>I am no US history expert, but methinks that situation in the South looked
>a bit more complex. There was a brief period after the Civil War in which
>the poor whites and newly freed slaves were finding common political
>interests and a common ways to pursue those interests - to which the ruling
>classes responded by playing the "race card" in their all too common
>"divide and rule" strategy. Can anyone more familar with the US history
>correct that or supply more details (Michael Hoover?).
Perhaps the most well known work that posits a period of fluidity in race relations before the racial reaction of the numerous lynchings and establishment of Jim Crow laws of the 1890s is Vann Woodward's The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Called by King "the historical Bible of the civil rights movement," it argues "first that racial segregation in the South in the rigid and universal form it had taken by 1954 did not appear with the end of slavery, but toward the end of the century and later; and second, that before it appeared in this form there occurred an era of experimentation and variety in race relations of the South in which segregation was not the inevitable rule."
White and black tenant farmers and yeoman farmers worked together to combat corporate America (!!!) in the Farmers' Alliances which gave birth to the Populist movement (late 1880s and 1890s), though the alliances were often (mostly?) segregated. In the electoral arena, the Populists faced difficulties because white voters were susceptible to calls for racial solidarity (a surprising number of blacks held the vote until the turn of the century).
mark
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