| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South. By William P. Jones. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005. xvi, 235 pp. Cloth, $45.00, ISBN 0-252-02979-8. Paper, $20.00, ISBN 0-252-07229-4.)

This book by William P. Jones revises the popular notion that rural southern blacks were "essentially incompatible with modernity" (p. 2), first advanced by the sociologist Howard Odum. In a trilogy of novels published from 1928 to 1931, Odum introduced "Black Ulysses," a character who serves as a trope for alienated working-class blacks forced to sever their ties with land and family to search for wage labor in the new industrial South. Black Ulysses symbolized how racial oppression had resulted in loose morals, broken homes, and family disorganization. Odum's Black Ulysses novels "established the alienated working-class black man" in American discourse (p. 3) and have influenced studies of the black family since then, most notably in the work of E. Franklin Frazier, Nathan Glazer, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

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