49 pages • 1 hour read
Henry Louis Gates Jr.Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Legacy of Enslavement
The legacy of enslavement is a central theme in Gates’s book. Although enslavement legally ended with the ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865, this did not bring an end to anti-Black racism. Southern Democrats chipped away at Reconstruction gains using the courts and legislatures. For example, United States v. Reese ruled that the 15th Amendment did not guarantee the right to vote; United States v. Harris ruled that the 13th and 14th Amendments applied to the actions of states rather than of individuals; and Plessy v. Ferguson enshrined Jim Crow segregation. As Gates notes, the refusal of the courts to defend Reconstruction policies speaks to the persistence of anti-Black racism after the end of enslavement:
Reconstruction revealed a fact that had been true but not always acknowledged even before the Civil War: that it was entirely possible for many in the country, even some abolitionists, to detest slavery to the extent that they would be willing to die for its abolition, yet at the same time to detest the enslaved and the formerly enslaved with equal passion (11).
Gates argues that enslavement and its underpinning ideology, white supremacy, did not end in 1865, but simply evolved. Scholars, politicians, and journalists increasingly turned to science to justify racist beliefs and policies. Although scientific racism existed before the Civil War—notably, in the theories of monogenesis and polygenesis—the field grew dramatically in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Harvard University, Gates’s home institution since 1991, became a center for eugenics, the science of racial improvement and planned breeding. Anti-Black racism fueled fears of interracial relationships, which, in turn, fueled eugenics and Jim Crow laws.
Anti-Black imagery proliferated after Reconstruction. In addition to Sambo art (anti-Black images on everyday objects), the period saw a rise in blackface performances and films. The Lost Cause myth also emerged in the wake of Reconstruction, promoting the idea that the Civil War was not about treason or enslavement, but was rather a heroic battle against federal overreach.
Gates demonstrates that the legacy of enslavement is still with us by drawing parallels between reactions to Obama’s presidency and reactions to Reconstruction. The Reconstruction era sparked a backlash that resulted in the erosion of Black rights and an increase in violence against Black people. Similarly, Obama’s presidency led to a surge in far-right extremism and the election of President Trump, who sought to reverse many of Obama’s foreign and domestic policies. Obama’s election also led to a resurgence of open white supremacy. The legacy of enslavement is also apparent in the mass incarceration of Black men and in persistent disparities of wealth, income, employment, homeownership, and health by race. As Gates observes, however, “revolutionary forces never recede” (32), and Black people will continue to struggle for equality.
The Dissemination of Scientific Racism in American Society
Racial science was a common justification for enslavement before the Civil War. Christian adherents of monogenesis argued that Black people were degenerations of Adam and Eve and the cursed descendants of Cain or Canaan. By contrast, Christian polygenists held that Black people descended from the apes on Noah’s Ark, making them subhuman. As Gates notes, the idea that Black and white people are separate species underpins white supremacy.
Although racist science existed before the Civil War, the field grew dramatically in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The emergence of new scientific theories helped justify the continued oppression and persecution of Black people, including Jim Crow segregation. Key among the new sciences was phrenology, a pseudoscience that associated Black people’s physical features with low mental capabilities and a lack of morals. Social Darwinism also emerged in this period. According to Social Darwinists, the purported biological superiority of white people also made them culturally superior. The idea that white people were inherently superior sparked anti-miscegenation laws and the eugenics movement. The latter aimed to create superior beings and eliminate social ills through genetic manipulation.
Gates demonstrates that scientific racism permeated American society in varied ways. The popular press was an important vehicle for spreading racist science, publishing widely accessible articles and pamphlets. Politicians also helped spread scientific racism, as evidenced by Hinton Helper, a politician who drew on phrenology in his pamphlet The Impending Crisis, and Benjamin Franklin Perry, the provisional governor of South Carolina who believed in the innate superiority of white people. As Gates notes, these politicians did not cite specific scientists, but instead relied on scientific ideas that circulated broadly in the press and in the chambers of government.
Gates argues that literature was a prime vehicle for spreading scientific racism. He cites many examples to support this claim, including examples of plantation literature. Of Gate’s examples, Thomas Dixon’s 1902 novel, The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden, and its 1905 sequel, The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, are arguably the most important because of their broad popularity. Both novels draw on phrenology and Social Darwinism. In The Leopard’s Spots, for example, Dixon writes about “thick-lipped, flat-nosed” Black people reversing the “natural” order by becoming rulers of “the proudest and strongest race of men evolved in two thousand years of history” (105). Dixon’s novels present Black people as different in kind from white people. The popularity of these books not only spread racist science to the white masses, but also justified the need for Jim Crow laws and vigilantism.
The Visual Rhetoric of White Supremacy and the Rise of Jim Crow
Anti-Black imagery proliferated like never before in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This imagery included Sambo art, a genre that superimposed racist images on everyday objects, such as books, trading cards, advertisements, children’s games, and potholders. Sambo art presented Black and white people in oppositional terms, with the latter presented as good, the former as bad. Easily accessible, Sambo art formed a visual rhetoric of white supremacy that reinforced anti-Black racism in other spheres, such as politics, the judicial system, and literature. Gates makes the argument that the images normalized racist ideas about Black people in the public consciousness, cementing the idea that they were subhuman, prone to criminality, lazy, lecherous, ugly, and inferior to white people in every way.
Gates argues that negative images of Black people helped erode Reconstruction gains by justifying the need for Jim Crow laws. Sambo art, as well as blackface performances and films, emphasized the dangers of Black male sexuality, especially for white women. According to Gates, the trope of the Black rapist promoted segregation by emphasizing the uncontrollable nature of Black male sexuality and the need to protect white women. Sources from the period link rape to lynching; one of the most informative is an 1892 editorial titled “More Rapes, More Lynchings,” which claims that “the frequency of these lynchings calls attention to the frequency of the crimes which cause lynching” (141). The editorial describes the premeditated quality of these rapes: “In each case, the crime was deliberately planned and perpetrated by several Negroes […] It was not a sudden yielding to a fit of passion, but the consummation of a devilish purpose […] No man can leave his family at night without dread that some roving Negro ruffian is watching and waiting for this opportunity” (141).
The explosion of anti-Black imagery and the rise of Jim Crow laws prompted a response from educated, middle-class Black people known as New Negroes. Successive versions of the New Negro challenged anti-Black racism and the erosion of Reconstruction gains by crafting counternarratives to white supremacy. This included forming their own cultural and social institutions and creating their own images of Blackness. Fredrick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois, two quintessential New Negroes, subverted racist stereotypes in varied ways. Douglass shaped his own image by sitting for photographs and writing three autobiographies. Du Bois organized an exhibit at the 1900 World Exposition in Paris that featured 363 photographs of Black people. Among these were portraits of students and professionals—male and female—with different skin tones and facial structures. The show presented the New Negro to an international audience, displacing old ideas that had been projected onto Black people since enslavement. Du Bois later became a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance, originally known as the New Negro Movement, a vibrant period in Black culture and art. Gates stresses the importance of the Harlem Renaissance in combatting white supremacy and Jim Crow: “In this war, great artistic artifacts would stand as the demonstration of the Negro’s intellectual equality, the implicit demonstration of the Negro’s rights to the natural rights of man” (220). In the Harlem Renaissance, Black artists used visual rhetoric to forge a new identity in defiance of racist stereotypes.
