Maintaining Segregation: Children and Racial Instruction in the South, 1920-1955 by LeeAnn G. Reynolds (review)

In this well-written, deeply analytical monograph, LeeAnn Reynolds examines the "racial conditioning" that black and white children experienced in their southern homes, schools, and churches in the years between the end of World War I and the Brown v. Board of Education decisions. She seeks to augment both the Long Civil Rights movement narrative, as first advanced by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, and the historiography of everyday forms of resistance, associated most closely with Robin D.G. Kelley. She argues that racial conditioning, or lessons learned about segregation from adults, created a "culture of silence" and encouraged children to "meet the demands of segregation" (3, 8). It thus "prevented critiques of segregation from permeating popular perceptions and effecting change," which explains why "opposition to segregation before the mid-1950s … did not effectively undermine the system" (7). While this analysis may short-change the long development of the litigious challenge to Jim Crow, this is nonetheless a deftly conceptualized and compelling book that should interest scholars of race and civil rights.

Reynolds allows that "active, intentional, effective resistance to segregation in the decades before 1950" was "vital to building the institutional apparatus and activist networks upon which the civil rights movement would draw." But she believes historians have overstated its impact and have "neglected the voices" of black southerners "who remembered having come to terms with segregation in light of the overwhelming opposition they faced" (8). She insists that uncovering the "obstacles" to activism in the pre-Brown years is "vital" both to "understanding segregation" and to appreciating fully what the Civil Rights Movement eventually accomplished (8-9). Reynolds argues that white liberals' efforts to educate-away segregation gradually would never have been successful without "the interposition of an active, black-led civil rights movement," which itself required developing an understanding of how children had been racially conditioned (147). Armed with this knowledge, and a willingness to engage in direct confrontation, the movement made whites realize that at least some elements of segregation were harming them, and it convinced blacks that nonviolent direct action could be successful.

Reynolds juxtaposes her work with that of other scholars who, in examining segregation, have focused on child-rearing, notably Jennifer Ritterhouse in Growing up Jim Crow: How Black and White Southern Children Learned about Race (University of North Carolina Press, 2006) and Kristina DuRocher in Raising Racists: The Socialization of White Children in the Jim Crow South (University Press of Kentucky, 2011). Challenging them on chronology and the nature of racial instruction, Reynolds argues that racial conditioning explains segregation's endurance in an era when violence, especially in the form of public lynchings, was less common than when Jim Crow was being established or when the movement openly challenged the system in the 1950s and 1960s. The generation born after the Great War learned about segregation "by rote" and by developing "unexamined emotional consequences," and the institutions Reynolds examines discouraged any "troubling questions" about racial inequality (10).

In exploring racial instruction in homes, Reynolds relies almost exclusively upon autobiography. This skews the source pool of white children toward those who experienced a "racial awakening," toward black children who ended up participating in the movement, and toward those, black and white, of privileged upbringing. Regardless, Reynolds makes a strong case that many children found their questions about Jim Crow met with dismissive remarks or admonition from parents. Segregation was something that just was, and it was not to be questioned or even discussed. For parents, the primary motivation in approaching racial instruction in this way was ensuring the safety of their children.

Some white parents bolstered the white supremacist order by educating their kids in Lost Cause mythology – the notion that an idyllic antebellum South had been destroyed by "Yankees" and ruled over by "carpetbaggers," "skalawags," and "ignorant" freedmen until the Ku Klux Klan restored "law and...