328 pages / 6.00 x 9.00 inches / 8 maps
History / United States - 19th Century | History / United States - Southern History | History / African American
Carl V. Harris’s Segregation in the New South, completed and edited by W. Elliot Brownlee, explores the rise of racial exclusion in late nineteenth-century Birmingham, Alabama. In the 1870s, African Americans in this crucial southern industrial city were eager to exploit the disarray of slavery’s old racial lines, assert their new autonomy, and advance toward full equality. However, most southern whites worked to restore the restrictive racial lines of the antebellum South or invent new ones that would guarantee the subordination of Black residents. From Birmingham’s founding in 1871, color lines divided the city, and as its people strove to erase the lines or fortify them, they shaped their futures in fateful ways.
Social segregation is at the center of Harris’s history. He shows that from the beginning of Reconstruction southern whites engaged in a comprehensive program of assigning social dishonor to African Americans—the same kind of dishonor that whites of the Old South had imposed on Black people while enslaving them. In the process, southern whites engaged in constructing the meaning of race in the New South.
Carl V. Harris was professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is the author of Political Power in Birmingham, 1871–1921.
W. Elliot Brownlee is professor emeritus of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the author of Federal Taxation in America: A History.
“In this thorough and thoughtful study, Harris reaches beyond the usual scholarship to delve into the interplay of emotional factors and the creation of a caste society.”—Orville Vernon Burton, author of The Age of Lincoln: A History and coauthor of Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court
“Harris’s reconstruction of the tactics of Birmingham’s Black political leaders to resist white supremacy is remarkable, and his analyses of the discrimination in education and housing are careful, impressive, and original.”—Henry M. McKiven Jr., author of Iron and Steel: Class, Race, and Community in Birmingham, Alabama, 1875–1920
“Harris’s study, based on extraordinarily careful and impressive research, reveals in rich detail the structures of white supremacy in late nineteenth-century Birmingham.”—J. Mills Thornton III, author of Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma
“Harris walks the reader not just down Birmingham’s streets, but even through its sewer system, to demonstrate the city’s layers of segregation.”—Robert C. Kenzer, author of Enterprising Southerners: Black Economic Success in North Carolina, 1865–1915
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