Southern History across the Color Line, Second Edition

By Nell Irvin Painter

The color line, once all too solid in southern public life, still exists in the study of southern history. As distinguished historian Nell Irvin Painter notes, we often still write about the South as though people of different races occupied entirely different spheres. In truth, although blacks and whites were expected to remain in their assigned places in the southern social hierarchy throughout the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth century, their lives were thoroughly entangled.

In this powerful collection of pathbreaking essays, Painter reaches across the color line to examine how race, gender, class, and individual subjectivity shaped the lives of black and white women and men in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century South. She explores such themes as interracial sex, white supremacy, and the physical and psychological violence of slavery, using insights gleaned from psychology and feminist social science as well as social, cultural, and intellectual history. The book illustrates both the breadth of Painter's interests and the originality of her intellectual contributions. This edition features refreshed essays and a new preface that sheds light on the development of Painter's thought and our continued struggles with racism in the twenty-first century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Feb 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9781469663777

Nell Irvin Painter

NELL IRVIN PAINTER is the Edwards Professor of American History Emerita at Princeton University. Her most recent books are The History of White People and Standing at Armageddon: A Grassroots History of the Progressive Era.

Book preview

PRAISE FOR Southern History across the Color Line

Demonstrate[s] excellence marked by the transgressive verve of [an] innovative and progressive scholar. … An extremely successful attempt to move with intellectual rigor and consistency toward a meaningful interpretation of a world mapped in blood by cruelty and violence.

—Southern Literary Journal

The theories, ideas, and analysis investigated in this text advance our understanding of nineteenth- and twentieth-century southern culture—both black and white—in unexpected, provocative, and compelling ways. … A highly original and radically ambitious book. This immensely important and insightful study underscores the need for new thinking about the scholarship of southern historiography that reaches beyond race. … A groundbreaking contribution and a rewarding addition to the field of American history, particularly southern historiography.

—North Carolina Historical Review

"Painter wields both a scalpel and an ax as she dissects multiple generations of southern-focused literature. … Compelling. … [Southern History across the Color Line] provides an insightful exploration into the historical factors that have led to an incomplete literature on the mutual impact of the color line in the American South. It deserves careful study by a wide-range of scholars and students of southern history and race relations."

—Gulf South Historical Review

Painter’s thoughtful collection is the result of a career spent in close examination of southern history. She demonstrates how that text can still reveal much but only if we sharpen and enlarge our intellectual armamentarium.

—Florida Historical Quarterly

Bold and innovative.

—Canadian Journal of History

"Nell Painter’s Southern History across the Color Line is an important and welcome collection. Her essays are always timely, telling, and provocative. They take risks and often seek to confound categories, topically and conceptually. And they chart the intellectual range and growth of one of our leading historians and teachers."

—STEVEN HAHN, New York University

Nell Irvin Painter is one of the major historians of our time. This invaluable collection brings together work that has influenced a generation of scholars and will continue to shape scholarship for the foreseeable future. Painter’s powerful and transgressive questioning of the tenets of southern history and southern historiography has opened up new ways of understanding both the centrality of race and the necessity of moving beyond it. This is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the American condition.

—HAZEL V. CARBY, Yale University

SOUTHERN HISTORY ACROSS THE COLOR LINE

GENDER AND AMERICAN CULTURE

Mary Kelley, editor

Editorial Advisory Board

Emerita Board Members

Guided by feminist and antiracist perspectives, this series examines the construction and influence of gender and sexuality within the full range of America’s cultures. Investigating in deep context the ways in which gender works with and against such markers as race, class, and region, the series presents outstanding interdisciplinary scholarship, including works in history, literary studies, religion, folklore, and the visual arts. In so doing, Gender and American Culture seeks to reveal how identity and community are shaped by gender and sexuality.

A complete list of books published in Gender and American Culture is available at www.uncpress.org.

SOUTHERN HISTORY ACROSS THE COLOR LINE

NELL IRVIN PAINTER

. . .

