Segregation in the New South

"Carl V. Harris's Segregation in the New South explores the rise of racial exclusion in late nineteenth-century Birmingham, Alabama, a critical southern industrial city. In the 1870s, African Americans in Birmingham 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-elite and non-elite alike-worked to restore the restrictive racial lines of the slave 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. 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. Harris's interpretation emphasizes the importance, even in early Reconstruction, of the white doctrine that Black freedpeople were inherently inferior, had inherited the abysmally low social status of slaves, and had to be rigorously excluded from social fellowship and social institutions. In the process, he reveals, southern whites engaged in constructing the meaning of race in the post-Civil War South. Harris's study draws on an extensive body of research in social psychology rarely utilized by historians, including the creation of group boundaries that illuminate the social construction of races. This model is dynamic, revealing how groups develop and evolve through encounters with other groups. Using this methodology, Harris explores segregation within the social core of southern society, probing the motivations of whites who devised Jim Crow, identifying and assessing the relative importance of transactional versus socio-emotional factors in the origins of discrimination, and discussing the reasons for the prolonged survival of Jim Crow"--