Volume 51, Number 16 · October 21, 2004
Is There Hope for the South?
By George M. Fredrickson
Where We Stand: Voices of Southern Dissent
edited by Anthony Dunbar
NewSouth Books, 234 pp., $24.95
Among the regions of the United States, the South has long stood out as the most distinctive, and, in the minds of many, the one that has deviated the most from the norms accepted by the rest of the country. This sense of difference and peculiarity goes back to the early nineteenth century when African-American slavery was being eliminated in the North but was rooting itself more and more deeply in Southern society. After the abolition of slavery as a result of a war fought primarily over the question of the future of slavery in the United States, the federal government made an ineffectual attempt to guarantee civil and political equality for the freed slaves. When the North's Reconstruction policy failed and 'home rule' was restored to the Southern states, another 'peculiar institution' emerged—legalized segregation, or Jim Crow. In 1928, Ulrich Phillips, the leading Southern historian of his time, wrote, 'The central theme of Southern history' was the struggle to maintain white supremacy, 'to remain a white man's country.'[1]
Review, 3310 words
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