| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Rural Face of White Supremacy: Beyond Jim Crow. By Mark Schultz. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005. xviii, 305 pp. $42.00, ISBN 0-252-02960-7.)

It took Mark Schultz sixteen years to document the complex personal relationships between white and black inhabitants of rural Hancock County, Georgia. He recorded more than 180 oral interviews with residents who represented a cross-section of the race, class, educational, and occupational variables in the county. Their memories prompted him to rethink southern history and to claim that "segregation is simply an inadequate model to understand race relations" (p. 7). Schultz found that, until World War II, rural whites in Hancock County constructed their supremacy on a foundation of selective intimacy with blacks, an intimacy based in "ritualized deference and highly personalized violence" (ibid.). Rural whites used oppressive personal relationships more than legalized segregation to limit rural blacks' opportunities. Thus, "in the rural South, physical segregation was not an important agent and symbol of white supremacy, as it obviously was in the urban South" (p. 128). Three factors combined to create rural white supremacy: a racialized way of life instituted through traditional labor systems that forced laborers, regardless of their race, to share space; localized and personal relations that endured across generations; and collective experiences gained through community, church, and shared class status.

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