Segregation in the New South

Birmingham, Alabama, 1871–1901

Carl V. Harris, W. Elliot Brownlee

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2022
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9780807178898
• Subtopic: African American History
• Index: History

Carl V. Harris's Segregation in the New South, completed and edited by W. Elliot Brownlee, explores the rise of racial exclusion in late nineteenth-century Birmingham, Alabama. In the 1870s, African Americans in this crucial southern industrial city were eager to exploit the disarray of slavery's old racial lines, assert their new autonomy, and advance toward full equality. However, most southern whites worked to restore the restrictive racial lines of the antebellum South or invent new ones that would guarantee the subordination of Black residents. From Birmingham's founding in 1871, color lines divided the city, and as its people strove to erase the lines or fortify them, they shaped their futures in fateful ways. Social segregation is at the center of Harris's history. He shows that from the beginning of Reconstruction southern whites engaged in a comprehensive program of assigning social dishonor to African Americans—the same kind of dishonor that whites of the Old South had imposed on Black people while enslaving them. In the process, southern whites engaged in constructing the meaning of race in the New South.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• EDITOR’S PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION: The Social History of Jim Crow
• CHAPTER 1. City of Opportunities and Boundaries
• CHAPTER 2. Transition to the New South: Reconstructing Boundaries
• CHAPTER 3. Protocols, Sanctions, and Mob Terror
• CHAPTER 4. School Segregation
• CHAPTER 5. Urban Residential Segregation
• CHAPTER 6. The Economic Realm: Work and Property
• CHAPTER 7. The Economic Realm: Social Space
• CHAPTER 8. The Political Realm, 1871–1888: Organizing and Voting
• CHAPTER 9. The Political Realm, 1888–1901: Excluding Black Voters
• CODA: Historians and the Interplay of Class, Race, and Caste
• APPENDIX: Social Psychology, Color Lines, and the Blumer Model
• NOTES
• INDEX