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

“I often wonder if Frederick Douglass and his fellow abolitionists could have imagined the extent to which this antiblack racist discourse would remain very much alive in American society a century and a half after the end of the Civil War.”

Gates is drawing connections between the past and present in this passage. Much of Chapter 1 centers on these connections, stressing the impact of the post-Reconstruction era on contemporary American politics. Despite over a century passing between the abolitionists’ plight and modern day, racist discourse is still a part of society.

“It is difficult to imagine any act more revolutionary than the redistribution of land from the planters to the slaves in the former Confederacy.”

This quote addresses a bold and transformative act taken by the federal government in 1865, namely, the redistribution of plantation lands to formerly enslaved people in the southern US. Shortly thereafter, however, President Johnson reversed the plans, only allowing formerly enslaved people who had paid for their lands to remain on them.

“We need and demand protection, and if States should not protect us against abuse, against insults, against violation of our rights, Congress should and must.”

This quote stresses the importance of the federal government in protecting the rights of all Americans. The federal government failed in this mission after Reconstruction by allowing white southern Democrats to erode Reconstruction gains. States continue to chip away at the rights of citizens, including those of women and minorities, as evidenced by the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022 and recent anti-LGBTQ bills restricting access to healthcare and education in many states.

“Virtually all of the former Confederate states threw out their Reconstruction-era constitutions—those that black people helped draft and which they voted to ratify—and wrote new ones that included disenfranchisement provisions, antimiscegenation provisions, and separate-but-equal Jim Crow provisions.”

This quote addresses the erosion of Reconstruction achievements by white supremacists. Though race neutral in language, the post-Reconstruction constitutions of the southern states legalized racial segregation and other forms of racial discrimination.

“The court cases and acts of legislation that enshrined Jim Crow as the law of the land did not unfold in a vacuum. The larger context for them was the ideology of white supremacy.”

White supremacist ideology runs as a through line in Gates’s book. White supremacy not only underpinned the institution of enslavement, but also justified racial inequality after Reconstruction, including Jim Crow segregation, sharecropping, convict leasing, and the political disenfranchisement of Black people.

“The postwar American South fashioned a political and economic system in which freedpeople were, if no longer slaves, then not fully free either.”

The Legacy of Enslavement is a central theme in Gates’s book. This quote describes the precarious status of Black people in the South after Reconstruction. Enslavement legally ended in 1865, but racial inequality persisted through discriminatory laws, social norms, and vigilantism.

“That Africans and those of African descent were either not human or fully human was a cardinal tenet of proslavery thought.”

This quote addresses the theme of scientific racism. Christian polygenists held that the races originated separately. Some presented white people as the descendants of Adam and Eve, and Black people as descendants of the apes from Noah’s Ark. The idea that Black people are different in kind to white people is central not just to proslavery thought, but also to white supremacy.

“Amalgamation […] was nothing short of a crime against God.”

Interracial relationships, also called amalgamation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, were an abomination in the eyes of white supremacists. The fear of “race mixing” rested on the idea that white people were human, and that Black people were subhuman or a different species altogether. The fear of interracial relationships fueled eugenics and Jim Crow segregation.

“Eugenics therefore reflected, ironically, impulses of progressivism.”

This quote contextualizes eugenics by linking it to the progressivism of the industrial revolution. Like other advances of the period, eugenics reflected the belief that humans could control and shape nature through science and technology.

“Harvard emerged as a center of eugenics thought in the United States.”

Gates is critical of Harvard University, his home institution since 1991, for its role in promoting eugenics. Harvard faculty, administrators, and alumni supported the eugenics movement by founding eugenics organizations, publishing on eugenics, and lobbying for the enactment of eugenics laws.

“Williams understood the Negro Problem for what it was: the product of centuries of white exploitation.”

This quote addresses the so-called Negro Problem, that is, the persistence of poverty, unemployment, and other problems in Black communities. A keen observer of his time, the Black historian George Washington Williams understood that the Negro problem resulted from centuries of white supremacy.

“The black characters in white American literature […] were really reflections of contemporary white attitudes about black people.”

Gates discusses the mutually reinforcing relationship between literature, art, politics, journalism, and the sciences. The racist descriptions of Black characters in literature reflected the racist beliefs expressed in other parts of American society.

“The collective image of the black person in American popular culture functions like a visual mantra reinforcing the negativity of difference.”

