"These people are creating a terrible problem in our cities. They can’t or won’t hold a job, they flout the law constantly and neglect their children, they drink too much and their moral standards would shame an alley cat. For some reason or other, they absolutely refuse to accommodate themselves to any kind of decent, civilized life."

This was said in 1956 in Indianapolis, not about blacks or other minorities, but about poor whites from the South. Nor was Indianapolis unique in this respect. A 1951 survey in Detroit found that white Southerners living there were considered “undesirable” by 21 percent of those surveyed, compared with 13 percent who ranked blacks the same way. In the late 1940s, a Chicago employer said frankly, “I told the guard at the plant gate to tell the hillbillies that there were no openings.” When poor whites from the South moved into Northern cities to work in war plants during the Second World War, “occasionally a white southerner would find that a flat or furnished room had ‘just been rented’ when the landlord heard his southern accent.”

More is involved here than a mere parallel between blacks and Southern whites. What is involved is a common subculture that goes back for centuries, which has encompassed everything from ways of talking to attitudes toward education, violence and sex—and which originated not in the South, but in those parts of the British Isles from which white Southerners came. That culture long ago died out where it originated in Britain, while surviving in the American South. Then it largely died out among both white and black Southerners, while still surviving today in the poorest and worst of the urban black ghettoes.

It is not uncommon for a culture to survive longer where it is transplanted and to retain characteristics lost in its place of origin. The French spoken in Quebec and the Spanish spoken in Mexico contain words and phrases that have long since become archaic in France and Spain. Regional German dialects persisted among Germans living in the United States after those dialects had begun to die out in Germany itself. A scholar specializing in the history of the South has likewise noted among white Southerners “archaic word forms,” while another scholar has pointed out the continued use in that region of “terms that were familiar at the time of the first Queen Elizabeth.” The card game whist is today played almost exclusively by blacks, especially low-income blacks, though in the eighteenth century it was played by the British upper classes, and has since then evolved into bridge. The history of the evolution of this game is indicative of a much broader pattern of cultural evolution in much more weighty things. 

Southern whites not only spoke the English language in very different ways from whites in other regions, but their churches, their roads, their homes, their music, their education, their food and their sex lives were all sharply different from those of other whites. The history of this “redneck” or “cracker” culture is more than a curiosity. It has contemporary significance because of its influence on the economic and social evolution of vast numbers of people—millions of blacks and whites—and its continuing influence on the lives and deaths of a residual population in America’s black ghettos that has still not completely escaped from that culture.

From early in American history, foreign visitors and domestic travelers alike were struck by cultural contrasts between the white population of the South and that of the rest of the country in general—and of New England in particular. In the early nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville contrasted white Southerners with white Northerners in his classic Democracy in America, and Frederick Law Olmsted did the same later in his books about his travels through the antebellum South, notably Cotton Kingdom. De Tocqueville set a pattern when he concluded that “almost all the differences which may be noticed between the Americans in the Southern and in the Northern states have originated in slavery.” Olmsted likewise attributed the differences between white Southerners and white Northerners to the existence of slavery in the South. So did widely read antebellum Southern writer Hinton Helper, who declared that “slavery, and nothing but slavery, has retarded the progress and prosperity of our portion of the Union.”

Just as they explained regional differences between whites by way of slavery, so many others in a later era would explain differences between blacks and whites nationwide by way of slavery. Plausible as these explanations might seem in both cases, they will not stand up under a closer scrutiny of history.

It is perhaps understandable that the great, overwhelming moral curse of slavery has presented a tempting causal explanation of the peculiar subculture of Southern whites, as well as that of blacks. Yet this same subculture had existed among Southern whites and their ancestors in those parts of the British Isles from which they came, long before they had ever seen a black slave. The nature of this subculture, among people who were called “rednecks” and “crackers” in Britain before they ever saw America, needs to be explored before we turn to the question of its current status among ghetto blacks and how developments in the larger society have affected its evolution.