In Black America; Making Whiteness with Grace Elizabeth Hale

A From the Longhorn Radio Network, the University of Texas at Austin, this is in Black America. Why should we care about the history of race relations in America? Well, I think that history gives us a way to understand our current problems and gives

us a way to see our way out of them. I think being a historian and having a historical sense makes people both more optimistic even as they're pessimistic because over the course of the history of humankind we have solved a lot of difficult dilemmas. And I think the long historical view gives us a sense of how we came to this impact, how this particular racial situation that we have now was created. And in particular, as a scholar, I'm interested in white people's understanding of their own role in that. And their need to see the racial problem is something that is inside them as well, and not just something that other people should fix, or it's somebody else's problem, but that they have to figure out a way not to have this privilege anymore. To live in an American democracy that's not founded on a kind of white racial privilege.

Grace Elizabeth Hale, Assistant Professor of American History, the University of Virginia, an author of the book Making Whiteness, the Culture of Segregation in the South, 1830 to 1940, published by Pantheon Books. And this groundbreaking look at Whiteness as a contemporary American racial identity that has its origin in the entouched and alive segregation of the post-Civil War South. The book examines the roots of American racial mythology and ideology. According to Hale, the role of the South is essential in examining our collective racial identities. The South has been to use the language of our racial orderings, the darkness that has made the American nation lose its color. I'm John L. Hanson Jr. and welcome to another edition of In Black America. On this week's program, Making Whiteness with author Grace Elizabeth Hale in Black America. I think that white Americans think they have to have it, they certainly don't have to have it, but it's I think very terrifying for them, first of all, to take that very

first step and recognize that they have that kind of privilege, that they have that racial privilege to recognize that they have a racial identity, because most white Americans see race as something that black people have or Hispanic people have, see race as something they have. So I think even to take that first step is terrifying, is terrifying for white Americans. In the past, they reserved all the best jobs for white men. So we didn't have a meritocracy then at all, and that affirmative action is very much about trying to broaden a system that's already racially defined. I mean, the world, if you see whiteness as a race, you can see then that the world already was racially defined. And this is something that the vast majority of African Americans know, but white Americans don't know this. In her book, Hale convincingly argues that in the wake of reconstruction and the active citizenship of their slaves, white southerners chose to establish their identity through a cultural system of violence and physical separation based on skin color.

This culture of segregation created by a modern notion of whiteness that was eventually taken up by the rest of the nation and continues to shape and disfigure American society in unacknowledged ways. By showing the very recent historical making of contemporary American whiteness and by examining her segregation in all his murderous contradiction was lived, Hale makes it possible to imagine a future outside of it. Recently in black America spoke with grace a little bit with Hale. I did think about it a lot because as I said, I grew up in suburban Atlanta and it was after desegregation and as I said, I went to integrated schools. I actually went to what had been the colored elementary school in the part of Atlanta that I grew up in and it was a very integrated environment. And yet I sort of, even as a child, believed that my, many of my white teachers and some of my relatives and even my parents didn't always believe this rhetoric of racial equality that was, by that point in time, the sort of public rhetoric getting at school.

And certainly again, we didn't live in a world, I didn't grow up in a world where the kind of segregation of movie theaters and segregation of restaurants, all that had been ended. And this disjuncture was really heightened for me because my relatives all lived in Southern Mississippi. And so every summer we would troop from Atlanta back to rural Southern Mississippi, which was at that time still undergoing the civil rights movement. I remember the desegregation of the schools in the county there that my relatives lived in in the early 70s. And of course as a child, I felt like we were just vastly superior in Atlanta, right? And that they were so backward over there in Mississippi. The older I got, the more I realized that that was too simplistic a way to look at it. And I began to be, to sort of try to figure out why it was that race was so important to my white family, you know, to the family. Why were they so obsessed with these issues that seemed not to be a part of the life that

I was having? Tell us about your grandfather. Well, my grandfather was the sheriff of Jeff Davis County, Mississippi, Jefferson Davis County, of course, a very perfect county name actually for this kind of a story. He was the sheriff at various times in the post-World War II period, in the immediate post-World World War II period, 46, 47, 48, and then he was sheriff again actually in the late 60s early 70s that I remember. But I grew up with a story, you know, much like a kind of Tequila Mockingbird story of this grandfather. His name was Guy Berry, stopping a lynching there in that town in 1947, actually standing up all night at the door to the jail with a shotgun and telling everybody that he was going to hate to have to shoot him since he'd known him all his life, but they weren't going

to take this man out of his jail. There was an African-American man, a young man named Versi Johnson, who had been accused of raping a white farm woman, and everybody, all the white people in the town were convinced in the ways that white southerners thought at the time that this person was guilty. And the story, the way my family told it, was one of my grandfather as less racist, as performing his duty as believing that justice should be colorblind, that this man should have a chance to have a trial. As I began to investigate this as a professional historian, this is not a part of my book, but just as my work as a professional historian expanded, I wanted to go back and revisit this story through the archives, and I looked up a local newspaper accounts and collected as much information as I could find about it. It became very apparent to me that there was a lot more going on here.