Second Edition

With a new preface by the author

The University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill

© 2021

The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Set in Galliard and Mantinia types

by Rebecca Evans

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Cover illustration: Nell Painter, Black Sea Composite Map 8, Sullen, 2012, acrylic on Yupo, 26″ x 40″. Photo by Greg Leshé.

ISBN 978-1-4696-6375-3 (cloth: alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4696-6376-0 (pbk: alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4696-6377-7 (ebook)

The Library of Congress has cataloged the original edition as follows:

© 2002 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Set in Carter Cone Galliard and Mantinia types by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress

Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Painter, Nell Irvin.

Southern history across the color line / Nell Irvin Painter

p. cm.—(Gender and American culture)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8078-2692-8 (alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8078-5360-3 (pbk.: alk. paper)

ISBN 078-1-4696-1099-3 (ebook)

1. Southern States—Historiography. 2. Southern States—Race relations. 3. Southern States—Social conditions. I. Title. II. Gender & American culture.

F208.2 .P35    2002

975′.007′2—dc21       2001053070

TO JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN (1915–2009)

who showed it could be done

CONTENTS

Preface to the Second Edition

Introduction: Southern History across the Color Line

1. Soul Murder and Slavery: Toward a Fully Loaded Cost Accounting

2. Social Equality and Rape in the Fin-de-Siècle South

3. Three Southern Women and Freud: A Non-Exceptionalist Approach to Race, Class, and Gender in the Slave South

4. The Journal of Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas: A Testament of Wealth, Loss, and Adultery

5. Hosea Hudson: The Life and Times of a Black Communist

6. Sexuality and Power in The Mind of the South

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

I’m writing this preface in the summer of 2020 in what feels like a turning point in American history, as protests against police brutality and for Black Lives Matter take place in cities and towns all across the United States, even in countries outside the U.S.A. Unless a severe backlash stifles changes now under way, 2020 will surely mark a watershed in American social history, a moment when systemic, often unexamined White supremacy became visible and rejected, a moment when the willful unknowing of American structures of racial hierarchy were scrutinized and jettisoned—a moment when the long-established and widely accepted culture of White privilege was overruled.

To my mind, the protests of 2020 recall the rebellions of the 1960s. But those earlier righteous upheavals turned into squandered opportunities, for the American majority chose to close its eyes to the injustices visited upon fellow Americans who were Black. In the 1960s, White Americans still thought and felt apart from—even in conflict with—Americans on the other side of a virtually impermeable color line. It was so easy to smugly conclude, especially if you were not in the South, that racism and the color line weren’t your problem.

The intellectual roots of this book go back to those 1960s, back to that virtually impermeable color line in the United States, but also, for me, to Ghana. There, in the 1960s, I emerged from an American upbringing where my human identity began and pretty much ended in race. Even though I grew up in Oakland in the Bay Area, my life, my ways of making sense in the world, were shaped by racial awareness. In Ghana, in contrast, my upbringing as a racialized American did not serve me well. In Ghana, everyone’s skin was dark. Without my American markers of race and racial identity, I had to find other poles of orientation. I learned to see class and the many manifestations of economic development as phenomena to be understood as shapers of human destiny. By the time I was researching my Harvard dissertation in the 1970s, money, education, and power dynamics had joined my Berkeley and Bordeaux undergraduate education as themes demanding investigation. Here were the beginnings, though hardly the culmination of my ways of working as a historian.

In the 1970s, as now, dissertation research meant situating one’s work within historiographical tradition. And research in those days meant traveling physically from one repository to another. This I did in a Volkswagen Beetle with Massachusetts plates, an image that gave my friends pause, even fear, as they imagined my traipsing around the South, which even in the post–civil rights era was not used to a Black woman scholar behind the wheel of a car bearing the name of the state that synopsized antislavery and the Union during the still all-too-present Civil War. My friends also surely bore in mind my own character, molded in Californian irreverence, a way of moving through the world unlike self-effacing southern femininity, as a southern Black colleague told me later.

My car didn’t cause me any problems, though, and however unexpected my body may have been in the archives and restaurants, only once, in Mississippi, did I feel slighted on account of my race; an archivist there dealt with me as though I were the help. Otherwise, I encountered little of the curiosity that John Hope Franklin had engendered in the 1940s by reading a paper in an annual meeting of the Southern Historical Association. (In 2007 I served as president of that scholarly body, and by then I was not the first Black scholar, not even the first Black woman scholar, to occupy the SHA presidency.)

Researching my dissertation in the southern archives, I found a more-nuanced history of racial interactions than existing historiography—the history of historical writing—had led me to expect. This doesn’t mean an absence of White supremacy and White terrorism; not at all. I found them both in bloody abundance, and said so in my dissertation and the book it became, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction. In spite of all I already knew of American history (we called it a survey knowledge), I was nevertheless jolted by the viciousness of the violence—planned, sustained, cold-blooded racist slaughter—that I found in the documents created during Reconstruction. I emerged from the archives feeling covered in gore, in blood purposefully shed to destroy the rule of democratic law. All that blood broke my heart. But as a historian, it didn’t give me pause. White-supremacist terrorism was familiar in southern history, in theory at least.

However, that’s not all I found in the archives as I turned over papers and leaned into microfilm readers. What I also found were the ways the color line could work, how it could bend and stretch. I’m not talking about interracial cooperation in public—there wasn’t much of that in Reconstruction. But themes of class and gender emerged in addition to race as means of ordering southern thought and action on both sides and through the color line.

My previous historiographical study had not prepared me for this. That work was often myopic, treating the South as a White preserve. An entire body of scholarship, summed up as the conservative, White-supremacist Dunning school of historical writing, made the South White and the Negro, even when capitalized, an alien. The most-read book on the South in the 1960s, Wilbur Cash’s The Mind of the South, created the Southerner as a middle-class White man.

As I was writing in the mid-1970s, there existed two fields: southern history, which was about White southerners, and Black history, which was about Black Americans, including southerners. Scholars who were White and wrote about Black people were described as southern historians. But not historians who were Black. We were Black historians who, in the 1970s, were not ordinarily seen as working across the color line, even when, as in the case of John Hope Franklin’s Reconstruction after the Civil War, our work embraced American history generally.

An alternate historiographical tradition certainly did exist. And there existed long-standing Black institutions like the Association for the Study of Negro/African American History and the Journal of Negro/African American History (both founded in the early twentieth century by Carter G. Woodson) that welcomed Negro/Black/African American history. The hunger for scholarship on Black Americans existed, and Black historians and a few non-Black allies like Herbert Aptheker eagerly provided it. According to the racial segregation still dividing academia, this tradition was largely relegated to traditionally Black institutions.

In the twenty-first century, however, Black history has come to the fore, as Black historians and their left-wing allies have been joined by perfectly middle-of-the road White scholars who were not necessarily products of Black institutions or African American studies. Unlike the Black scholarship of the twentieth century, these more recent works in Black history by non-Black historians were likely to be honored with book prizes and promotions. But this is to get ahead of the tradition to which I belonged.

Keeping to our side suited us well for the most part in the twentieth century, for it seemed that there were already plenty of White scholars writing about White people, though not as White subjects but as individuals of historical importance. An additional obstacle was the common suspicion that were a Black scholar to write about non-Black people, he or she was self-hating or did not want to be Black. Our mission was to reveal a history of Black agency that had largely been ignored. But embracing Black history as an intellectual mission entailed its own problem, for scholarship was supposed to be totally disinterested, even when this obviously was not always the case. The boundaries held even beyond scholarship, where White authors like William Styron found outlets for their writing on Black southerners. White writers on Black topics were the most ordinary thing in the world. It seldom worked the other way around, because scholars who were Black were hardly seen as having anything useful to say beyond Blackness.

I wanted to do something else, to see both the color line and, simultaneously, across and through it. I wanted a southern history that did more than one race at a time, to capture the relationships between southerners who were raced and yet more than just their racial identity. I wanted to write southern history that did not halt at the color line. I would not pretend the South was White and that Black southerners played no active part in what White southerners thought or did. I also rejected the view that the only White people who could figure in the history of Black southerners were White supremacists bent on racial violence.

