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Masterless men : poor whites and slavery in the antebellum South
\"Analyzing land policy, labor, and legal history, Keri Leigh Merritt reveals what happens to excess workers when a capitalist system is predicated on slave labor. With the rising global demand for cotton--and thus, slaves--in the 1840s and 1850s, the need for white laborers in the American South was drastically reduced, creating a large underclass who were unemployed or underemployed. These poor whites could not compete--for jobs or living wages--with profitable slave labor. Though impoverished whites were never subjected to the daily violence and degrading humiliations of racial slavery, they did suffer tangible socio-economic consequences as a result of living in a slave society. Merritt examines how these 'masterless' men and women threatened the existing Southern hierarchy and ultimately helped push Southern slaveholders toward secession and civil war\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The road out
Can one teacher truly make a difference in her students’ lives when everything is working against them? Can a love for literature and learning save the most vulnerable of youth from a life of poverty? The Road Out is a gripping account of one teacher’s journey of hope and discovery with her students—girls growing up poor in a neighborhood that was once home to white Appalachian workers, and is now a ghetto. Deborah Hicks, set out to give one group of girls something she never had: a first-rate education, and a chance to live their dreams. A contemporary tragedy is brought to life as she leads us deep into the worlds of Adriana, Blair, Mariah, Elizabeth, Shannon, Jessica, and Alicia: seven girls coming of age in poverty. This is a moving story about girls who have lost their childhoods, but who face the street’s torments with courage and resiliency. “I want out,” says 10-year-old Blair, a tiny but tough girl who is extremely poor and yet deeply imaginative and precocious. Hicks tries to convey to her students a sense of the power of fiction and of sisterhood to get them through the toughest years of adolescence. But by the time they’re sixteen, eight years after the start of the class, the girls are experiencing the collision of their youthful dreams with the pitfalls of growing up in chaotic single-parent families amid the deteriorating cityscape. Yet even as they face disappointments and sometimes despair, these girls cling to their desire for a better future. The author’s own life story—from a poorly educated girl in a small mountain town to a Harvard-educated writer, teacher, and social advocate—infuses this chronicle with a message of hope.
eBook
Untold. 87, The invisible plight of poor Southern Whites
For many poor White families in the Antebellum South, slavery did not pay - so why did the ruling elite erase their narrative from the history books?
Streaming Video
Archaeology below the Cliff
First book-length archaeological study of a nonelite white population on a Caribbean plantation
Archaeology below the Cliff: Race, Class, and Redlegs in Barbadian Sugar Society is the first archaeological study of the poor whites of Barbados, the descendants of seventeenth-century European indentured servants and small farmers. “Redlegs” is a pejorative to describe the marginalized group who remained after the island transitioned to a sugar monoculture economy dependent on the labor of enslaved Africans. A sizable portion of the “white” minority, the Redlegs largely existed on the peripheries of the plantation landscape in an area called “Below Cliff,” which was deemed unsuitable for profitable agricultural production. Just as the land on which they resided was cast as marginal, so too have the poor whites historically and contemporarily been derided as peripheral and isolated as well as idle, alcoholic, degenerate, inbred, and irrelevant to a functional island society and economy.
Using archaeological, historical, and oral sources, Matthew C. Reilly shows how the precarious existence of the Barbadian Redlegs challenged elite hypercapitalistic notions of economics, race, and class as they were developing in colonial society. Experiencing pronounced economic hardship, similar to that of the enslaved, albeit under very different circumstances, Barbadian Redlegs developed strategies to live in a harsh environment. Reilly’s investigations reveal that what developed in Below Cliff was a moral economy, based on community needs rather than free-market prices.
Reilly extensively excavated households from the tenantry area on the boundaries of the Clifton Hall Plantation, which was abandoned in the 1960s, to explore the daily lives of poor white tenants and investigate their relationships with island economic processes and networks. Despite misconceptions of strict racial isolation, evidence also highlights the importance of poor white encounters and relationships with Afro-Barbadians. Historical data are also incorporated to address how an underrepresented demographic experienced the plantation landscape. Ultimately, Reilly’s narrative situates the Redlegs within island history, privileging inclusion and embeddedness over exclusion and isolation.
eBook
Changing Childhoods in the Cape Colony
This book opens up histories of childhood and youth in South African historiography. It looks at how childhoods changed during South Africa's industrialisation, and traces the ways in which institutions, first the Dutch Reformed Church and then the Cape government, attempted to shape white childhood to the future benefit of the colony.
eBook
American experience. The murder of Emmett Till. Interview with Clara Davis, Mississippi resident. 2 of 2
Clara Davis (continued) interview about Emmett Till, an African-American teenager who was lynched in Mississippi at the age of 14 after reportedly flirting with a white woman.
Streaming Video
Trashed: The Myth of the Southern Poor White
The fact of class has been a powerful tool in the process of identity formation, particularly in the American South, which has been viewed as a region apart from the national imaginary. To counter this exclusion, Southerners have often relied on stereotypes. One of the most prevalent and tragic of these is the stereotype of poor white trash, a construction that has been utilized to insist upon elite white Southerners' exceptionalism and innocence and to assert their rightful place in American historiography. While it is difficult to calculate their level of success, as perceptions of the region have varied through the decades, the destructive power of white trash cannot be disputed. This work utilizes a number of texts to demonstrate the myriad ways in which white trash, a relatively static construction of undesirable attitudes and beliefs since the antebellum era, has nonetheless been adapted to promote disparate agendas. At the same time, I explore the impact of the epithet on poor whites themselves, examining the stereotype's deleterious effects upon the economically disadvantaged and politically powerless. In Uncle Tom's Cabin Harriet Beecher Stowe uses the threat of upper-class contamination by white trash to, expose the ills of slavery. Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition demonstrates the displacement of the nation's long and shameful history of African-American disfranchisement onto white trash. In his Snopes trilogy, William Faulkner attempts to negotiate Southern past and present through white trash's intrusion on civilized society. Erskine Caldwell tries to shed light on poor white oppression, but his Tobacco Road is too steeped in stereotype to prove his assertions. In Deliverance, James Dickey fashions white trash monsters to exacerbate middle-class fears of poor white mobility, and Harry Crews's A Childhood: The Biography of a Place examines the poor white's initial resistance but ultimate resignation to the limiting functions of the stereotype. A hopeful shift in poor white depictions occurs in Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina and Amy Greene's Bloodroot, two works which seek to confront the stereotype and call for a reevaluation of the beliefs and practices that have suppressed poor whites for centuries.
Dissertation
The Shame of Not Belonging: Navigating Failure in the Colonial Petition, South Africa 1910–1961
This essay examines letters of petition sent by failed white settlers in South Africa to the British Governor General. These letters comprise a particular discursive genre that combine aspects of both private and public. The key to their success was controlled emotion: petitioners had to present their distress in such a way as to excite the exercise of compassion. Allowing subversive or stray emotions to enter a letter was bound to undermine a petitioner’s appeal. Reading this epistolary corpus critically allows us to understand the discursive strategies by which colonials claimed a sentimental attachment to Britain, the empire and, indeed, the Governor General himself.
Journal Article
Cracker Culture
Cracker Culture is a provocative study of social life in the Old South that probes the origin of cultural differences between the South and the North throughout American history.Among Scotch-Irish settlers the term \"Cracker\" initially designated a person who boasted, but in American usage the word has come to designate poor whites.
eBook