That in fact, Versi Johnson's family would have a very different story to tell about this incident, because what in fact happened was the next day my grandfather went home to rest in the family story, and the deputy, his deputy, and my grandfather's dead, so I have no way of knowing whether he ordered this man to do this or not, actually took Versi Johnson out to the scene of the crime, and again, I know from my professional work as a historian, this is again a very common way, a white set of dealing with these things, and supposedly at that point, out in the country, Versi Johnson tried to escape, and this deputy, Spencer Puckett, shot him, so this from the vantage point of the full historical picture, becomes not so much a tale of colorblind justice and the heroism of my grandfather, but in many ways, a much more complicated story and a story, a lynching was prevented in one sense, a public lynching in the town, but what are we to call this shooting?

In many ways, it is a lynching in and of itself. The fact that the county paid for the funeral of Versi Johnson while admitting no wrong doing, and Sir Puckett was let off any charges of having killed Versi Johnson seems to suggest to me that the county felt responsible. They certainly weren't magnanimous enough to pay for most African-Americans' funeral at that time. When you're teaching American history on a collegiate level, is the study of the history of this country more inclusive today than when it was when it was taught to you? I think so, and I think that it's come in large part because the history profession has begun to be more inclusive. There are many more people working as professional historians from a greater variety of backgrounds. There are many more African-Americans actually working as historians, as professional historians. There are many more people of all different ethnic and racial backgrounds, many more women

working as historians, and these people certainly bring their various perspectives to the profession of history, and I think, and I don't want to paint a perfect picture. There's a lot of work to be done, but I think it is more inclusive and we're moving in a better direction. As recent fights over the history standards, which people may or may not have heard about really indicate where conservatives were really trying to squelch this move into more inclusive history and arguing that that wasn't true history that we needed to get back to the founding fathers. I think that they're being so upset about this, is evidence of the fact that some progress has been made. When did you come to the point that you needed to contribute to this larger dialogue concerning race in this country and writing the book Making Whiteness? As I suggested before, I grew up with these disjunctures growing up in an integrated world, but absolutely being surrounded by people who were shaped by a segregated world, is disjuncture between the kind of suburban Atlanta desire to be a part of the future of

the country and going to Mississippi and seeing a very different place there. I think this is something that as I did my work, I found out was common for many black and white Southern children throughout the 20th century, is that children don't understand race at some level. They have to be taught it and trying to figure out what race meant as a child really became my intellectual obsession as an adult. Trying to figure out why white Southerners who I had grown up with, who I thought to be seemingly good people, could have created such an unjust system and believed that it was okay. Then gotten up every day and gone to church on Sundays and yet created this separate and incredibly unequal system and believed so strongly that it was just, that it was right. I wanted to figure that out as a scholar. What did you figure out?

You started in the 1920s, why was that the beginning point? Well, I started in the 1890s, actually. I started there because it seemed to me to be the point in time in which what I like to call modern white racial identity was created and I can just back up a second. Any construction is a very special time in American history. It is in many ways unique with the federal troops in the south enforcing the rights of the newly freed people. When race construction is over, there is somewhat of a low in the 1880s as white Southerners are trying to figure out what kind of system to create and how to create a system that will both be acceptable to the country at large and will not bring back the northern troops, but will at the same time create their privileges again, recreate their privileges, their racial privileges.

It seemed to me that this period, the late 19th century, is really the moment when modern American racial relations are born because white Southerners are beginning to try to put together a system that will work in a modernizing economy. The southern economy is changing rapidly. People are beginning to move to towns and cities. They are not living so much in the country anymore. They are trying to put together a system that will work in that kind of a changing world. It is also the point at which white Southerners begin to create the segregated system. During the civil rights movement, we hear all this rhetoric about white Southerners are saying, oh, the Southern way of life, the Southern tradition, as if this way of life has some old, honored past. In actuality, it is only about 50 years old, even at the point of the civil rights movement. The point at which segregation laws are put into effect and segregation conventions are become very much a part of the culture is the late 19th century.

The epidemic of lynchings, late 19th century. So it seemed the key starting point. Why did they feel it was necessary for them to and their meaning, meaning, southerners to develop a system that basically gave them autonomy over a different race? Why did they feel it was necessary for them to be that superior? That's a good question. And that's the question that I definitely began to study with and grapple and trying to grapple with. I think. Was it fear or losing some type of control or what? I think very much it was about fear. The thing that's so amazing about race relations in this country is that these whites in the late 19th and early 20th century are talking about how it's natural for the race to be separated and that the races are different and that nature has created this different hierarchy. So if it was so natural, why did they have to do anything?

