Customer Reviews

The Rural Face of White Supremacy: Beyond Jim Crow

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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.

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.