WHITE FRIGHT

A scholarly history of how “the civil rights movement was articulated against a white opposition that was explicitly and thoroughly sexualized.”

Historian Dailey, who has written extensively on the Jim Crow South, examines the era lasting roughly from Reconstruction until the 1960s, a time in which fears of interracial sex and biracial reproduction were widespread. Interracial marriage was prohibited in the majority of states until 1967, when the Supreme Court declared those restrictions unconstitutional in the landmark case of Loving v. Virginia. The author shows how maintaining "racial purity" became a fixation after the Civil War. “As practiced by those dedicated to the proposition, ‘white supremacy’ was both a social argument and a political program designed to reestablish white men’s social and political dominance after the war and Reconstruction," writes Dailey. She looks at the belief that in order to maintain White supremacy, White women had to comply by not engaging in voluntary sexual relations with Black men and that defending racial purity in the South was the same as defending the South “herself.” Dailey also systematically explores cases of lynching, specifically the Scottsboro cases of 1931, which involved the consideration of “the conventional Southern assumption that any sex between a white woman and a black man was ipso facto rape”; how the NAACP made a strategic decision to avoid cases of sex discrimination in favor of launching a vigorous assault on education issues; the treatment of Black soldiers abroad by the American military during the world wars; and various court cases that challenged miscegenation laws—e.g., Perez v. Sharp (1948). Though general readers may occasionally lose their way in the thickets of legal maneuvering, students of the civil rights movement and constitutional law will find plenty of useful information.

A methodical journey through significant legal questions involving racism in America.