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Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia
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.
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.
292 pages, Paperback
First published December 18, 2000
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October 18, 2023
Another illuminating study I read for my class on race, ethnicity, and gender in 19th century US.
The political is unequivocally personal, is the succinct version of Jane Dailey’s thesis in Before Jim Crow. By insisting on race as a slippery, tractable, and malleable designation rather than a deterministic, essentializing category, Dailey seeks to redefine race as “situational and historical, created and sustained through social interactions.” In other words, race, in Dailey’s rendering, exists as a social dynamic and interpersonal negotiation. It’s a phenomenon not only enacted and maintained by social structures and institutions, but is also continually renewed and remade through the “ordinary and everyday” actions and interactions often invisibly informed by them.
Recognizing the volatile state of change and instability, slipperiness and malleability that characterize constructions of race, Dailey convincingly demonstrates how white supremacy undermined the efforts to build cross-race political cooperation in the post-Emancipation South. Dailey’s monograph is the Readjuster coalition, an interracial political movement that sought to breach the color line by emphasizing the class-based interests of both Black and white Virginians.
Central to Dailey’s argument is the idea that late 19th century Virginians were acutely aware of the socially constructed nature of race, and that that awareness has generated implacable levels of anxiety that originated principally from “the rising fortunes of Black Virginians.” Indeed, the appearance of Black people asserting their citizenship in public spaces not only challenged existing social hierarchies but also called into question definitions that centered around ‘being black’ and ‘being white.’ The Readjuster Party, in other words, shattered the sacred fantasies that allowed Virignians to establish whiteness as intrinsically valuable and blackness as inherently inferior.
Playing on these race-based anxieties, white Democrats set out to destroy the Readjusters party. Capitalizing on white Readjusters' fears that their “possessive investment in whiteness” is being challenged, the Democratic Party excluded white Readjusters from definitions of whiteness–and its ‘wages,’ to quote the DuBoisian term–on account of them being hybridized or contaminated. For white Democrats, to put it differently, white Readjuster’s social affiliation and proximity to Black people undermined their whiteness and made them inferior.
The strength of Dailey’s reflection in this book is to make clear that evaluations of race should account for the ways in which the gender line and the color line often intersect. As Dailey sees it, white Readjusters’ “vulnerab[ility ]to race baiting” stemmed, in a large part, from a sense that their manhood, more than anything else, is being devalued. Indeed, white Democrats, in Dailey’s view, successfully employed a “gendered rhetoric of race and politics” against which white identity was defined and legitimated. Within this rhetoric, Black Readjusters served as a repository for the sexual longings and fears of white Readjusters and Democrats alike (in regards to miscegenation, control over white women, loss of white male authority etc). White Readjusters understood, in other words, that in order for them to be regarded as credibly ‘white’ and credibly ‘male,’ they had to distance themselves from the Black members of the Party and reassert their whiteness and masculinity in the same breath. To illustrate this, Dailey evokes the white reactions to the appointment of two black men on the Richmond school board in 1883 as the clearest statement of white anxieties about “the value of whiteness.”
The cumulative effect of this commitment to male whiteness, Dailey hauntingly demonstrates, is a resurgence of white male supremacy and the disintegration of the coalition party. To break through the color line, white Readjusters had to make a commitment to a radical repudiation of whiteness where it intersects with received notions of masculinity. That they failed to do so paved the way for the rise of Jim Crow.
The political is unequivocally personal, is the succinct version of Jane Dailey’s thesis in Before Jim Crow. By insisting on race as a slippery, tractable, and malleable designation rather than a deterministic, essentializing category, Dailey seeks to redefine race as “situational and historical, created and sustained through social interactions.” In other words, race, in Dailey’s rendering, exists as a social dynamic and interpersonal negotiation. It’s a phenomenon not only enacted and maintained by social structures and institutions, but is also continually renewed and remade through the “ordinary and everyday” actions and interactions often invisibly informed by them.
Recognizing the volatile state of change and instability, slipperiness and malleability that characterize constructions of race, Dailey convincingly demonstrates how white supremacy undermined the efforts to build cross-race political cooperation in the post-Emancipation South. Dailey’s monograph is the Readjuster coalition, an interracial political movement that sought to breach the color line by emphasizing the class-based interests of both Black and white Virginians.
Central to Dailey’s argument is the idea that late 19th century Virginians were acutely aware of the socially constructed nature of race, and that that awareness has generated implacable levels of anxiety that originated principally from “the rising fortunes of Black Virginians.” Indeed, the appearance of Black people asserting their citizenship in public spaces not only challenged existing social hierarchies but also called into question definitions that centered around ‘being black’ and ‘being white.’ The Readjuster Party, in other words, shattered the sacred fantasies that allowed Virignians to establish whiteness as intrinsically valuable and blackness as inherently inferior.
