“This is a book written by two well known opponents of anything to do with confederate history.” Stephen D. Echard
“The authors of this book are all well-known to have a pronounced bias against all things Southern and all things conservative. One cannot expect their book to do anythin else but reflect the biases of the authors.” Michael R. Bradley.
The above quotations are cut and pasted from two ‘one-star’ reviews of Hague’s, Beirich’s, and Sebesta’s collection of essays on the secessionist social and cultural phenomena they refer to as the ‘Neo-Confederacy.’ The above quotations are interesting to me because they presume the exhibition of editorial bias is synonymous with ‘bad book’. This is not true, of course, but I’m somewhat fascinated by how pervasive and common it is to find this sort of sentiment expressed in regards to critical literature and documentary films. I’m curious to know what the permitted perspective is on such subjects according to the authors of these ‘one-star’ reviews. Should all writing be devoid of opinion and just aspire to describe things? Is this attitude reflective of a facebook-style imposition of a ‘like’ function on all things that fosters an expectation that the public expression of opinion should only be oriented towards approving things?
Heidi Beirich is the current director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’sIntelligence Project, which draws a lot of negative attention from the radical right-wing in the United States. Edward H. Sebesta is an independent scholar who runs the Anti-Neo-Confederacy blog and has done research work for the Southern Poverty Law Center in the past. He has also maintained a web archive of a newspaper called The Citizens’ Council (the publication of the Citizen’s Council of Mississippi) and has edited another volume of Neo-Confederate literature. I’m sure that these two editors are the individuals the above reviewers were referring to. Euen Hauge is current chair of the Department of Geography at DePaul University in Chicago, where he specializes in teaching urban and cultural geography. Many of his publications take the points where race intersects with place as their focus.
Anyways... Hague, Beirich, and Sebesta have collected a set of scholarly critiques of various aspects of what they call ‘Neo-Confederacy’, which is the persistent assertion that the Southern United States is home to a distinct social and cultural formation which is incompatible with the rest of modern America. Over the course of 10 essays, this distinct cultural and its ideological supports are investigated by the book’s authors. Seven of the ten essays were written by the editors, so that accounts for the editorial bias of this book, and they seem quite sharp in their critique of the statements issued by ‘Neo-Confederate’ commentators and writers.
Many of the Neo-Confederate quotations used by the authors of this book are explicitly racist, or, for example, call for violence as a means of keeping social order. The authors uncover many tensions amongst Neo-Conservative rhetoric that indicate that the purveyors of a return to the pre-civil war way of living in the American south desire an authoritarian rule for the benefit of white protestant men. More specifically, the authors identify the white, hot-blooded, southern male as the pinnacle of human evolution, and for this specimen to properly express his values, he must be permitted to engage in violence against any offense to his honor. Of course, the authors also identify Neo-Confederate voices that consider the perceived propensity for violence among non-whites as indicators of their inferiority. What they truly call for, then, is a renewed Southern social order where the use of violence is legitimately exercised by white men to keep everyone else “in their place”. This is a small example of the expressions of southern nationalism critiqued by this book’s authors, who discuss a full range of cultural forms and attitudes found in literature (such as the writings of the Southern Agrarians) and music and in small social groups (such as the Sons of Confederate Veterans) to define and affirm a desire to return to the Antebellum south.
The essays combine to form a critical cultural survey of Neo-Confederate forms, from their attitudes towards race, to the literature and music that expresses their ideals. The views that Sebestra, Beirich, Hauge, and company critique fall within the far side of conservatism. Some Neo-Confederate commentators, for example, note that the abolition of slavery was part of an elaborate plot to eradicate Christianity from the south, and furthermore that slavery was sanctioned by the Christian God. The term ‘Neo-Confederacy’ sounds like a name, created by the editors of this book given to a broad range of Southern-nationalist expressions by the editors of this text. If we take this to be a secessionist movement, then it is clearly different from the secessionist movement Thomas H. Naylor leads in Vermont. Naylor suggests that Vermont must seceed because his state is uniquely progressive among the Union. The Neo-Confederates, however, appear to want to leave the Union and leave the modern era behind.
PS: there is a mockumentary film that imagines that the Confederacy won the civil war titled the Confederate States of America viewable in its entirety on youtube:
The basic foundation for the Jim Crow laws that segregated the races in the American South, according to At the Dark End of the Street author Danielle L. McGuire (and a number of her sources), is a fear of sex. In particular the driving fear was of the races mixing, of the pure white blood becoming polluted by impurities from inferiors. This fear was the surging undercurrent to those laws that organized southern society into a racially tiered hierarchy. Riding that current was the fear of the supersexualized black stereotype, the the black man of the white imagination who is driven by a violent lust for white women and the insatiable black woman with little concern for public morality - such representations of the other served as sufficient grounds for maintaining racial segregation and oppression in the American south.
