Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow

Chapter 2 examines how white people justified their reluctance to extend civil rights to Black people by using racial science, political rhetoric, journalism, fiction, and folklore. Enslavement legally ended after the Civil War, but opponents of racial equality used varied means to deny formerly enslaved people equal rights.

Racial Science and Scientific Racism

This section focuses on racial science as a justification for enslavement. Before the Civil War, white scientists grappled with the origins of the races and what caused Africans to be dark skinned. Some held that the races shared a common origin (monogenesis), while others believed that distinct races existed from the start (polygenesis). Religious adherents of monogenesis argued that all humans descended from a white Adam and Eve, and that Black people were degenerations of the original archetype. Some believed that Black people descended from Cain, while others held that they descended from Canaan, both of whom had been cursed. The theory of monogenesis coexisted with polygenesis, which turned to science to answer long-standing questions about race. The scientific explanations for the different races were both explicitly and implicitly racist. Some scientists posited that the races originated simultaneously, but from different “creation centers,” resulting in different physical traits and capabilities. Others characterized Black people as “a separate species altogether” (59), a notion central to white supremacy. Still other forms of scientific racism included phrenology, which drew connections between physical traits and mental capabilities, and the notion of diseases that only affected Black people, such as Drapetomania, which caused Black people to run away, and Rascality, which caused intellectual lethargy and physical incoordination.

Post-Civil War Scientific Racism

Although the Civil War prompted some white people to rethink old ideas about race, questions about Black people’s humanity persisted, justifying anti-Black racism and the continued exploitation of Black labor. The press perpetuated old ideas of race, as did pamphlets promoting phrenology and academic publications in anthropology and other disciplines. Social Darwinism emerged in the last quarter of the 19th century. According to Social Darwinists, the supposed biological superiority of white people also made them culturally superior, explaining their wealth and power. Some used statistics to explain racial differences, linking, for instance, chest measurements to respiratory diseases and blaming the inherent inferiority of Black people for their higher rates of certain diseases. Some argued that Black people descended from apes saved from the Flood by Noah, a belief that fueled opposition to the mixing of races. The offspring of interracial unions were deemed monstrous and unworthy of the right to live.

Eugenics and Progressivism

This section focuses on eugenics, a form of scientific racism pertaining to selective breeding that emerged in the early 20th century. The eugenics movement aimed to create a genetically “superior” race (positive eugenics) and to eliminate racially “inferior” people (negative eugenics). Adherents of negative eugenics wanted to outlaw interracial marriage, limit immigration, and mandate the sterilization of certain people. Harvard University became the prime center of eugenics in the US. The science appealed to Americans who wanted to believe that racial, ethnic, gender, and class hierarchies were natural.

World War I

In this section, Gates argues that World War I provided American eugenicists with new opportunities to test their theories. The US Army relied on a Harvard intelligence test that held that interracial sex had resulted in a decline in the intelligence of white people. The test divided Black people into three groups, ranking lighter skinned people above darker skinned people. The war years also marked an increase in publications about eugenics, including Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race; or, The Racial Bias of European History (1916), which argued that bodily characteristics are closely associated with psychical predispositions, both of which are immutable. Eugenics publications did not cease after the war, nor were they restricted to academia. In 1927, for instance, the Supreme Court upheld Virginia’s sterilization law (Buck v. Bell) to prevent “those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind” (79).

Defining the “Negro Problem”

This section addresses the climate that fueled Jim Crow segregation, focusing on the so-called Negro Problem—the issue of how to educate and help Black people. Many white people who grappled with the “Negro Problem,” including scholars, politicians, journalists, and novelists, became apologists for segregation. Rejecting the idea of Black leadership and Black self-determination, they held that white people were morally obligated to solve the “Negro Problem,” rather than confer with Black people to promote Black advancement. Many white people rejected the idea that racial discrimination was the source of the “Negro Problem.” Even progressive publications, such as the Atlantic Monthly, promoted paternalistic ideas by publishing articles about the need to guide Black people. By minimizing the role Black people could play in their own advancement, white people not only retained control of Black people, but also set limits on their prospects.

The Negro: A Problem of Whose Making?