Playing on these race-based anxieties, white Democrats set out to destroy the Readjusters party. Capitalizing on white Readjusters' fears that their “possessive investment in whiteness” is being challenged, the Democratic Party excluded white Readjusters from definitions of whiteness–and its ‘wages,’ to quote the DuBoisian term–on account of them being hybridized or contaminated. For white Democrats, to put it differently, white Readjuster’s social affiliation and proximity to Black people undermined their whiteness and made them inferior.
The strength of Dailey’s reflection in this book is to make clear that evaluations of race should account for the ways in which the gender line and the color line often intersect. As Dailey sees it, white Readjusters’ “vulnerab[ility ]to race baiting” stemmed, in a large part, from a sense that their manhood, more than anything else, is being devalued. Indeed, white Democrats, in Dailey’s view, successfully employed a “gendered rhetoric of race and politics” against which white identity was defined and legitimated. Within this rhetoric, Black Readjusters served as a repository for the sexual longings and fears of white Readjusters and Democrats alike (in regards to miscegenation, control over white women, loss of white male authority etc). White Readjusters understood, in other words, that in order for them to be regarded as credibly ‘white’ and credibly ‘male,’ they had to distance themselves from the Black members of the Party and reassert their whiteness and masculinity in the same breath. To illustrate this, Dailey evokes the white reactions to the appointment of two black men on the Richmond school board in 1883 as the clearest statement of white anxieties about “the value of whiteness.”
The cumulative effect of this commitment to male whiteness, Dailey hauntingly demonstrates, is a resurgence of white male supremacy and the disintegration of the coalition party. To break through the color line, white Readjusters had to make a commitment to a radical repudiation of whiteness where it intersects with received notions of masculinity. That they failed to do so paved the way for the rise of Jim Crow.
December 23, 2013
In her book, Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia, Professor Jane Dailey, of the University of Chicago, enlightens the world to the brief history of the Readjuster Party. The Readjusters were a political coalition which incubated and then defused the hopes, of African-Americans for political and societal equality in the Old Dominion following Reconstruction. As Dailey laboriously explains in the volume's initial chapter, the Readjuster movement was spawned chiefly by the debate over Virginia's tremendous public debt, which totaled forty-eight million dollars by the end of Reconstruction. Much of the debt had been incurred by the state prior to the Civil War, to finance major public works projects, such as railroads, turnpikes, bridges and canals, which largely now laid in ruins, except in the region which had become West Virginia in 1863. This separation of the mountainous, western region of Virginia into a separate sovereign state, had further complicated and embroiled the debate over the state's debt situation, as the question of this region's share of the debt was hotly debated. For over a decade this issue had divided Virginia's citizenry and politicians largely along lines of economic class.
The state's elite, White, planter class favored complete funding of the entire enormous debt including the accrued interest, which was owed predominantly to Northern banks by the state of Virginia. Thus they became known as the Funders, and it was their strongly held belief that do less, was to forfeit the only thing the loyal sons of the Old Dominion, which had fought for the sovereignty of the commonwealth and their confederate brethren had left; their Southern honor. Funders contended that since these obligations predated those commitments enacted by subsequent sessions of the legislature, they logically took precedence. Most specifically their aim was to deny funding of free public education, which had been established by what it considered as the dangerously subversive Reconstruction era government with the adoption of state's 1870 constitution, which had finally allowed Virginia to rejoin the Union, after five years of military rule.
Opposing this group, was one of the more interesting political coalitions to emerge within the former Confederacy, known as the Readjusters, which garnered supporters of reform from all sides of the political and racial spectrum for a brief period in Virginia history. Impoverished small farmers, miners, and working class Whites in the emerging and industrializing cities were joined by significant numbers of African-Americans, in embracing the Readjuster position. The party's platform was relatively simple; it was the responsibility of the government, via the legislature to provide for three essentials. Those being in order of priority; the preservation of a democratic governing body, free public education, and finally servicing the debt. Furthermore the state of West Virginia must assume a portion of the debt, commensurate with the value which its territory and citizenry continued for the most part to enjoy, since its area was not overly ravaged by the destruction of the late war. It was the prioritizing of the funding of free public education however, which most solidly united this diverse and wide reaching faction during this brief era in Virginia. Essentially declaring that such was as an implied right of citizenship guaranteed by the state's new constitution as well as being absolutely indispensable, if Virginia was to move forward with the rapidly industrializing world of the day.
The Readjusters were headed by William Mahone and Harrison H. Riddleberger, both of which were very White men ironically, considering after all that this is an African-American Studies course. Mahone was a graduate of Virginia Military Institute, a former Confederate general, slave owner, and railroad tycoon. Riddleberger was also a former captain in the Confederate cavalry who became a lawyer and newspaper editor after the war, which led to political aspirations. Like Mahone, he had also served with the Confederate army although only attaining the rank of captain in the cavalry. Both of these White politicians however understood that the only hope of breaking the Democratic machine's stranglehold on the state's legislature lie in building an organization which crossed both divides of class, color, and party loyalty if their movement was to succeed.