If it was natural, they could have just sat back and waited for it to happen. If it was inherent in nature, then they wouldn't have had to do all the work that they had to do. Path laws, participate in these violent lynching spectacles. So I think it's very much about fear and I think it's very much about the fear that racial difference doesn't really exist in the way they think it exists. And I say that because the thing that seems to frighten white southerners the most in the late 19th century are those African Americans who despite all the oppression have managed to rise, have managed to become educated, middle class people. And those are the people who are most often attacked and they're written about in the newspapers and they're not very many statistically of them but hey, they embody the fear that white southerners have that maybe blacks and whites really just aren't that different. Maybe this whole history of our enslavement of them was wrong, maybe they're not that

different. I think very much it's about fear and it's about greed certainly in a desire for power and material advantages. But I think deep down inside psychologically it's very much about fear. And researching the book that you speak with old southerners or were there other literature that went to the heart of the matter that you were trying to ascertain. Well I did some oral history interviews but the problem with that kind of work and the post civil rights era is like nobody will admit they voted for Reagan, nobody will admit that they were ever racist. The whites will and many, many African Americans say they were part of the civil rights movement and then you hear people like Andrew Young interviewed and they talk about or Ann Moody's book on the civil rights movement and they talk about how it was only at the time in the early 60s a small group of people who were activists.

So everybody has changed their memory to fit the verdict of history. Everybody was on the right side looking back and particularly white southerners are very reticent and very they won't really talk about where they were at that time in terms of their attitudes and their positions. How did you go about dividing the books up into the different chapters? How did I go about? Can I say one thing more? Go ahead. Before moving on. Because I think the best sources for the book were African American intellectuals. People like W.E.B. Du Bois, I mean he had been thinking about what whiteness was, what whiteness was and what particularly southern whiteness is about since the late 19th century. So he was really a key figure for me in trying to do this thinking. People like Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, many, many African American intellectuals and thinkers have thought about this question and I really started with their work and then went back and tried to fill in the history.

They hadn't approached it as a story and they'd approached it as people trying to live in this world with this white privilege but that was the place I started. I'm sorry. Now I could. What was the question that you wanted to have? How did you go about dividing the book into the different chapters? Well, it seemed to me that there were certain stories that circulated throughout the period that I was looking at the late 19th through the mid 20th century that white southerners told themselves about their world in order to justify that world in order to make it seem reasonable in order to make it seem right and that in large part helped me to divide up the chapters. The story that we probably would think of first would be white southerners' accounts of the war. You know, we're all familiar with Golly the Wind which is a good example of this but so I started with a chapter on how white southerners in many ways reconfigured that history.

I mean, it's not history in the sense of what really happened but they turned the Civil War into this myth society and particularly they turned it into a myth of a world in which race relations were harmonious and wonderful and certainly that was not the perspective of the slaves who lived through the antebellum of southern era, certainly not the perspective of white southerners at the time if you read their diaries, they're not talking about harmony, they're talking about conflict and their diaries. So that was the first chapter and the second revolved around the story of the Mammie which is a story that still has a lot of resonance in our society today, we still have Antrimima after all. And that story I think really circulated as a story that helped white southerners to say, look, we're not personally racist. I mean, the number of white southerners in the autobiographies who say, hey, I love black people, I had a Mammie. I mean, it's just, it's absolutely a repeating trope, you know, you begin to wonder if everybody's copying each other in memoirs because you hear that same story so many times.

So I wanted to look at that. The third area I looked at was the area of consumer culture, the growing world of, you know, stores, shopping districts and movie theaters, restaurants, that world because so many white and black southerners talked about really having to experience segregation in that space. You know, classic story would be Ann Moody's account of not really knowing that she was black until she went to the segregated movie theater for the first time and was forced to sit in the back of the balcony. So that seemed to be an important place in which white by sort of creating these rituals of inferiority and of, of, of deference and making black people go through these humiliating circumstance, we're creating their racial privilege. And then the chapter on lynching, which is really where I started the whole project with that family story, with a desire to understand how people could do such horrible things,

how people could think of themselves as good, in many cases, Christian people and participate in such unheard of violence. Was it, and I won't stop you there, was it a message in which they were trying to send to blacks at that time? Yeah, yeah, I think so. I think that, you know, one of the things about segregation was that even as it was grossly unjust, it did, at least theoretically, imply that certain parts of the world were black parts of that world. And that in and of itself could have been a certain ground of autonomy for black people. And it was to the degree that they were able to create community and, and empower themselves through creating their churches and, and colleges and their own institutions. I think lynching was very much about saying, you're not safe anywhere, you know, that those black spaces aren't autonomous, that we can invade them, we, as in white southerners,