This section outlines different views of the “Negro Problem.” Southerners viewed Reconstruction as a mistake that stripped white people of their dignity by conferring rights on Black people that they believed should be reserved for them. Many in the South minimized the problem of racism, arguing that the mistreatment of Black people was the exception and not the norm. These southerners emphasized the racial harmony of the antebellum South. For them, Black citizenship and suffrage jeopardized this harmony. Northern abolitionists held markedly different views, which they tried to impose on the South. For example, Henry Cabot Lodge, a Republican from Massachusetts, wanted to send federal officials to the South to ensure that Black people could vote. His efforts, however, met with widespread resistance. In an 1891 article, the English historian James Bryce claimed that supporting Black suffrage was misguided and against natural laws. Similarly, in 1892, the author Thomas Nelson wrote that Black people were intellectually underdeveloped, implying that they were incapable of voting. Black people presented a different perspective on the “Negro Problem.” The minister and Civil War veteran George Washington Williams, for instance, understood the problem as the product of centuries of white exploitation, claiming the United States’ wealth and power were built by Black people. Similarly, Richard T. Greener, the University of South Carolina’s first Black faculty member, wrote about the “White Problem,” focusing on how white people infantilized Black people to prevent their advancement. Williams and Greener encouraged Black people to create their own opportunities, rather than relying on white people for support.

Plantation Literature

This section centers on plantation literature, fiction produced in the South after Reconstruction. Following scientists, journalists, academics, and politicians, white fiction writers portrayed Black people as childlike and dependent. Many white authors wrote from the point of view of Black people, employing dialect to signal their characters’ low intellect. Joel Chandler Harris’s Atlanta Constitution of 1876 is among the most celebrated examples of plantation literature. The book presents plantation life as preferable for Black people than life after emancipation. The main Black character, Uncle Remus, symbolizes the continuity between the Old and New South, his decision to remain in the South proving that life as an enslaved person was never that bad. Disney adapted the novel in 1946, presenting Uncle Remus as a grinning simpleton who sang in a thick accent alongside a menagerie of animals. Other authors reinforced racial stereotypes, including that of the contented enslaved person, the “tragic mulatto,” and the “exotic primitive.” Post-Reconstruction politicians combined the racial stereotypes circulating in literature with academic studies about race to argue that Black people had been emancipated prematurely and that they required white leadership. Racist stereotypes live on, as evidenced by right-wing discourse on Obama’s presidency.

The Specter of Reconstruction

This section focuses on literary representations of the Reconstruction era and the South. Gates begins with a discussion of white author Thomas Nelson Page, who idealized the Old South by presenting it as an untainted Eden. Page promoted the Lost Cause myth, presented Black political participation as ill-conceived and destructive, and promoted the idea of the child-like Black person. Reconstruction loomed large as a place of evil in Page’s books. Page depicted the negative consequences of Reconstruction to promote the idea that Black people were unfit to rule themselves or others. The themes in his books recall those of Joel Chandler Harris’s novels, which dealt with the evils of Reconstruction and the need to suppress Black votes. The works of these authors, and many others, not only glorified the past, but also expressed the hope for a bright future that would restore the Old South.

Birth of an Icon

In this section, Gates focuses on the writings of the American white supremacist Thomas Dixon. In his 1902 novel, The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden, and its popular 1905 sequel, The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, Dixon cast white supremacy in noble terms and blamed Black people for the Civil War. Dixon presented Northern abolitionists as radicals and the Old South as heroic. In addition to defending enslavement, Dixon expressed admiration for the Klan’s patriotism, chivalry, and humanity. Dixon also described Reconstruction as a reversal of the natural order, which white people were duty-bound to dismantle. Overtly ideological, his novels popularized ideas that circulated in scientific circles, turning storytelling into a powerful tool of racist propaganda. Advances in chromolithography allowed Dixon’s novels to be illustrated with colorful images that were as damaging as his words.

Chains of Being: The Black Body and the White Mind

This section consists of images of Black people from books, postcards, trade cards, and advertisements. The images formed part of a powerful visual rhetoric that helped spread racist ideas that first appeared in scientific and academic circles.