Feeding the Wolf: John B. Rayner and the Politics of Race, 1850-1918.

By Gregg Cantrell. (Wheeling, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, c. 2001. Pp. [x], 149. Paper, $12.95, ISBN 0-88295-961-1.)

Gregg Cantrell has revised the second half of his award-winning earlier work, Kenneth and John B. Rayner and the Limits of Southern Dissent (Urbana, Ill., 1993), and published it as a single book, intended primarily as supplementary reading in college courses. It is a largely political biography of an important African American Populist, John B. Rayner.

Rayner was born a slave, the son (by a fifteen-year-old slave) of Kenneth Rayner, a prominent antebellum politician in North Carolina. John Rayner was raised in his father's Raleigh home by Henry Jett, his maternal great-grandfather and probably kin to Kenneth Rayner's wife. After the war Rayner obtained a fairly thorough education in Raleigh and left in the early 1870s for Tarboro, North Carolina. The end of Reconstruction meant the end of his budding career as a Republican officeholder and led Rayner to leave North Carolina at the end of the 1870s. Rayner went to Texas, apparently financing his move by serving as an agent for Robertson County planters eager for black workers who were willing to leave North Carolina. Following the move, Rayner taught school in Calvert, Texas, to support his expanding family.

In 1887 Rayner became involved in the prohibition campaign in Texas, though his participation embarrassed the prohibitionists whom he supported. In the 1890s he joined the People's Party, the most prominent African American to work with them in Texas. The Populist leadership in Texas recognized and used his skill as a speaker and organizer, and in large part the considerable success the Populist Party had in attracting black support was due to Rayner's efforts. The collapse of Populism left Rayner politically isolated, and in the early twentieth century he turned his attention to a number of projects, including organizing African Americans to oppose prohibition (a change Cantrell attributes to the "drys" now being "the faction most dedicated to the segregation and disfranchisement of black people" [p. 103]) and serving as financial agent for two fledgling black colleges. In both he cultivated the support of wealthy whites, including the lumberman John Henry Kirby. Rayner's politics grew more conservative, but although he never abandoned his work for a measure of black political participation, he was willing, as Cantrell points out, to try "feeding the wolf" of white supremacy in the forlorn hope of controlling its appetite.

This book would be excellent for post-Civil War southern and African American history courses. Rayner's place in Reconstruction, the westward migration of African American southerners, Populism, Progressivism, disfranchisement, and prohibition offers many opportunities for discussion of issues central to politics in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century South, including fusion, local political organizing, and the varieties of African American resistance to Jim Crow. Although the publisher's omission of footnotes is common in this kind of book, it is not as serious as the lack of a bibliography. Students using books like these frequently start with the bibliography when writing research papers, and the absence of one in this text unfortunately helps promote the tendency of students to turn to the World Wide Web for research material.

BRUCE PALMER
University of Houston-Clear Lake