacy (especially at the book's outset).

Furthermore, the author claims—and rightfully so—that race relations in Jim Crow Virginia were unique. Yet, Brooks makes a case for Virginia exceptionalism without comparison. What of North Carolina's progressive plutocracy and how it was similar to, or different from, the Virginia Way? How might a delineation of racial progressives elsewhere enhance our understanding of what actually made polite racism in Virginia exceptional?

In the end, this book's shortcomings do little to undermine its contributions. Ultimately, Brooks' interrogation of cross-racialism in Virginia...