113: Steve Hoelscher's Making Place, Making Race

In "Making Place, Making Race: Performances of Whiteness in the Jim Crow South," Steve Hoelscher uses the landscapes and performances of white Southern memory in Natchez, Mississippi to show how a dominant group created a culture of segregation that far exceeded its legal boundaries, and how racialization of "everyday geographies" is constantly being both upheld and reworked.  Hoelscher argues that modern American race relations have roots in the Southern past and especially in the Jim Crow past, so understanding the processes of Natchez' production of race in the landscape can help us understand racialization of American landscapes more generally.

Hoelscher relies on a wide variety of sources, including ethnographic research and interviews in Natchez, archival sources, including pamphlets, letters, ads, and photos, and secondary and archival sources on lynching, residential segregation, and other evidence of racialization on the landscape.

86: James Grossman's Land of Hope

James Grossman's Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration looks at the Great Black Migration as a social process of migration and adaptation that linked together North and South, culturally as well as geographically.  Grossman works in the new social history tradition, so his interest is in the experiences and decisions made by black Southerners who participated in the migration, as well as in their perceptions of their new lives in Chicago.

Looking at the Migration from the perspective of black Southerners, Grossman discovers that the decision to move North was made by the migrants themselves, not by larger structural forces.  The migrants evaluated the North based on the world they knew in the South, not abstract notions of equality.  And initially, Chicago really was a land of hope: the city offered higher wages, more autonomy, the ability to vote, and better schools for their children than were available in the South.  While some historians interpret the migration as a structural shift from rural to urban work, Grossman argues that it was a conscious move by black Southerners to gain opportunity and freedom.

82: Clay Carson's In Struggle

Clay Carson’s In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s uses the trajectory of SNCC’s radicalism in the 1960s both to analyze the black civil rights movement as a historical struggle and to draw conclusions based on this struggle about social movements more generally.  He divides SNCC’s history into three broad segments: formation of a grassroots organization around the dual foci of non-violent protest strategies and socioeconomic programs to help poor rural Southern blacks; organizational centralization and internal strife related to a deepening understanding of the extent of structural racism in the United States and conflict over whether separatism or interracial collaboration would best address it; and a turn toward generating black power ideology and away from social programs that resulted in the failure of SNCC and a dissipation of the civil rights movement more generally.  As Carson assembles oral histories, meeting transcripts, newspaper accounts, and other sources into this general narrative, several historically contingent conclusions emerge.  First and foremost, Carson argues that the black civil rights movement (as SNCC) was most successful at effecting social change early in the movement, when it was able to balance individual interests with collective rights – hence Ella Baker’s “group-centered leaders” instead of “leader-centered groups.” Further, developing an ideology is important for sustaining a mass movement, but this ideology has to come from the ground up, not from the top down.  Hence, SNCC lost its constituency when it moved away from localized social and economic programs and toward flashy Black Power rhetoric.  And finally, Carson argues that radical separatism will not achieve social equality as well as interracial cooperation or cooperation with more liberal groups, both because it overemphasizes individualism and because it has little basis in the material reality of most potential constituents.  Carson’s history thus makes a compelling argument for grassroots activism and a federated structure as two characteristics of a successful social change organization.

74: David Levering Lewis' Biography of a Race

David Levering Lewis' W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919, is a massive popular biography of Du Bois and one of two planned volumes on his life and work.  Lewis takes "biography" in two different directions: as a writer who focused on recovering African American voices and reconstructing their agentive participation in their own history, Du Bois was a biographer of a race; as a person who was born right after the Civil War and who died during the Civil Rights movement, his life can also be used to trace the trajectory of an oppressed group from slavery to freedom (and, for Du Bois, on to Africa.)  Therefore, the book is both a deeply contextualized biography of Du Bois' life, career, and work, and an attempt to recreate the massive political, social, and economic changes impacting the lives of black Americans during his lifetime.

