White Supremacy and Black Resistance

2019 ◽  
pp. 159-181
Author(s):  
Stephen V. Ash
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Women's Education ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Black Resistance

This chapter observes the biased treatment between white and black Richmonders, the injustice of slavery, and white supremacy. The topics of slavery and freedom, direct causes of the Civil War, are examined through the perspectives of individuals who supported different beliefs. This chapter also covers black resistance, and Southern whites’ fears about the rise of Black men and women’s education and independence.

Prophecies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Historical Consciousness ◽  
Harpers Ferry ◽  
John Brown ◽  
Prophetic Imagination ◽  
Southern Nationalism

Focusing on Edmund Ruffin, this chapter interprets the prophecies of secessionists. During a national craze for John Brown relics after the Harpers Ferry raid, Edmund Ruffin circulated Brown’s pikes to each southern legislature or governor to promote southern nationalism and secession. This chapter inverts memory studies to interpret how antebellum novels by Ruffin, John B. Jones, and Beverley Tucker forecasted civil war and elevated white supremacy. The prophetic imagination of secessionists like Ruffin empowered masters at the expense of women, yeomen, and slaves. By identifying themselves as conservative prophets rebelling against modern transgressions of timeless laws, southern nationalists adopted a historical consciousness that predicted a looming revolution to restore order and harmony. Their prophecies imagined bloodshed and destruction that exceeded the actual war and echoed earlier revolutions, particularly the American, French, and Haitian.

Black Families and Resistance in Kansas, 1880–1905

2019 ◽  
pp. 74-91
Author(s):  
Brent M. S. Campney
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Final Section ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Black Families ◽  
Border Studies ◽  
Border States ◽  
Black Resistance

Pioneering a new methodology, this chapter shows that whites targeted particular black families for disproportionate racist violence, justifying it through a complicit press that circulated defamatory stories designed to create negative reputations about them and through a criminal justice system that hounded them. It challenges the contemporary white-authored narrative by demonstrating that whites targeted these families not because of their “bad character” but because of their refusal to submit to white supremacy. Investigating sources centered on Kansas and its border states over several decades, this study demonstrates that historians may unearth more credible stories about these families and their experiences. In the final section, the chapter assesses the significance of this methodology for the scholarship on black resistance and border studies.

The Crime of Freedom

2018 ◽  
pp. 217-246
Author(s):  
Adam Malka
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Black People ◽  
Racial Violence

Slavery in Maryland died during the 1860s, but for all of their promise the changes also brought heartbreak. As Chapter 7 shows, black men’s acquisition of a fuller bundle of property rights and legal protections brought them into conflict with the very criminal justice system built to guard those rights and ensure those protections. White commentators scoffed at black men’s supposed indolence and bristled at their households’ apparent disorder; police officers arrested black Baltimoreans for an expanding list of crimes; and black people, black men in particular, were incarcerated at growing rates. During the years immediately following the Civil War, Baltimore’s policemen and prisons perpetrated a form of racial violence that was different from yet indicative of the violence inflicted by the old order’s vigilantes. Castigated as criminals, freedmen’s legal victories provoked a form of policing reserved for the truly free.

A White Man’s War?

2020 ◽  
pp. 39-68
Author(s):  
Brian Taylor
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Black Men ◽  
The United States ◽  
Us Army ◽  
Us Military ◽  
The Us ◽  
Founding Principle ◽  
Proper Response

This chapter looks at the first two years of the Civil War, when black men were barred from serving in the US Army. It follows the debate that black Northerners conducted about the proper response to the call to serve in the US military, which they were sure would come at some point. Immediate enlistment advocates sparred with those who counseled withholding enlistment until African Americans’ demands had been met. Black Northerners began to articulate the terms under which they would serve the Union, among which citizenship emerged as central, as well as the changes necessary to bring lived reality in the United States in line with the founding principle of equality.

A Splendid Failure?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vijay Phulwani
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Black Politics ◽  
Economic Power ◽  
Racial Uplift ◽  
Alternative Strategies ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Political Agitation ◽  
The Subject

In this essay, Vijay Phulwani posits that Du Bois uses the language of tragedy in 1935’s Black Reconstruction in America to emphasize the constraints and limitations created by white supremacy and subvert the tragic legend of Reconstruction. Informed by his changing understanding of the role of slaves and freedmen in the Civil War and Reconstruction, Du Bois’s ideas moved from an emphasis on internal racial uplift and external political agitation to a theory of economic separatism and a strategic embrace of segregation. Du Bois returned to the subject of Reconstruction many times throughout his career, using it to rethink and further develop his ideas about the form and content of black politics. Phulwani argues that by continuing to analyze Reconstruction, Du Bois was able to simultaneously narrate its history and model alternative strategies for building black political and economic power.

scholarly journals “Slaves of the State”: Christianity and Convict Labor in the Postbellum South

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (12) ◽  
pp. 651
Author(s):  
Brad Stoddard
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
The State ◽  
Public Works ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Convict Labor ◽  
Southern States ◽  
Labor Camp ◽  
Protestant Christianity

In the wake of the Civil War, southern states incarcerated record numbers of black men and women, closed their prisons, and sent convicted criminals to convict lease camps. Inside these camps, convict laborers worked for businesses, for individual entrepreneurs, on plantations, and on public works projects contracted to private businesses. Due to the Thirteenth Amendment’s “slaves of the state” clause, these laborers were legally classified as slaves and treated as such by labor camp operators. Conditions inside these camps were quite harsh, and in most camps, state-sanctioned Protestant socialization efforts were the laborers’ primary source of leisure. This essay provides a preliminary overview of the convergence of Protestant Christianity and convict lease camps as it calls scholars to explore this convergence in greater detail in future scholarship.

scholarly journals Neo-Confederates take their stand: Southern Agrarians and the Civil War

2020 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
Niall Munro
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Lost Cause ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
War Memory ◽  
Allen Tate ◽  
Temporal Shape ◽  
United States Today ◽  
Civil War Memory

Ninety years ago, a group of twelve Southern intellectuals published I’ll Take My Stand, a manifesto dedicated to reviving Southern values and ideals in direct opposition to Northern industrialism and philosophy. Ever since 1930, the Southern Agrarians have been frequently presented as critics of modern life, but this kind of focus overshadows another way in which they were described in those early days: as neo-Confederates. The Agrarians’ ongoing and wide-ranging engagement with the Civil War ‐ especially in the work of Allen Tate and Donald Davidson ‐ was, I argue, hugely significant for the planning and writing of the manifesto. Examining the ways in which these writers used the war also shows how they sought to retard modernist progress, embrace failure as an element of Lost Cause ideology, and distort the temporal shape of Civil War memory. Furthermore, I show here how bound up in the manifesto and related writing by its contributors is a commitment to white supremacy and violence ‐ a kind of fanatical dedication that speaks to events in the United States today.

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