Dailey describes again in great detail how the Readjusters gained political momentum from its broad coalition and swept into a position of political majority in the state legislature, which at that time allowed the party to select United States Senators. The Readjusters soon set about altering federal law to allow for the direct election of senators by popular vote as well in an effort to level the political playing field, for all classes of Americans. In 1881 Virginia sent William Mahone to the Senate and two years later Riddleberger followed as well. During the intervening year the party had gotten William E. Cameron elected as governor also and Readjuster candidates won a number of lesser county and local offices as well. The party set about the business of governing, funding education and lessening ,at least the gap in funding between the state's segregated schools and abolished the poll tax. Additionally, significant government monies were also spent on improvements which directly benefited urban Blacks such as new sidewalks in their neighborhoods, better medical and mental facilities, and perhaps most controversially the hiring of African-American men as police officers and constables. This latter development, probably more than any other, provided an opening upon which the party's opposition pounced as the state elections of 1883 loomed on the horizon.
The Readjuster's outreach to African-Americans voters and the inclusion of Black politicians within its numbers, was the quite predictable point at which the state's Democratic machine launched its attack to undermine the new found political superiority of the Readjusters in 1883. Preying on the fears of Whites who supported the Readjuster cause, over the danger to the sanctity and purity of White women and girls if African-Americans were granted in full practice, the social and political equality they had so recently assumed. Just days before the state election in November, an altercation over right of way on public sidewalks had resulted in riot which ended with seven Black men shot dead and two Whites wounded in Danville. This the Virginia Democrats roared, was the direct result of the enforced equality of races, which was by the higher law of nature wrong to begin with, and would sadly be the abdominal future which portended all White men, women, and children, if things continued down the path they were headed. Then as now the prominent mainstream media played a central part in sensationalizing of political differences. Democratic newspapers painted the “Danville Riot” as the repugnant image of what would happen to Southern society and tradition if Blacks were allowed positions of armed state authority. Already they proclaimed the formerly polite and docile Southern Blacks had become, in less than a generation, an uppity and pretentious class, presuming to be as good as Whites in all realms. This was a powerful message, which brought back the important votes for the Democrats from poor Whites, who simply would not accept complete equality of the races, since that would of course place Blacks in even more direct competition with them in terms of economics and social mobility and status.
As the author highlights in her conclusions, the Democrats found the best way to crush political opposition, besides of course flat-out intimidation with threat of violence, was by adopting its hot button issues as its own, which they would again use in the future with Progressives. Her contention that race transcends private and public spheres has merit as well. Although one does have to often consult a dictionary, unless their vocabulary is well within the sphere of graduate study to understand. Also the theme centered organization of the book make for a less than page turning experience, however it has become an enduring part of the historiography of African-American Studies since its release at the dawn of the new millennium. However it is not totally without its shortcomings. Besides the areas just mentioned, one might also come away with a sense, completely unintended by the author. While the author does mention several African-American politicians and office holders, for the irony that the two chief movers of the Readjuster movement were not only White, but whom had also led troops under the battle flags of the Confederacy, can not be escaped. Also missing is any meaningful discussion of similar political coalitions which emerged in elsewhere in the South. However this does not diminish the value of this meticulously researched and documented scholarly endeavor to serious students of the genre.
The state's elite, White, planter class favored complete funding of the entire enormous debt including the accrued interest, which was owed predominantly to Northern banks by the state of Virginia. Thus they became known as the Funders, and it was their strongly held belief that do less, was to forfeit the only thing the loyal sons of the Old Dominion, which had fought for the sovereignty of the commonwealth and their confederate brethren had left; their Southern honor. Funders contended that since these obligations predated those commitments enacted by subsequent sessions of the legislature, they logically took precedence. Most specifically their aim was to deny funding of free public education, which had been established by what it considered as the dangerously subversive Reconstruction era government with the adoption of state's 1870 constitution, which had finally allowed Virginia to rejoin the Union, after five years of military rule.
Opposing this group, was one of the more interesting political coalitions to emerge within the former Confederacy, known as the Readjusters, which garnered supporters of reform from all sides of the political and racial spectrum for a brief period in Virginia history. Impoverished small farmers, miners, and working class Whites in the emerging and industrializing cities were joined by significant numbers of African-Americans, in embracing the Readjuster position. The party's platform was relatively simple; it was the responsibility of the government, via the legislature to provide for three essentials. Those being in order of priority; the preservation of a democratic governing body, free public education, and finally servicing the debt. Furthermore the state of West Virginia must assume a portion of the debt, commensurate with the value which its territory and citizenry continued for the most part to enjoy, since its area was not overly ravaged by the destruction of the late war. It was the prioritizing of the funding of free public education however, which most solidly united this diverse and wide reaching faction during this brief era in Virginia. Essentially declaring that such was as an implied right of citizenship guaranteed by the state's new constitution as well as being absolutely indispensable, if Virginia was to move forward with the rapidly industrializing world of the day.