A huge barrier blocked my imagined southern history with Black agency left in: the moonlight-and-magnolia history had already configured a role for Black southerners in multiracial history, but that role was a proslavery role of faithful darkies, tragic mulattoes, or menacing beast-rapists. Moonlight-and-magnolia history reinforced Black subjugation, as in the figures of the mammy who dedicated her allegiance to her White folks or the Black Confederate who voluntarily followed his master into Civil War battlefields. This was not at all what I had in mind.

The easiest way to show what I mean is to point to two southerners, one in the twentieth century, Hosea Hudson in urban Alabama, and one in the nineteenth century, Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas in rural Georgia. Hosea Hudson, a Birmingham steelworker, credited the Communist Party of the USA with his intellectual education and political emancipation. Hudson’s Birmingham Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) cell was Black. It could not have existed without Black workers like himself. But CPUSA organizers, southern and northern, were not Black, integrating Hudson’s political and intellectual history. Given communism’s internationalism, CPUSA opened to Hudson the world beyond the South; CPUSA took him to the USSR and gave him comrades who were not only American. As a thinker and historical actor, Hosea Hudson cannot be limited to contexts purely southern or exclusively Black. Hudson was a cosmopolitan thinker and historical actor who, through voting-rights activism, helped shape Birmingham long after he was forced to leave home. There would be no modern Alabama without him and the international political organization that made him an activist.

Although Gertrude Thomas, a formally educated, wealthy White woman, would seem to be personally autonomous, she was not. Psychologically and physically, she was deeply entangled in the lives of the people she owned, for they all lived in intimate contact, and her self-concept was intimately bound up with their presence. Thomas took her intellectual bearings from the Black people around her; she heeded their explanations of the workings of the world when she could not otherwise understand. Their lives affected her emotionally as well: upon their emancipation, she suffered a miscarriage and a months’ long depression. Enslaved women and children were also intimately entangled with her father and husband, so that her father’s adultery and fornication with women he owned made those children not only her half siblings, but also, literally, her inheritance. Her husband’s adultery and fornication with a woman of color injured Thomas profoundly, years after emancipation. Gertrude Thomas’s physical and mental world was multiracial, particularly when it came to the dynamics of sexual power.

The dynamics of sexual power had not been a prominent theme in historiography of the South in the 1960s and 1970s. But by the 1980s and 1990s, Black women historians like Deborah Gray White were bringing the history of southern Black women to the fore, and not only in the historiography. Jean Fagan Yellin showed the importance of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl as an eloquent story of the sexual abuse of vulnerable young women captive within enslavement.

The young women I found in historical records led me across the color line and into the topics that became the essays in Southern History across the Color Line. Even though legal status and class dynamics separated unfree young women in the Americas from bourgeois young women in Europe, they shared an all-too-common young women’s fate. Jacobs’s Linda Brent and Freud’s Dora led me from the American South and Vienna to, eventually, the Caucasus and its millennia-long history of captivity and enslavement.

After the publication of Southern History across the Color Line in 2002, I remained within American historiographical expectation of matching the race of the historian with the race of the subject matter. Oxford University Press published my book Creating Black Americans: African American History and Its Meanings, 1619 to the Present in 2006, a narrative history that did two new things. First, its illustrations are Black fine art, turning the book into a showcase of the work of Black visual artists. All the images are by artists who identified as Black, and none of the images shows anti-Black atrocities. No lynching or beating photos at all, but images showing how Black artists responded to Black history. Second, I made no pretense of showing an image and claiming it depicted something or somebody once and for all. Occasionally, I presented more than one image of the same person to emphasize the role of interpretation in how we understand the meanings of history. My subtitle, African American History and Its Meanings, underscores my message that what we seek in the past changes according to our own social context. As a historian who is myself Black, I adhered to historical expectations by writing Black history.

Creating Black Americans hewed to the conventions of U.S. historiography, but for me it raised further, crucial questions about history on the other side of the color line. I knew that Black people were not the only Americans with a racial identity, even though in American culture, Whiteness as race routinely remained obscured; for the most part, White people occupied individual rather than raced identities in American thought. Where was the history of White people? Not of White violence against other people or White nationalism’s hatreds and cockamamie theories and anti-Semitism. Where was an intellectual history of changing constructions of the meaning of American Whiteness?

