Willard B. Gatewood

Racism: A Short History

Racism: A Short History. By George M. Fredrickson. (Princeton: Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). Pp ix, 216. Acknowledgments, introduction, epilogue, appendix, notes, index.

The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction.

22.95.) Historian George M. Fredrickson, an eminent authority on race and ethnicity, has produced a highly readable, sharply analytical, and consistently provocative overview of the course of Western racism from the Middle Ages to the present. He focuses on the evolution of the two most virulent forms of racism, anti-Semitism and color-coded white supremacy, that came to fullest fruition in the overtly racist regimes that emerged in the American South, Nazi Germany, and South Africa. Fredrickson compares and contrasts these regimes and probes the connections between them with consummate skill. He also maintains that racism, always nationally specific, invariably became involved in searches for national identity and cohesion and varied with the historical experience of each country. Despite such variations, all three overtly racist regimes possessed common features, including the implementation of an official racist ideology that severely proscribed the rights, privileges, and opportunities of blacks and/ or Jews. This volume traces the origins of Western racism to medieval Europe, during an era of intense religiosity in which the increasing hostility of Christians toward Jews transformed the anti-Judaism endemic to Christianity into an anti-Semitism that made getting rid of Jews preferable to converting them. Anti-Semitism, in turn, became racism when Jews came to be considered innately malevolent beings in league with the devil rather than merely guilty of harboring false beliefs. Of particular importance in this development was Spain, where attitudes and practices toward Muslims and Jews served as a kind of segue between the religious intolerance of the Middle Ages and the naturalistic racism of the modern era (p. 40). Although Fredrickson recognizes that Europeans had long associated the color black with evil, he nonetheless questions whether Europeans in general were strongly prejudiced against Africans prior to the beginning of the slave trade. Initially, he points out, religion rather than race justified the European enslavement of Africans: The only way to save African souls was to enslave them (p. 38). The dark skins of West Africans soon became a part of the equation, and the so-called Curse of Ham or Canaan was invoked to demonstrate that African slavery was divinely inspired. However, anti-black racism took root slowly because it ran counter to the Christian belief that the entire human race was of one blood and worthy of salvation. Only when emancipated from Christian universalism did colorcoded racism become an ideology. The volume explores the route by which this emancipation took place, beginning in the eighteenth century with the invention of the concept of races as basic human types classified by skin color and other physical characteristics. The scientific racism that ultimately emerged was used to determine those groups, notably Jews and blacks, who were unfit to possess the rights of full citizenship. Scientific pronouncements regarding the innate inferiority of blacks lent legitimacy to popular views long held in the United States, especially in the South. …

Edward E. Cooper, Black Journalist

At a public picnic in the South in the 1890s, a young man paid five cents for his first chance to hear the revolutionary Edison talking machine. He eagerly listened as the soundman placed the needle down, only to find that through the tubes he held to his ears came the chilling sounds of a lynching. In this story, with its blend of new technology and old hatreds, genteel picnics and mob violence, Edward Ayers captures the history of the South in the years between Reconstruction and the turn of the century. Ranging from the Georgia coast to the Tennessee mountains, from the power brokers to tenant farmers, Ayers depicts a land of startling contrasts. Ayers takes us from remote Southern towns, revolutionized by the spread of the railroads, to the statehouses where Democratic Redeemers swept away the legacy of Reconstruction; from the small farmers, trapped into growing nothing but cotton, to the new industries of Birmingham; from abuse and intimacy in the family to tumultuous public meetings of the prohibitionists. He explores every aspect of society, politics, and the economy, detailing the importance of each in the emerging New South. Central to the entire story is the role of race relations, from alliances and friendships between blacks and whites to the spread of Jim Crows laws and disfranchisement. The teeming nineteenth-century South comes to life in these pages. When this book first appeared in 1992, it won a broad array of prizes and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. The citation for the National Book Award declared Promise of the New South a vivid and masterfully detailed picture of the evolution of a new society. The Atlantic called it one of the broadest and most original interpretations of southern history of the past twenty years.

Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880-1920.

b From 1881 until his death a quarter ot a century later Edward Elder Cooper was a conspicuous figure in Negro journalism. A complex and somewhat contradictory personality full of pluck and ambition, he was alternately praised and damned by his contemporaries, depending in large part upon whether they judged him by the quality of his various journalistic enterprises or by his business methods and code of ethics. In 1891, for example, I. Garland Penn, the author of a book-length study of the black press, pronounced him Americas greatest Afro-American journalist, and C.H.J. Taylor, a veteran newspaperman and former minister to Liberia, who published a review of Negro journals that year, characterized him as the prince of the Negro newspaper world. No less emphatic, however, was the judgment of several highly respected black editors who, in 1891, described Cooper as a master of deception and selfserving antics, as a man devoid of scruples but endowed with abundant conceit. But even those who concluded that Cooper was something of a charlatan admitted that he possessed the talent, resourcefulness and imagination necessary to produce newspapers of the very first class. A man of striking appearance and great