The Rural Face of White Supremacy: BEYOND JIM CROW [Hardcover]

Mark Roman Schultz (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0252029607 | ISBN-13: 978-0252029608 | Publication Date: April 11, 2005

Mark Schultz entered rural Hancock county expecting to confirm the standard expectations about race relations in the South, an area characterized by lynchings, segregation, and black poverty. What he found undermined and confounded his sweeping assumptions about the ostensibly "solid" South. The Rural Face of White Supremacy is a detailed study of the daily experiences of ordinary people in rural Hancock County, Georgia. Drawing on his own interviews with over two hundred black and white residents, Schultz depicts the rhythms of work, social interaction, violence, power, and paternalism in a setting much different from the more widely studied post-bellum urban South. By acting on the basis of personal rather than institutional relationships, Schultz argues, Hancock County residents experienced more fluid interactions and more freedom than their urban counterparts had. This freedom created a space for interracial relationships that included mixed housing, midwifery, church services, meals, and even common-law marriages. These relationships, both intimate and hierarchical, and marked by personal, sexual, and economic violence, were far more complex than the conveniently efficient and modern ideal of Jim Crow.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"An unusually rich and dense portrait. . . . Schultz's compelling, detailed account illuminates the basic fact of southern history: the two races have always been inextricably bound together. . . . Although Schultz scrupulously eschews romanticizing what Martin Luther King Jr. called 'the intimacy of life' between rural blacks and whites, his work corrects some of the best-publicized recent chronicles of southern life in this period."
--The Atlantic Monthly

“Mark Schultz illuminates a shadowy corner of the South with vivid depictions of work, race relations, and violence in Hancock County, Georgia. By connecting the memories of Hancock residents, past and present, with a trove of documentary evidence and then situating his evidence in the context of historical and autobiographical writing about the region, Schultz constructs a thoughtful, careful, and revealing study of race in the rural South during the twentieth century.” --Robert C. McMath Jr., professor of history, Georgia Institute of Technology

“The Rural Face of White Supremacy is an important book, sure to attract attention and help shape our view of race relations in the twentieth-century South."
--J. Morgan Kousser, professor of history and social sciences, California Institute of Technology

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Book Description

Now in paperback, The Rural Face of White Supremacy presents a detailed study of the daily experiences of ordinary people in rural Hancock County, Georgia. Drawing on his own interviews with over two hundred black and white residents, Mark Schultz argues that the residents acted on the basis of personal rather than institutional relationships. As a result, Hancock County residents experienced more intimate face-to-face interactions, which made possible more black agency than their urban counterparts were allowed. While they were still firmly entrenched within an exploitive white supremacist culture, this relative freedom did create a space for a range of interracial relationships that included mixed housing, midwifery, church services, meals, and even common-law marriages.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: University of Illinois Press (April 11, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0252029607
• ISBN-13: 978-0252029608
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #435,463 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Rural Face of White Supremacy, August 17, 2009

By 

Maxtone Witherball - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Rural Face of White Supremacy: Beyond Jim Crow (Paperback)

Mark Schultz describes Leon Litwack's Trouble in Mind as "an encyclopedia of systematic, horrifying acts of brutality that white southerners perpetrated against their helpless black neighbors"--which it surely is, at least in part. Schultz takes issue, however, with what he calls Litwack's "homogeniz[ation] [of] the southern experience."

In the Rural Face of White Supremacy, Schultz successfully shows that, in one specific Georgia county, for several reasons--chief among them, planters' sense of security--white supremacy did not assume, for example, generally speaking, the form of mob violence (one of the things Litwack surveys in depth). Schultz also does a good job in humanizing the rural blacks of Hancock County--which is to say that he presents them not necessarily as agencyless victims (though this is not to say that Litwack portrays southern blacks between Reconstruction and the Great War as feckless or anything of the kind).

In short, if Trouble in Mind lacks sufficient nuance, the Rural Face of White Supremacy goes a distance in supplying it. My only problem with Schultz's book--which is, inter alia, well-written and eye-opening--is that it punts the question of how representative of the New South Hancock County was. That is, although Schultz achieves his goal of demonstrating that the so-called "Solid South"--while "Solid" in the sense that white supremacy obtained without exception--was at least to the extent of Hancock County fluid in how whites maintained their hegemony, he never satisfactorily addresses the elephant in the room: I.e., did Hancock County represent an exception to a rule, and if so, how exceptional was this county?

Ultimately, though, if you have read Trouble in Mind, and that book leaves you with the question of whether there were any variations on the hell it describes, Schultz's book is the book to read next. Neither book, however, should leave you with any doubt that life for blacks under white supremacy was anything but hell.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent academic perspective., May 8, 2007

By 

Anthony A. Lee "Kalimat Press" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Rural Face of White Supremacy: Beyond Jim Crow (Paperback)

This is a fine academic study of rural practices of segregation and subordination of black people in one area of the South. Highly recommended. Of course, it is not an easy read.