Racism - A Short History - George M Fredrickson.pdf - WNLibrary

did things to African Americans that few, if any, imperial
powers would have allowed their white settlers to do to
“the natives” once they were subjugated. Not only were
Jim Crow laws passed governing even the most trivial forms
of social contact, but also black males were deprived of the
suffrage rights that many of them had once possessed, and
an epidemic of sadistic lynching parties and one-sided “race
riots” swept the South. 19
Relatively liberal or progressive white supremacists—
those who believed that blacks were improving rather than
retrogressing and could make a contribution to the modernization
of the South—were troubled by the violence and
disorder. After the horrendous Atlanta riot of 1906, they
used their influence on behalf of a racial separation that
might provide blacks some opportunity to “develop along
their own lines.” Black education, while remaining vastly
inferior to that provided for whites, survived a demagogic
threat to its very existence. By the time of the First World
War, the dominant discourse about blacks in the white
South was shifting from one expressing utter contempt and
even genocidal hatred to one characterized more often by
paternalism and condescending benevolence. By this time,
of course, blacks had been removed from the electorate,
and the Jim Crow system was not only fully established
but relatively immune to challenge from outside the South.
Hence an analogy with the imperialism of guardianship and
the “white man’s burden” became more plausible, especially
at a time when the nation had acquired colonies of its
own. 20 America’s mode of white supremacy, unlike South
Africa’s, originated primarily in the slave trade with Africa
rather than in the colonization of that continent. But it
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