This quote describes the visual rhetoric of white supremacy, a central theme in Gates’s book. Anti-Black Samba images presenting Black people in opposition to white people proliferated throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Showing a group of people as different and “other” create both overt and internal biases in society.

“It is precisely within the ordinary and everyday that racialization has been most effective, where it makes race [a process] that fixes the meaning of one’s self before one even had had the opportunity to live and make a self […] capable of communicating at a glance accumulated stores of racialized knowledge.”

Gates quotes the work of the American historian Thomas Holt, in his discussion of the power of everyday imagery in promoting white supremacy. Sambo art was not only pervasive, but easily digested and internalized, making it an ideal vehicle for spreading anti-Black racism. In addition to touching on an important issue, the passage exemplifies Gates’s use of outside sources.

“Rape caused lynching; black men rape.”

This quote captures the twisted logic white supremacists used to justify racial violence. Depictions of Black rapists reinforced the idea that Black men posed a danger to white women, which justified lynchings and racial segregation. Statements like this also take away the culpability of those who lynched others—the lynching was a result of the rape, not of the men who committed the act.

“Wilson was a friend of Thomas Dixon’s.”

President Wilson was the first southern-born president after the Civil War. He viewed Dixon’s novel The Birth of a Nation at the White House and reportedly supported it. His views on the film are of a piece with his actions as president, notably, his support of segregating the federal civil service.

“Protests against The Birth of a Nation, though ultimately unsuccessful in banning the film, was one of the most important factors in galvanizing black political protest against Jim Crow in the second decade of the century.”

Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation galvanized the NAACP, which staged massive protests in New York and Boston. The NAACP also organized letter-writing campaigns to the Nation Board of Censorship of Motion Pictures. Although the protests failed to get the film banned, they dramatically increased membership to the NAACP and drew attention to the role of media in shaping public opinion about race.

“By the end of the decade, for instance, Louisiana had fewer than 6,000 registered black voters, down from a high of 130,000, and Alabama had 3,000 down from 181,000.”

This quote captures two salient aspects of Gates’s book: his argument that Redemption and Jim Crow eroded Reconstruction gains, and his use of statistics to support his claims.

“Whether intentionally or not, however, the construct of a New Negro implicitly acknowledged some of the stereotypes of the Old Negro.”

The concept of the New Negro emerged after Reconstruction to differentiate middle-class, educated, and cultured Black people from their poor, uneducated counterparts. New Negroes sought to combat negative stereotypes about Black people by adopting white Victorian social and moral values. In defining themselves against Old Negroes, however, they tacitly accepted certain negative stereotypes.

“Every image, every graph was included to prove the existence of the New Negro.”

This quote describes Du Bois’s Exhibit of American Negroes at the Paris Exposition of 1900. A quintessential New Negro, Du Bois gathered 363 photographs highlighting Black achievement since the end of enslavement. Among them were portraits of Black students and professionals, male and female, with different skin tones and facial structures. Most sitters were photographed inside to counter the stereotype of the Black agricultural laborer. The exhibit introduced the New Negro to global audiences.

“Unable to overcome the structures of oppression, black leaders embraced individual agency, will, and achievement against this tidal wave of antiblack racism.”

This passage describes how New Negroes responded to anti-Black racism. Douglass turned to self-representation in writing and photography, Du Bois organized an exhibit of 363 photographs highlight Black achievement, and others adopted white Victorian social and morals to distinguish themselves for Old Negroes.

“The metaphor of the New Negro was a powerful construct, like an empty vessel or floating signifier that completely different—and even contradictory—ideologies could (and would) fill.”

Gates discusses different versions of the New Negro. The concept of the New Negro first emerged in response to continued anti-Black racism after Reconstruction. The leaders of this movement were activists who enacted social change thought protests and letter-writing campaigns. In the early 20th century, however, a newer New Negro emerged, one that was more militant than the preceding generation. Other types of New Negroes included socialists, nationalists, and conservatives.

“It was a heady goal, and these were heady times. Langston Hughes said that Negroes were creating art and literature as if their lives depended on it.”

This quote describes the Harlem Renaissance, originally known as the New Negro Movement. Like the poet Langston Hughes, some people associated with the Harlem Renaissance stressed the importance of literature and art in the struggle for racial equality. The period saw a flourishing of Black culture that influenced generations of writers and artists.