The Readjusters were headed by William Mahone and Harrison H. Riddleberger, both of which were very White men ironically, considering after all that this is an African-American Studies course. Mahone was a graduate of Virginia Military Institute, a former Confederate general, slave owner, and railroad tycoon. Riddleberger was also a former captain in the Confederate cavalry who became a lawyer and newspaper editor after the war, which led to political aspirations. Like Mahone, he had also served with the Confederate army although only attaining the rank of captain in the cavalry. Both of these White politicians however understood that the only hope of breaking the Democratic machine's stranglehold on the state's legislature lie in building an organization which crossed both divides of class, color, and party loyalty if their movement was to succeed.
Dailey describes again in great detail how the Readjusters gained political momentum from its broad coalition and swept into a position of political majority in the state legislature, which at that time allowed the party to select United States Senators. The Readjusters soon set about altering federal law to allow for the direct election of senators by popular vote as well in an effort to level the political playing field, for all classes of Americans. In 1881 Virginia sent William Mahone to the Senate and two years later Riddleberger followed as well. During the intervening year the party had gotten William E. Cameron elected as governor also and Readjuster candidates won a number of lesser county and local offices as well. The party set about the business of governing, funding education and lessening ,at least the gap in funding between the state's segregated schools and abolished the poll tax. Additionally, significant government monies were also spent on improvements which directly benefited urban Blacks such as new sidewalks in their neighborhoods, better medical and mental facilities, and perhaps most controversially the hiring of African-American men as police officers and constables. This latter development, probably more than any other, provided an opening upon which the party's opposition pounced as the state elections of 1883 loomed on the horizon.
The Readjuster's outreach to African-Americans voters and the inclusion of Black politicians within its numbers, was the quite predictable point at which the state's Democratic machine launched its attack to undermine the new found political superiority of the Readjusters in 1883. Preying on the fears of Whites who supported the Readjuster cause, over the danger to the sanctity and purity of White women and girls if African-Americans were granted in full practice, the social and political equality they had so recently assumed. Just days before the state election in November, an altercation over right of way on public sidewalks had resulted in riot which ended with seven Black men shot dead and two Whites wounded in Danville. This the Virginia Democrats roared, was the direct result of the enforced equality of races, which was by the higher law of nature wrong to begin with, and would sadly be the abdominal future which portended all White men, women, and children, if things continued down the path they were headed. Then as now the prominent mainstream media played a central part in sensationalizing of political differences. Democratic newspapers painted the “Danville Riot” as the repugnant image of what would happen to Southern society and tradition if Blacks were allowed positions of armed state authority. Already they proclaimed the formerly polite and docile Southern Blacks had become, in less than a generation, an uppity and pretentious class, presuming to be as good as Whites in all realms. This was a powerful message, which brought back the important votes for the Democrats from poor Whites, who simply would not accept complete equality of the races, since that would of course place Blacks in even more direct competition with them in terms of economics and social mobility and status.
As the author highlights in her conclusions, the Democrats found the best way to crush political opposition, besides of course flat-out intimidation with threat of violence, was by adopting its hot button issues as its own, which they would again use in the future with Progressives. Her contention that race transcends private and public spheres has merit as well. Although one does have to often consult a dictionary, unless their vocabulary is well within the sphere of graduate study to understand. Also the theme centered organization of the book make for a less than page turning experience, however it has become an enduring part of the historiography of African-American Studies since its release at the dawn of the new millennium. However it is not totally without its shortcomings. Besides the areas just mentioned, one might also come away with a sense, completely unintended by the author. While the author does mention several African-American politicians and office holders, for the irony that the two chief movers of the Readjuster movement were not only White, but whom had also led troops under the battle flags of the Confederacy, can not be escaped. Also missing is any meaningful discussion of similar political coalitions which emerged in elsewhere in the South. However this does not diminish the value of this meticulously researched and documented scholarly endeavor to serious students of the genre.
December 6, 2018
Interesting. Writing is very academic and tends to be repetitive in making key points.
December 2, 2020
This book offers a critical lesson on the political possibilities when the working poor unite across racial and ethnic lines. It's as applicable today as it was after the civil war.
April 22, 2014
Dailey recounts the efforts of the "Readjuster" movement in post Civil War Virginia. This book provides voice to that fact that racial bigotry and hatred were not inevitable outcomes of the Civil War. Something better had begun to emerge in Virginia, but was quickly crushed by the ugly face of racism and bigotry.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews