Before Jim Crow
Subtitle: the politics of race in postemancipation Virginia
By: Jane Dailey.
Series: Gender & American culture
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2000
Place of publication: Chapel Hill
Language: eng
Number of pages: 278
Subjects: Reconstruction (U.S. history, 1865-1877) -- Virginia; Race awareness -- Political aspects -- Virginia -- History -- 19th century; Sex role -- Political aspects -- Virginia -- History -- 19th century; Social classes -- Virginia -- History -- 19th century; African Americans -- Virginia -- Politics and government -- 19th century; African Americans -- Civil rights -- Virginia -- History -- 19th century; Slaves -- Emancipation -- Virginia; Virginia -- Race relations -- Political aspects -- History -- 19th century; Virginia -- Politics and government -- 1865-1950
Description: Long before the Montgomery bus boycott ushered in the modern civil rights movement, black and white southerners struggled to forge interracial democracy in America. This innovative book examines the most successful interracial coalition in the nineteenth-century South, Virginia's Readjuster Party, and uncovers a surprising degree of fluidity in postemancipation southern politics. Melding social, cultural, and political history, Jane Dailey chronicles the Readjusters' efforts to foster political cooperation across the color line. She demonstrates that the power of racial rhetoric, and the divisiveness of racial politics, derived from the everyday experiences of individual Virginians--from their local encounters on the sidewalk, before the magistrate's bench, in the schoolroom. In the process, she reveals the power of black and white southerners to both create and resist new systems of racial discrimination. The story of the Readjusters shows how hard white southerners had to work to establish racial domination after emancipation, and how passionately black southerners fought each and every infringement of their rights as Americans.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 237-267 and index.