TY - JOUR
AU - Ardizzone,, Heidi
AB - The opening vignette of The Uplift Generation: Cooperation across the Color Line in Early Twentieth-Century Virginia describes a small group of white women in Virginia who decided to be present at polls in black neighborhoods during the first post–Nineteenth Amendment election. Their goal was to head off white violence or other forms of interference as black women cast votes for the first time. This event, for Brooks, illustrates a “long tradition of interracial activism in Virginia.” Even so, she cautions, this pattern of white support was not evidence of an early civil rights campaign but a product of paternalism and racism. “Instead of threatening segregation,” she notes, “these cross-racial efforts helped build and reinforce” Jim Crow systems (2). The 1920 election bifurcates the two-decade span of Brooks’s study, which traces individual, institutional, and policy approaches to cross-racial organizing. Her emphasis on interracial cooperation efforts highlights the connections of many black community leaders with whites, and the efforts of some white community leaders to include selected black voices in their programs. Brooks is clear that, at best, these white leaders were motivated by a “polite” form of racism. From the white perspective, interracial cooperation was inherently paternalistic and a legacy of both slavery and the Lost Cause resurrection of selective ideological renderings of antebellum southern politics and social mores. While Brooks’s study is focused exclusively on Virginia, she claims that the pattern of paternalistic interracialism could be found in variations throughout the South. Still, Virginians had a unique sense of themselves as a model among the states; an “aristocratic mother” of the nation, boasting racial harmony (10). These Virginians, of course, were whites. Over seven chapters, Brooks traces what she argues is the success of interracial efforts at reform to avoid the extremes of racist violence used in other states to enforce the secondary status of African Americans under the new system of segregation. Early chapters look at the roots of white reformers’ approaches in their understandings of their history of enslavement and a paternalistic white supremacy, and the development of segregation as a legal apparatus. Central chapters focus on points of cooperation in welfare and health reforms, women’s issues, and war support. By chapter 6, what successes of interracial cooperation that might be claimed are falling apart, as segregation solidified despite black activism against it. Her conclusion reveals the fragility of those cross-racial networks as Virginia sets itself forward as a model for the nation in its attempts to maintain whiteness as a “pure” and privileged category of socioeconomic status and political power. Indeed, Virginia sent representatives on nationwide campaigns to tout its new imposition of one-drop racialism and its policies of racial eugenics. One of the strengths of The Uplift Generation is that it brings to life several leading figures in Virginian politics. Brooks tells her subjects’ stories carefully, clearly invested in considering the complexities of individual biographies and motivations. Some familiar names are here, like Maggie Lena Walker, whose work with the Independent Order of St. Luke has been analyzed by Elsa Barkley Brown and others, and John Mitchell Jr., editor of the Richmond Planet. But Brooks provides dozens of stories. There is Thomas C. Walker, who manipulated white former Confederate leaders into giving him the resources he needed to get an education and a law degree (73–74). Ora B. Stokes, who organized a temperance society at age twelve as just the first of many community organizations she helped found and lead, became one of Richmond’s first black probation officers in 1918, working with black female parolees (100–103). Janie Porter Barrett, who founded the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls with substantial support from white donations and an interracial board of trustees, has an almost liminal status. Barrett grew up living in a wealthy white household as the daughter of the home’s housekeeper, and Brooks notes that Barrett’s experiences of being raised “as a pampered child among the family’s white offspring” gave her both a distinctive ability to represent respectability among whites and a comfort with those interracial networks that much of her work relied on (108–110). Another high point for both the book’s thesis and the interracial movement comes in the chapter that focuses on public health issues. As part of the Progressive movement bringing reform issues to government, activists looking for improved health conditions, sanitation, and medical care found new opportunities in state-supported organizations. In trying to distinguish her work from previous studies of African Americans in early twentieth-century Virginia, Brooks overstates the synchronicity of black and white interests. She counters Elsa Barkley Brown’s analysis of Maggie Lena Walker and her peers as womanist by claiming that black and white women’s motivations in social reform had “more parallels than differences” (103). In countering Earl Lewis’s claim that African Americans in Norfolk, Virginia, were not taken in by “polite racism,” she provides examples of public statements in black newspapers praising white Virginia leaders and individuals. At the same time, Uplift Generation offers significant evidence to demonstrate the distinction between carefully crafted public representation and internal strategies and worldviews. When black activists made statements praising the white peers they were working with, or when they entered into “cooperative” efforts with whites, should historians understand those statements and actions as a strategy or as an internal motivation? Ultimately, Brooks does not provide convincing evidence for her claims that other scholars have overstated or misstated the extent to which black activists had not just nonparallel but often oppositional motivations from those of their white would-be allies. In taking on the work of a generation of historians who pioneered methodologies and analytics that centered African American experience and perspectives, Brooks works against herself. Many of her research questions and methods, after all, are in part the result of this school. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Clayton McClure Brooks. The Uplift Generation: Cooperation across the Color Line in Early Twentieth-Century Virginia.
JF - The American Historical Review
DO - 10.1093/ahr/rhz100
DA - 2019-04-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/clayton-mcclure-brooks-the-uplift-generation-cooperation-across-the-rSd0rBJaXO
SP - 677
VL - 124
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -