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Book Reviews
Visions of Racial Destiny: Reexamining African American Life in the New South
| MITCHELL, MICHELLE. Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. xxii + 388 pp. $59.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8078-2902-1; $22.50 (paper), ISBN 0-8078-5567-7.
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| GODSHALK, DAVID FORT. Veiled Visions: The 1906 Atlanta Race Riot and the Reshaping of American Race Relations. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. xvi + 365 pp. Introduction, illustrations, notes. $59.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8078-2962-5; $22.50 (paper), ISBN 0-8078-5626-6.
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W. E. B. Du Bois's invocation of the Veil, a transparent barrier between the white and African American worlds, is one of the most enduring symbols in African American literature. For Du Bois it represented the separate but mutually dependent worlds of white and black Americans as well as the unique vision of African Americans whose oppressed condition afforded them a "second-sight" or understanding about the complexities of American racial politics. Racial Destiny, the political, social, economic, and racial trajectory of African American life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the central idea in both books under discussion here, also has a veiled history. African American racial destiny is inevitably bound up with the evolution of Jim Crow. Beginning with C. Vann Woodward's Strange Career of Jim Crow, scholars have largely agreed with Woodward's thesis of Jim Crow as an evolutionary construct rather than an immediate imposition. Its codification in the law occurred concurrently with closure of the public sphere for African Americans marked by the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896. In framing the rise of an impenetrable veil between the races, the scholarly literature presented the advent of Jim Crow as a series of institutional decisions and deployments and placed less emphasis on the role of individuals or their reactions, strategies, or engagements with the shifting realities of the period. In the few cases where individual lives were examined, they tended to be those of race leaders such as Booker T. Washington or W. E. B. Du Bois. The outpouring of work on African American women's activism in suffrage and club movements, education, and social welfare as chronicled by Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, Cynthia Neverdon-Morton, Darlene Clark Hine, Jacqueline Rouse, Glenda Gilmore, and Stephanie Shaw has complicated one-dimensional notions of racial destiny and black life behind the Veil.1 |
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David Godshalk's Veiled Visions and Michelle Mitchell's Righteous Propagation are two excellent additions to the literature that continue a tradition of complicating established ideas regarding racial destiny in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Building on the work mentioned above they transcend simplistic binaries that inform African American history such as accommodation versus nationalism and separatism versus interracial cooperation. These simplistic constructs are replaced with presentations that reveal African American life as a complex theoretical as well as interpretative engagement with both interracial and intraracial realities. Both books also build on recent work in studies of masculinity, women studies, urban history, psychological and economic motivations underlying race riots, and memory to construct a vision of a city and a nation trying to reconcile a progressive historical moment with the not-too-distant past of slavery and racial subordination.2 |
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