White Fright

September 15, 2020
A scholarly history of how "the civil rights movement was articulated against a white opposition that was explicitly and thoroughly sexualized." Historian Dailey, who has written extensively on the Jim Crow South, examines the era lasting roughly from Reconstruction until the 1960s, a time in which fears of interracial sex and biracial reproduction were widespread. Interracial marriage was prohibited in the majority of states until 1967, when the Supreme Court declared those restrictions unconstitutional in the landmark case of Loving v. Virginia. The author shows how maintaining "racial purity" became a fixation after the Civil War. "As practiced by those dedicated to the proposition, 'white supremacy' was both a social argument and a political program designed to reestablish white men's social and political dominance after the war and Reconstruction," writes Dailey. She looks at the belief that in order to maintain White supremacy, White women had to comply by not engaging in voluntary sexual relations with Black men and that defending racial purity in the South was the same as defending the South "herself." Dailey also systematically explores cases of lynching, specifically the Scottsboro cases of 1931, which involved the consideration of "the conventional Southern assumption that any sex between a white woman and a black man was ipso facto rape"; how the NAACP made a strategic decision to avoid cases of sex discrimination in favor of launching a vigorous assault on education issues; the treatment of Black soldiers abroad by the American military during the world wars; and various court cases that challenged miscegenation laws--e.g., Perez v. Sharp (1948). Though general readers may occasionally lose their way in the thickets of legal maneuvering, students of the civil rights movement and constitutional law will find plenty of useful information. A methodical journey through significant legal questions involving racism in America.

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November 1, 2020

In this latest work, Dailey (history, Univ. of Chicago; Before Jim Crow) explores the centrality of white fears about interracial sex and marriage in developing and maintaining segregation between the end of Reconstruction and the Supreme Court ruling Loving v. State of Virginia (1967). Jim Crow depended, legally and socially, upon the ability to categorize individuals as either white or nonwhite; people who defied easy racial classification threatened the social and political structures of white supremacy. Therefore, the maintenance of white racial purity was a priority for white Southerners; even whites who thought of themselves as supporters of civil rights during the period would often "only articulate their position on the grounds that sex and marriage between Blacks and whites were off the table." Dailey charts how white terror of interracial sexual intimacy was inextricable from every argument about civil rights, whether overtly offered up as the justification for lynchings, incongruously inserted into heated debates about workplace discrimination, or simmering as subtext in the massive resistance to school desegregation. VERDICT This book makes a compelling argument that white America's fear of interracial procreation was a driving concern in the creation and maintenance of segregation throughout the Jim Crow era; a thought-provoking read.--Anna J. Clutterbuck-Cook, Massachusetts Historical Soc., Boston

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