Growing Up Jim Crow: How Black And White Southern Children Learned Race by Jennifer Ritterhouse

by Jennifer Ritterhouse

In the segregated South of the early twentieth century, unwritten rules guided every aspect of individual behavior, from how blacks and whites stood, sat, ate, drank, walked, and talked to whether they made eye contact with one another. Jennifer Ritterhouse asks how children learned this racial "etiquette," which was sustained by coercion and the threat of violence. More broadly, she asks how individuals developed racial self-consciousness.Parental instruction was an important factor--both white parents' reinforcement of a white supremacist worldview and black parents' oppositional lessons in respectability and race pride. Children also learned much from their interactions across race lines. The fact that black youths were often eager to stand up for themselves, despite the risks, suggests that the emotional underpinnings of the civil rights movement were in place long before the historical moment when change became possible. Meanwhile, a younger generation of whites continued to enforce traditional patterns of domination and deference in private, while also creating an increasingly elaborate system of segregation in public settings. Exploring relationships between public and private and between segregation, racial etiquette, and racial violence, Growing Up Jim Crow sheds new light on tradition and change in the South and the meanings of segregation within southern culture.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American, Sociology, Race, Social Issues, American History

Paperback

First published May 15, 2006

Reviews

[Libby · Rating 4 out of 5]

White children and African American children were carefully taught the Jim Crow social structure, but differently. White writers who describe the point in their lives when segregation is enforced (for instance when they are scolded for sitting down to eat with the family's maid) write about this only if they find something wrong about it. Therefore only a handful of white southerners write about the Jim Crow system because most of them just accept it. Black children are taught the rules for their own protection and parents are often harsh in reinforcing the prohibitions.

[Mary Burkholder · Rating 5 out of 5]

This well-documented and researched book answered my questions about race relations after the Civil War and what it might have been like to be a child of either race growing up in that era. Illustrated with an abundance of true accounts. Includes a few old photographs.

[Larry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Academic book but written with great clarity. Will absolutely inform my teaching.

[Chris Zurzolo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Had to read this for class. Interesting