Ned Cobb's children: A new look at white supremacy in the rural southern US

Abstract

Many scholars regard segregation in the US South as part of urbanization and modernization. Yet few have examined race relations in the countryside. The Rural Face of White Supremacy shows that absolute separation based on race proved poorly adapted to rural life. Inspired by the sociological studies of the rural South done in the 1930s and the 1940s, this book uses oral history to show that interracial social life in mid-twentieth century rural Georgia was ‘marked by intimacy as well as white supremacy.’ Race relations reflected the paternalism and dependence of an agrarian labour system that reduced black workers to the status of a peasantry.

Notes

1 See Raper 1936: 275].

2 See Woodward 1955, Ayers 1992, Cell 1982, Rabinowitz 1996, and Smith 2002.

3 One of the few exceptions is Kirby 1987.

4 Examples of rural sociology conducted at the University of Chicago include Johnson 1934, Alexander, Embree and Johnson 1935, Woofter 1936, Odum 1936, Raper 1936, Dollard 1937, Powdermaker 1939, Holley, Winston, and Woofter 1940, Raper and Reid 1941, Davis, Gardner and Gardner 1941, and Raper 1943.

5 See, for example, Du Bois 1904.

6 See the Foreword to Raper 1936: xvi]. Unfortunately, there still is no full-length study or collective biography of the New Deal rural sociologists and their contribution to southern thought. See, however, Dunne 1998: 1–34], Mazzari 2003: 389–408], Gilpin and Gasman 2003, and Sosna 1977: Chapters 2–4].

7 Du Bois 1969: Chapters 7–8], among others, made just such a comparison in 1903.

8 I take up this issue elsewhere [Lichtenstein, 1998a: 124–45; 1998b: 297–33]. See also Marler [2004: 113–137].

9 See Alexander, Embree, and Johnson 1935, National Resources Committee 1937, Daniel 1985, Aiken 1998, and Seavoy 1998.

10 On this, see Johnson, et al. 1941: 98].

11 One promising place to look, to supplement the kind of ethnographic oral history upon which Schultz relies, is in the records generated by the criminal justice system, especially in pardon and parole files, which generated black supplication and white favor. On this, see Ayers 1984: 63, 204–6], Curtin 2000: 183–95], Oshinsky 1996: 179–204], Miller 2000, and Garton 2003: 675–99].

12 In the articles cited in note 8 above I explore the limitations of a materialist paradigm that considers sharecroppers as proletarians rather than peasants, and misconstrues the nature of class and race relations in the twentieth century rural South as a result.

13 See U.S. Department of Commerce 1933.

14 Scott [1985].

15 This notion has been most forcefully advanced in the work of Harold D. Woodman [Woodman, 1977: 523–54; 1979: 319–37; 1995. For a lengthy refutation, see Lichtenstein 1998a; 1998b.

16 See Raper 1936: 124].

17 See Tyson 1999 and Hill 2004.

18 For which, see Daniel 1990: 886–911] and Chamberlain 2003.

19 Though Schultz (p.229) consciously tried to correct for this by asking people about ‘specific actions and activities’ rather than about what they felt.

20 On South Africa one could start by comparing the two magisterial life histories of Ned Cobb and Kas Maine, in Rosengarten 1974 and van Onselen 1996, respectively; for just such a comparison see the review essay by Bundy 1997: 363–70]. On the South African case see also van Onselen 1990: 99–123] and Ochiltree 2004: 41–62]; on Brazil, see Scott 1994: 70–102]; on Italy, the essays collected in Rick Halpern and Enrico Dal Lago 2002; and on Russia, Kolchin 1996: 42–67; 1999: 87–115].

21 Hahn 1990:75–98] is suggestive here, though he pays more attention to the place of the restored planter class in the national political economy than to the class relations over which it presided in its own shrunken dominion.

22 My thinking on these matters has been profoundly influenced by my attendance at the 1999 Commonwealth Fund Conference at University College London, which took up the question of the ‘Two Souths’, comparing the U.S. South with the Italian Mezzogiorno. The papers from the conference were published subsequently in the volume edited by Halpern and Dal Lago 2002.

23 See Hahn 2003.

24 See Johnson 1934: xvi].

25 For reviews of A Nation Under Our Feet that question the applicability of Hahn's model to the twentieth century, see Arnesen 2004 and Lichtenstein 2005: 261–9].

26 With the important exception of Payne 1995, few studies have considered the distinctive rural dimension of the movement, although see also Moye 2004.