The crucible of race.

Between 1889 AND 1915, race relations in the South underwent what Joel Williamson calls the Great Changeover. The facts would appear to be approximately as follows: Whites had long tended to perceive blacks alternately as children and vicious animals, as Sambo or savage. The end of Reconstruction in 1876 was followed by a period of paternalism on the part of "conservatives," accompanied by ineffectual protests by "liberals" who thought blacks could work their way into the mainstream of Southern life. Then, abruptly, in 1889, the white South was swept by a wave of fear and rage, and racial "radicals" (not political radicals) went on a rampage that overthrew both conservative and liberal positions. The black was now perceived as having regressed from the modicum of civilization he had acquired under slavery, returning to his natural bestiality and declining in numbers so rapidly that he was expected soon to disappear. Meanwhile there was, or appeared to be, a surge of black criminality and especially of the rape of white women.

The first white response was lynching: In the Southern states in the decade of the 1890s an average of 138 persons a year, three-quarters of them black, were lynched. These were gruesome affairs, attended by huge crowds, and each one seemed to incite greater blood-lust among radicals. (Said rebecca Felton, a firey radical who would later become the frist woman in the U.S. Senate: "If it takes lynching to protect women's dearest possession from drunken, ravening beasts, then I say lynch a thousand a week if necessary.") The next white response was more generalized. In the realm of direct action, lynchings gave way to race riots, in which bands of whites went about randomly slaughtering blacks. In the realm of politics, blacks were systematically disfranchised, deprived of other civil rights, and segregated. The process was completed by the Wilson Administration's segregation of government employment. By 1915 the black was "in his place" to stay until the 1960s, radicalism was dead, and racial conservatives were back in control--serenely confident that blacks, the burdens of citizenship now removed, were contented with their lot.

The question is, how does one account for this quarter-century-long outburst of violence and the accompanying "Great Changeover"? Williamson considers but dismisses the possibility that the radicals might have had some provocation. He points out that there had grown up in cities all over the South a black "street-corner society of pool halls, juke joints, and women. . . in which the hero was too smart to work and too highly sexed to be satisfied by one woman." He also points out that crime rates among blacks were high: In Atlanta, for instance, there were about eighty thousand whites and fifty thousand blacks, yet ten thousand of the seventeen thousand arrests made annually were of blacks. He goes on, however, to use such words as "seeming" and "alleged" to describe black criminality. He ridcules the notion that blacks were physically regressing, though he records that the Prudential Insurance Company found in 1881 that the death rate for blacks was 50 per cent higher than for whites. He belittles the datum as an example of racial prejudice by indicating that the black population continued to increase (he does not tell us, though it is a fact, that the life expectancy of adult blacks in slavery had been higher than that of whites, or that the rate of natural increase of the black population in slavery had been higher than that of whites whereas in freedom the black rate fell to a fraction of that of whites).

The source of the violence, Williamson maintains, lay not in anything blacks were doing but within the twisted hearts and minds of whites. You see, this was the climax of the Victorian Age, a time when white males had "pedestalized" (sic; is that what they mean by the "abominable crime against nature"?) their women and therefore deprived themselves of wholesome sexual outlets. The mythical "black beast rapist was the only man on earth who had sex with Sourthern white women withou inhibition, to the exhaustion of desire, and mirable [sic] dictu, without guilt." Thus black men "had achieved what white men, in the Victorian infatuation, had lost--'no faulth' sex." In other words, white men were "projecting upon black men extravagant sexual behavior because they were, at varying levels, denying ordinary sexual behavior to themselves. . . . Simple death, clearly, was too good" for the blacks, hence the lynch mob.

Such Freudian theorizing is, of course, passe everywhere except in the historical profession. That Williamson's thesis is outmoded may be demonstrated by a fact that he himself supplies: Fewer than a third of the lynchings were for rape, real or alleged. Besides, one wonders, if sexual frustration causes lynching, why were the Boston Brahmins of the period not out in the streets stringing up Irishmen?

The history of race relations is an inherently interesting and important subject, one that is too important to be trivialized by amateur psychoanalysis. On the other hand, it is not, as Williamson would have it, the central feature of Southern and American history, the pivot upon which all else turns. Nor is white America a uniquely "racist" society. Xenophobia--suspicion and distrust of people who are or appear to be different--is common to all of humanity, and indeed in many circumstances it has survival value. We may strive to overcome it, and perhaps the extent to which we do overcome it is a measure of our civility. It does not, however, facilitate our understanding to describe it as racism and to wallow accordingly in guilt.