Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow |
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Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow
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by Neil R. McMillen
Sales Rank: 535211
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List Price: $24.00
$5.04
At Amazon
on 6-20-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Paperback with 464 pages
Published by: University of Illinois Press September 1, 1990
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 025206156X
ISBN 13 Number: 978-0252061561
Book Dimensions:
9 x 6 x 1 inches
Weighs: 1.3 pounds
From Library Journal
McMillen's sequel of sorts to Vernon Lane Wharton's classic The Negro in Mississippi , 1865-1890 (1947; Greenwood, 1984. reprint) describes the origins, development, and enforcement of the color-caste system in perhaps the most race-haunted state--Mississippi--where nearly one in ten black Americans lived in 1890. He lays bare the raw and ugly lynchings and the coarse legal inequities that formed the sinews of white supremacy between 1890 and 1940. He seeks also to show blacks' view of Jim Crow and to describe it in their words. He is best at capturing the structure of race relations and at presaging the milieu of civil rights change. His state study complements Herbert Shapiro's White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery (LJ 2/1/88). For Afro-American, local, Southern, and race relations collections.
- Thomas J. Davis, African American Studies, SUNY at Buffalo
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Reader Reviews
Neil McMillen gives us a look at the real effects of Jim Crow in Dark Journey, the story of white supremacy in Mississippi in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. McMillen explores this society of racial apartheid from the vantage point of the oppressor and the oppressed, for as he states in his preface, "until historians adequately explored the exterior forces that operated on the black community there could be no truly adequate histories of the interior life of the people within that community." He includes many descriptions of Mississippi during this "race-haunted" time from blacks themselves, which adds significantly to the texture of McMillen's "bottom up" depiction of how truly repressive the white regime was. What quickly emerges from this straightforward study is a society dominated without question by whites, one in which whites sought to re-establish race relations as they existed prior to the Civil War. They largely succeeded. What strikes the reader forcefully from the beginning of McMillen's book is how insidiously prevalent the system known as Jim Crow was in Mississippi, and how it affected every aspect of black life. Jim Crow did not mean that blacks were simply in effect denied the right to vote and had limited economic opportunities, though to be sure both of these hurdles existed. White supremacy, as McMillen deftly points out, meant far more than denied voting rights and low-rung jobs. It meant (either de facto or de jury) poor or no high schools, lynchings, outrageous jury verdicts and trials, harassment for succeeding in traditionally white professions, no libraries, etc. The sheer scope and overriding predominance of white supremacy in Mississippi is shocking, especially since whites really did not seek to hide it from prying Northerners. White supremacy transcended class lines for the most part, McMillen show us, and even acted as a greater force upon whites than economic self-interest. For example, every white owner of a store, restaurant, garage, theatre, etc., who refused to serve blacks was also losing the money blacks would have paid them. McMillen concludes that from the 1890s to the middle of the 20th century very few blacks overcame the high political and economic barriers placed in their way by a Mississippi society bent on oppressing them. Blacks in that state, however, managed to create and maintain their own separate political, religious, educational and social institutions despite the odds against them. Those who could, moved away from Mississippi, much like the oppressed and degraded Irish left their native island to escape the shackles of British economic and sectarian control. Truly, Mississippi's society was born of hatred of blacks by whites, a situation not totally eradicated by the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.
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Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow
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