I wrote The History of White People, published by W. W. Norton in 2010, to address these questions. It remains my best-known book and made me a go-to expert on Whiteness. The age of Trump, Black Lives Matter, and antiracism has made Whiteness even more pressing as a subject of investigation.

I began research on the history of Whiteness in the early twenty-first century with a question: why are White Americans called Caucasian, when most have no idea of who Caucasians are and where the Caucasus is. As it happens, I wrote the introduction to the original edition of Southern History across the Color Line in Germany, where I was looking for the answer to this question. I found the answer in the University of Göttingen and in an intellectual history beginning in the European Enlightenment. At the time, a Black author writing about White people still presented a novelty, so much so that in the United States I was queried point blank about my intentions. Was I trying to settle racial scores by attacking White people after White people had treated Black people badly? Was I writing as a Black person? I was glad to note that those questions died away as readers became accustomed to a Black person as president of the United States, and as readers actually read the book.

Nell Painter, Black Sea Composite Map 4, Fake History, from the series Odalisque Atlas, 2012. Reproduced with permission of the artist.

The History of White People is deeply indebted to the essays in Southern History across the Color Line. But vulnerable young women inspired a couple of chapters in The History of White People and, after art school, my ongoing painted series Odalisque Atlas.

At the end of my introduction to the first edition of Southern History across the Color Line, I mentioned what was then still to come: my departure from scholarship and my step into visual art. The History of White People is still my best-known book, but it is not my most recent. In 2018 I published Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over about my experiences of being an old person (i.e., over thirty) in the art world, which is obsessed with youth.

Today, my work draws on both history and imagery in a way peculiar to me. Working with ink, paint, and digital tools, I’m still crossing color lines. Still crossing lines, now of concept and vision.

Why return to my thinking from the twentieth century? You could read these essays as intense immersions in the psychosocial lives of particular southerners and also as classic formulations of ideas that shaped my approach to biography unafraid of unorthodoxy. And you could read them as chapters in intellectual autobiography, as intellectual curiosity that continues to this day, not cramped by intellectual conventions visual or verbal.

Nell Irvin Painter

Adirondack Park, N.Y., August 2020

SOUTHERN HISTORY ACROSS THE COLOR LINE

Introduction

SOUTHERN HISTORY ACROSS THE COLOR LINE

. . .

Fruit of many years’ thought and living, Southern History across the Color Line points across and beyond a color line once all too solid in southern public life and still discernible in scholarship and everyday life. Preserved by residential segregation, class barriers, and the old bogey of social equality, the color line seems practically indelible. It outlasted the legal framework and institutional superstructure erected in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1896 ruling, in Plessy v. Ferguson, permitting the existence of racially separate but equal establishments. The mid-twentieth-century civil rights revolution dismantled the laws separating the races, yet generations later, southerners of all races still must go against the grain of their culture to reach for equals outside the churches, clubs, and habit-places of their own race.

Those habit-places house intellectual production, for an all-too-firm conceptual barrier still bisects the world of scholarship. Oh, yes, much has changed—thankfully. Before my time, but within the lifetime of John Hope Franklin—born in 1915 and a graduate student and young scholar during the 1940s and 1950s—the color line interfered materially with the pursuit of history. Legal segregation and traditions of unwelcome restricted the places where a historian could do research and eat lunch. Colleges segregated by race and gender offered unequal opportunities for professional advancement. Even the process of dismantling the color bar turned a black scholar’s presenting a paper in a scholarly meeting into a public curiosity, as John Hope Franklin discovered at a meeting of the Southern Historical Association in the late 1940s.

