| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

A Rift in the Clouds: Race and the Southern Federal Judiciary, 1900–1910. By Brent J. Aucoin. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2007. xii, 169 pp. $34.95, ISBN 978-1-55728-849-3.)
Too often, southern federal judges around the turn of the twentieth century are portrayed as unified in their commitment to the defense of southern white supremacy and to the destruction of the civil rights of African Americans via their legal interpretation of the post–Civil War amendments to the Constitution. Brent J. Aucoin reminds us that this conventional thinking is not in line with the reality of events. In this thin volume, he focuses specifically on the work of three federal judges who bucked the trend: Judge Jacob Trieber of Arkansas, Judge Emory Speer of Georgia, and Judge Thomas Goode Jones of Alabama.	1
In examining the work of those judges, Aucoin seeks to tell us why they were different, why they "cut against the grain of racial and legal thinking in their day" (p. 13). The short answer is that Trieber, Speer, and Jones were adherents of the "New South Creed," a "belief that the postbellum South could experience peace and propriety by following the northern model of economic and agricultural diversification" (p. 14). To be sure, this creed did not make these judges believers in the social equality of African Americans. Rather, they advanced a "paternalistic racial ideology," perhaps best summed up by a line from Judge Jones's statement at the 1901 Alabama constitutional convention: "If we do not lift them up, they will drag us down" (pp. 14, 85).	. . .

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