Biography of a Race belies a huge amount of research, and Lewis spends a great deal of time reconstructing Du Bois' rather "prickly" personality and his tendency toward separatism as he got older. Working from Du Bois' personal papers, he works to humanize him, so that we see his troubled childhood, his difficult relationships with his wives, and his philandering tendencies in plain relief.  And he includes a full 8 chapters on Du Bois and the NAACP, including his frustration with Booker T. Washington and the "accomodationist" Tuskegee Institute.  He also traces the shift in Du Bois' thought around the turn of the century from a "naive" faith in science's ability to solve racial inequality to the more political route of the NAACP.  And he ends - rather precipitously - during the "Red Summer" of 1919.

While this book really helps humanize Du Bois, Lewis' strategy seems to be to keep in every detail, no matter how small, and he often includes several versions of the same story rather than working to figure out which pieces seem the most well-supported.  Further, his chatty speculations and asides sometimes detract from his larger point, as when he offhandedly suggests that a white woman living with him and his wife might have been a boarder - or perhaps the three were involved in a menage a trois.  He also apparently went to a psychoanalyst in the guise of Du Bois by way of interrogating his psyche.  I appreciate the humanization of the subject, but I do wish Lewis or his editor had been a little more careful.

70: Eric Foner's Reconstruction

Eric Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 is a synthetic history of American Reconstruction that combines social, political, and economic aspects of Reconstruction into three overarching themes:

• the centrality of black experience
• the larger context of an emergent national state
• the impact of social, political, economic, and moral developments in the North affected the course of Reconstruction in the South

A synthesis of "revisionist" scholarship on black experiences after slavery, Foner's book clearly and consistently emphasizes the experiences, worldviews, interpretations, and actions of black Southerners across class lines.  He thus builds on the work of new social historians and continues WEB DuBois' project in Black Reconstruction, which rewrote the history of the Reconstruction period by reframing black "debauchery" as white racism and a deliberate attempt to retain the power of white elites by discrediting freed blacks.  He also integrates "post-Revisionist" studies into his argument by showing how Reconstruction policies themselves were woefully inadequate, and thus the North, as well as the South, was complicit in the failure of the Reconstruction project.  Even though freed blacks were eager to take control of their working lives and many had millenial expectations of a post-racial society, white Southerners were so afraid of losing their disciplined workforce that they blocked land purchases, denied credit access, built exploitation into a new sharecropping system, and used violence to prevent freed people from exercising their newfound freedom.

53: Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham's African-American Women's History

In her 1992 article "African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of race," Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham argues that feminist scholars need to bring race into their analysis of social power.  Race for Higginbotham is both a "decentered complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle" AND a "metalanguage" that has a "powerful, all-encompassing effect on the construction and representation of other social and power relations."  Integrating race and gender into a study of social power de-homogenizes both sides of the equation: racializing gender challenges the assumption that all women are the same, and gendering race challenges the assumption that all people of a particular race are the same.  Destabilizing these two categories also helps make other social divisions, like class, visible within them.  And all of this destabilization gives us a more nuanced picture of the relations of power in American society.

In the course of challenging the homogeneity of race and class, Higginbotham draws on plenty of cultural theory to analyze speeches and writings by black intellectuals and white feminist scholars, court cases, and histories of mostly 19th-century black experiences as well as some 20th-century examples.  In the process, she historicizes the development of race as a tool of oppression that is rooted in slavery; because race thus signifies the master/slave relationship, it exists as ideology on top of class and property relations and conditions gender and sexuality.  However, because race develops out of material relations of oppression between groups, it also serves as what Bakhtin calls a "double-voiced discourse:" race is simultaneously the language of black oppression AND black liberation.  And, recognizing the liberatory possibilities of racial discourse, Higginbotham concludes with a call for black female historians to write race into gender by writing histories that open up spaces for agency; we will become fully human in and through discourse.

While I'm concerned about what feels like a cherrypicking approach in her choice of examples, and even more concerned that she seems to be more interested in discourse than in real, material actions and places, I think her call to look for the intersections and divisions in race and gender as categories can lead to very productive thinking about power in a more holistic way.