Most historians followed (and all too often still follow) segregation’s decree and wrote about the South as though people of different races occupied entirely different spheres. First, white historians made up a lily-white southern history that included no blacks, or only those blacks who loved serving whites, loved being enslaved or at least benefited from the institution, and who missed slavery after it was gone. Then, in the wake of the civil rights revolution, black historians and our allies tried to redress the imbalance by publishing the history of blacks as though white people existed only as faceless oppressors. My first book appeared in that era. My primary sources—full of the details characteristic of individual day-by-day experience lived according to necessity, not society’s larger rules—showed me southerners tracking across the color line. But as a beginning historian, I lacked the writing skill to present a thoroughly racialized, steeply hierarchical, utterly repressive society in which some black and white people nonetheless looked and stepped across the line. I expressed my doubts only timidly and resolved better to capture nuance in future. Nowadays more and more historians write about southerners of many races as fully realized historical actors. The old habit of writing only or mainly about white people or only or mainly about black people dies hard, but it never fettered John Hope Franklin.

In a segregated world, Franklin received accolades in abundance as the author of From Slavery to Freedom, first published in 1947 and still, after many revisions, in print and flourishing. Franklin very rightly deserves honors for this finest and most enduring history of black Americans. He also deserves recognition for a good deal else he has written. In addition to contributing a distinguished oeuvre in American history, Franklin also thought and wrote across the color line and probed the meaning of southern history as a whole.

Segregation may have encumbered Franklin’s conditions of research, but it never shuttered his vision. He wrote perceptively of white as well as black southerners and of all Americans.¹ How much richer would history be if historians of all races followed his lead and peered beyond their own allotments! This is beginning to happen: I love the breaching of the conceptual color bar in southern history into which many now step. There are too many for me to name them all here, but I cannot resist the desire to mention some with whom I’ve had the opportunity to work closely: Crystal Feimster, Glenda Gilmore, and Walter Johnson, for example.² Much more work remains to be done, especially to keep black women as well as black men in view as full-fledged southerners. But, happily, the work is well launched.

In one sense, the very fact of my writing about white southerners lofts this book across the color line. While white historians often write about black people, black historians still rarely write about whites.³ I regret this imbalance, if only because black historians are more likely than whites to read the vast literature of African American studies. The bibliography of this field, consisting of work by scholars from all racial-ethnic backgrounds, contains trenchant analyses of American culture from a black point of view ordinarily lacking in American scholarship. Unfortunately, the color line endures in the world of footnotes and citations and still distorts the intellectual history of African Americans and Americans generally. I lament the tendency of scholars of all races to overlook the publications of authors who were or are black.

In another, larger sense, I want to cross the color line by looking beyond color and race. I do not mean not looking at color and race. Race matters enormously and must figure in any analysis of American history, doubly so for southern history. For too long we have normalized whiteness, as though to be white were to be natural, and only those people not counted as white had racial identities. Southerner used to mean only white southerner, as though black southerners somehow were not part of the South. Along the same line, the South and the Confederacy used also to seem interchangeable, as though the only people who counted as southerners supported the Confederacy. Yes, especially in southern history, race matters a lot. But race is not all there is to life or to history. Much more remains to be said. Playing with the vogue for quantification, I used to joke that race constitutes 49 percent of a southerner’s human life: as the crucial factor, it counts for a plurality, but not the totality, of causes and effects. (Now that cliometrics has faded into historiography’s mists, I must find another, up-to-date little formula.)

Responsible historians cannot halt their analyses at the color line, and now they can draw upon a generation’s worth or more of new scholarship for guidance. African American studies and women’s studies tell us—and rightly—to think through race, class, and gender simultaneously. No one goes through life as simply a unit of race, for race’s significance varies according to one’s class and gender. Womanliness or manliness means different things for people of different races. Wealth and poverty play out according to the race and gender of the subject(s) at hand. But even race, class, and gender together miss much in life and history. Keeping all three in mind always, historians must transcend them.

Race, class, and gender constitute three essential but blunt tools of analysis. Each contains a plethora of subcategories and variations: region, chronology, cultural context, sexual orientation, physical ability, education, and so on. Within race lies color, for instance. The shade of color of an African American woman’s skin affects her life’s chances, so that one black woman’s experience with people of all races cannot simply be interchanged with another’s. We are less likely to assume that all white women are identical to one another, but we need always to keep in mind their differences according to class-inflected levels of education and standing, even within the same region, the same era, and the same generation.

Beyond even the most finely tuned categories lies something exceeding race, class, and gender: individual subjectivity.