The Rural Face of White Supremacy: Beyond Jim Crow - Hardcover

Schultz, Mark Roman

3.83

12 ratings by Goodreads

9780252029608: The Rural Face of White Supremacy: Beyond Jim Crow

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0252029607 ISBN 13: 9780252029608

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 2005

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

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.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

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

Synopsis:

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.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.