invade them at will and get away with it. And I think that's really the larger message of lynching, the spectacle of lynching, the lynchings that occurred in front of vast crowds of people, almost a carnival-like atmosphere. And then, of course, newspapers and later radio circulated those stories and photographs of these victims appeared in newspapers. And so even for people who didn't go to the actual event, news of it spread all across the region. And that became a way of saying to African Americans, don't think that you have your own place in this world, even, even if it is an unequal place, you know, you, you are not safe anywhere. Three lynchings you chronicle, why those particular three individuals. Well, lynching is a, is a very complicated practice. I mean, it varies from the kinds of incidents where, say, one or two white men would take an African American, man or woman, and mostly men, but there were a significant number of

women who were victims of lynchings too, into the woods or into an isolated area and shoot them or hang them in a very isolated way. That is, that is the most common kind of lynching, but the kind of lynching that most people knew about or heard about, or even perhaps witnessed in person, were these lynchings that were turned into very large spectacles. And I focused on those because it seemed to me that in the, in the project of creating and maintaining this segregated world and a certain kind of white Southern privilege that those spectacles were, were the key lynchings, not the individual cases where maybe a black man is murdered because the white man wants his farm. Certainly that is very important, but it does not translate into a very public message to all African Americans across the region. So I picked the sort of three most notorious incidents of the era, and also they were incidents that the NAACP had been able to investigate in depth.

And so there was a huge amount of information about those, not the hose lynching because that happened before the NAACP was founded. But the other two lynchings, the NAACP, sent white investigators undercover to investigate them and they actually got, you know, eyewitness accounts and they got a lot of information on this particular case. So that helped me make my decision as well. Why did Stone Mountain receive his own chapter? That chapter is really as much about Margaret Mitchell, the writer, the wind, and another less well-known white Southern woman named Lillian Smith, who was actually the first white Southerner to speak out publicly against segregation and to say that it was immoral and wrong and had to be abolished and was, of course, attacked by many other white Southern liberals for having said that. But it's about those two women as much as it is about Stone Mountain, but Stone Mountain seemed to me a symbol of the white Southern struggle to create segregation because they

sort of worked on building this monument across the history of early 20th century and the fact that it wasn't finished until after Brown v. Board of Education. And it was only at that moment that the state of Georgia agreed to put public money into the project, seemed to me both sort of a metaphor of the whole process and also a very important story within it. It's also, I think, very interesting that the national government got behind Stone Mountain in the 1920s, which just gives us a sense of how much white Americans across the country were in support of a segregated world at that time, willing to put, you know, national tax dollars into creating this monument. And now Stone Mountain has an African American mayor and is almost 50 percent African Americans. You know, there's something wonderful about the way history turns out. And also the other thing is they have a laser show at Stone Mountain now and they actually

draw Martin Luther King's picture over the mountain and the mountain, of course, has Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis, and Robert E. Lee carved into it. And that seems a nice, nice fitting ending as well that Martin Luther King is drawn right over that mountain. And they have this laser show, as I said, and they play part of his, I had a dream speech. But again, they don't erase the mountains, so I'm not sure how much progress has been made. Do you find some of the same mindset today in 20th century America that was back in the 18th and 1900s? Yeah. I do. You know, I think that the problem is that is that white identity is white racial identity is as much about a kind of psychological privilege as it is about a material world. Is it something that is necessary that the white America just has to have?

Well, I think that white Americans think they have to have it. They certainly don't have to have it, but it's I think very terrifying for them, first of all, to take that very first step and recognize that they have that kind of privilege. Grace, Elizabeth Hale, author of the book, Making Whiteness, The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1830 to 1940, published by Pantheon Books. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions asked your future in Black America programs write us, also let us know what radio station you heard us over. The views and opinions expressed on this program are not necessarily those of this station or of the University of Texas at Austin. Until we have the opportunity again for IBA technical producer David Alvarez, I'm John Io Hansen, Jr. Thank you for joining us today, and please join us again next week. Cassette copies of this program are available and may be purchased by writing in Black America cassettes, Communication Building B, UT Austin, Austin, Texas, 78712.

That's in Black America cassettes, Communication Building B, UT Austin, Austin, Texas, 78712. From the University of Texas at Austin, this is the Longhorn Radio Network. I'm John Io Hansen, Jr. Join me this week on in Black America. Because most white Americans see race as something that black people have or Hispanic people have, see race as something they have. So I think even to take that first step is terrifying. Making whiteness to cultural segregation in the South, 1830 to 1940 with grace a little of the pale this week on in Black America.