The History of Sexuality, a three volume text by French philosopher and cultural theorist Michel Foucault, describes how sexuality has been historically constituted as a domain and a director of social power. Much of Foucault’s text is focused upon how thinkers of the Classical world discussed sex and its proper conduct with regards to a good life. Foucault’s analysis described examples of how numerous writers of the past constituted the sexual life of the subject as productive of a good citizen and good societies. In other words, sexuality and a socially imposed sexual conduct can be the means by which a population is organized, which is, in a sense, what was at play in the American south under Jim Crow. Danielle L. McGuire’s book, At the Dark End of the Street, describes a weaponized sexuality, where the protection of the chastity of white women became the pretense by which black men were brutalized by whites and the rape of black women by white men was a means of repression against the black population. I’m not sure if sexuality really was the basis for segregation but McGuire’s text has convinced me that it was a means for the establishment and maintenance of power in southern society.
McGuire’s text approaches the history of the Civil Rights Movement from an angle that was previously unexplored in the civil rights literature. At the Dark End of the Street contains numerous accounts of black rape, murder and oppression and the hands of southern whites, and the frequent repetition of the crimes (in a sense) as law officials and the courts let white criminals walk free. Furthermore, the book also contains numerous accounts of black men sentenced to death for crimes against white women when there was often minimal evidence that a crime even occurred. Rosa Parks, frequently portrayed as the mother of the Civil Rights Movement, and is often remembered as a tired woman on a bus who just couldn’t bear to move all the way to the back, was actually an investigator sent to Abbeville, AL. by the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP to shed light on the matter of the rape of Recy Taylor. Taylor was kidnapped and raped by four white men and while she could identify her assailants to police, they lived unpunished for their crime. McGuire asserted the frequency of such occurrences in the south, with rapists often being released after insisting that their victim was a prostitute. Agents of the freedom movement sought to oppose these crimes in court, but before they could proceed they needed an impeccable example of black womanhood, because black women were assumed to be guilty of immorality, of enticing white men in some way.
While rape was a weapon in the arsenal of white repression against black populations, so was the city transportation system. Black bus riders in Montgomery and other southern cities were often forced to stand, even if seats were empty, according to the rules of conduct. Bus drivers were often cruel and verbally abusive to the riders, many of whom were the black women who worked as domestic help in affluent white households, who were forced to pay at the front but board at the middle door. Drivers would sometimes force black passengers to pay at the front, then quickly close the door and drive off before the patron could board. Furthermore, passengers who did not comply were arrested, detained, and frequently subject to sexual abuse administered by the police. The author thus describes a network of oppressive forces made up of the transportation system, white employers, law enforcement, and the courts, all of which are driven by sexual fears whites had of the racialized other.
Rosa Parks became the mother of the freedom movement because she was already an experienced civil rights activist (she was involved in the movement since the 1940s) and her reputation was beyond reproach, not simply because she chose to resist unfair rules of bus ridership. She was far from the first woman to disobey the orders of a bus driver, many others entered that realm ahead of her and it was their testimony of the cruel treatment they received by transportation officials and then police and the courts that prompted her to follow. It was her activist-honed bravery and her impeccable character that made her an icon for a movement that was already gaining in strength. With the momentum gained by Park’s action (supported by countless southern women who were vocal about their experiences) the Civil Rights Movement entered its best known phase, beginning at the end of 1955 with the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
At the Dark End of the Street is not just about Rosa Parks path from the investigation of unpunished rapes of black women by white men to her arrest on a Montgomery bus, although one of the book’s strengths is that it returns the depth to a woman who has largely been reduced in the popular consciousness to an image and a short anecdote. The book adds these dimensions to Parks by contextualizing her work as an investigator, and by contextualizing those cases in a society that is steeped in the politics of sadistic and racialized sexuality. McGuire’s text also recalls how other black activists formed organizations like the Sojourners for Truth and Justice to protect “black womanhood”, and it contains practical reversals of racial stereotypes, describing incident after incident where white men behaved as violent sexual predators of vulnerable black women.
Ultimately, the text describes the movement as a site where individual women could find pride in their race and gender, and attain a sense of personhood in a society that was structured to deny such status. Endesha Ida May Holland, for example, went from working as a prostitute to becoming an SNCC activist, stating that “the movement said I was somebody; I was somebody, they said.” McGuire uses court decisions as markers of progress, as a chapter is devoted to the first trial where white men were given life sentences in the south for the rape of Betty Jean Owens, and the book’s final chapter is about the trial of Joan Little, a woman of poor repute who killed jailer Clarence Alligood in self defense after he threatened her with rape during her detainment. Little was acquitted at trial and McGuire’s book includes a political cartoon at the end of the chapter that features and illustration of Joan Little standing over a knocked-out allegorical figure of ‘Dixie Racism’ in a boxing ring.
At the Dark end of the Street has received a number of accolades since its publication. It has won the 2011 Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians and the 2011 Lillian Smith Book Award from the Southern Regional Council and the University of Georgia Libraries. The book contains a detailed index, detailed endnotes, and a bibliography that is subdivided into publication types. The book also contains many black and white images of the people whose stories populate the text (many of these images also appear on the book website.)
