White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

Carol Anderson's White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide begins at the end of the Civil War. For Anderson, the Reconstruction Era was a time of great promise and possibility: with slavery, our nation's "original sin" (1), finally abolished, the country could have taken a great step towards the fair, democratic state imagined in the Declaration of Independence. But it didn’t. The Reconstruction Amendments, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and the formation of the Freedmen’s Bureau took concrete steps to ensure citizenship and access to land, education, and the courts for newly-freed slaves. But these steps were blocked by state governments who wanted to keep black people as “slaves in everything but name” (18), a Federal Government more concerned with preserving the Union than protecting the rights of black Americans, and a Supreme Court who permitted discrimination against blacks in decision after landmark decision. Most notably, the Court, in the infamous Dred Scott case, ruled that “black people have no rights [that] the white man is bound to respect” (17), a precedent that state governments all over the South took to heart in devising criminal statutes and civil legislation with expressly white-supremacist aims.

When President Johnson provided amnesty to former Confederate leaders, it empowered them to pursue policies and traditions of extreme violence against black people. Anderson shows how these traitors to the Union, once forgiven by the President, felt free to act upon their hatred of the newly-freed slaves: “As [Johnson] welcomed one ‘niggers will catch hell’ state after the next back into the union with no mention whatsoever of black voting rights and, thus, no political protection, he effectively laid the groundwork for mass murder” (16).

Lynchings, beatings, rapes, and false imprisonment of black people were carried out with impunity across the former slave states, and the Johnson government looked the other way in the name of preserving the Union. The state of Mississippi, for instance, passed a series of “Black Codes”–laws meant to apply only to black people–which made it legal to auction off black laborers and publicly whip black people for crimes of “defiance” and “inappropriate behavior” (19). Other former slave states soon copied these laws, which, in the name of preserving white supremacy, ensured that African Americans would be economically and politically powerless:

Blacks were denied access to land,banned from hunting and fishing, and forbidden to work independently using skills honed and developed while enslaved, such as blacksmithing. Under such conditions, self-sufficiency could never have been achieved. The bottom line was that economic independence was anathema to a power structure that depended on cheap, exploitable, rightless labor and required black subordination (21).

White rage needed African Americans to be subordinate and oppressed, but it equally judged and chastised them as lazy and weak. 

Every new freedom granted to African Americans was met with backlash from whites, which could reach extremes of violence and brutality. Anderson describes massacres that were committed in the South over nothing more than a group of African Americans meeting to discuss the vote. But more important, and more insidious, were the legal edifices constructed to shelter white supremacy and white hatred for blacks. The Jim Crow laws and the notorious Black Codes adopted in many former slave states made it legal to keep blacks from voting, gaining an education, changing jobs, moving to another residence, or seeking redress from the courts. The laws written and enacted during this era did not bring the country closer to a just, democratic ideal; instead, they brought it as close to re-establishing slavery as they could. 

Chapter 2 begins in 1918, as huge numbers of black Americans begin to move north for industrial jobs, with 500,000 blacks leaving the South in 1918 alone. Anderson describes the combination of wildly unfair labor practices and the terror of lynchings and violence that led African Americans to flee the agricultural South, along with the white rage this exodus engendered. Southern cities and states enacted a battery of laws and policies to prevent the migration of black workers which, effectively, criminalized the basic capitalist act of seeking a market for one's labor. The First Amendment was violated as newspapers with employment advertisements were seized, and even the war effort, which drove the need for industrial workers, was sabotaged in the attempt to keep blacks in the South and subject to Jim Crow laws. According to Anderson, white Southern elites went to such lengths to prevent the Great Migration because it threatened not only their economy but their racial beliefs and self-justifications: "The whole culture of the white South was erected on the presumption of black inability. And the Great Migration directly challenged that foundation. Black success was the white South's bogeyman" (54). Because the Great Migration signaled African Americans taking control of their own destinies, white Southerners took extreme measures to stop it.

The so-called “anti-enticement” statutes were one such measure: these laws criminalized the recruitment of black laborers, making it a felony in several states to attempt to hire workers for an out-of-state job, punishable by steep fines and even jail sentences:

The legalistic language about fines and prison sentences masked a barely contained fury at the dawning realization that blacks believed they could leave the South or the rural areas for decent wages, functioning schools, and more freedom. African Americans simply did not have that right. That was the message (48).

In addition to these restrictions, white authorities attempted to crack down on the free press, blaming newspapers for making black workers aware of better opportunities outside of the South. Anderson uses the Chicago Defender as a case study in how white rage curtailed and sabotaged the First Amendment. The Chicago Defender was the most influential African-American paper of the early 20th century; it had circulation in black communities far outside Chicago, and its pro-black message had made the paper “a symbol of African American pride and defiance” (48). Because the paper openly urged African Americans to flee the South, police chiefs in Southern towns ordered officers to seize the paper from newsstands and pursued criminal charges against vendors who sold it. It was banned outright in certain counties, in a clearly unconstitutional limit on the freedom of the press. White elites had no problem trespassing on the most hallowed of American freedoms in order to maintain their supremacy.

The chapter ends with the story of Dr. Ossian Sweet, which serves as a reminder that the cities that African Americans escaped to in the Great Migration were not panaceas of racial equality. The influx of black people caused racial panic amongst Northern whites, who responded with redlining, housing covenants, and mob violence to keep blacks out of white neighborhoods. In 1925, Dr. Sweet and his family moved into a white neighborhood in Detroit. Although it was not an upscale neighborhood–none of the white residents had Dr. Sweet’s level of educational or professional attainment–the residents were enraged at the idea of a black family living amongst them, and they immediately formed a homeowner’s association with the express purpose of preventing an African-American family from moving in. When an angry mob then gathered around the Sweet home, throwing rocks, breaking windows and doors, and shouting racial epithets, Dr. Sweet’s brother, Henry, attempted to fend off the rioters with a gun, and a man was killed.

Despite the obvious evidence of self-defense, a prosecutor named Robert Toms decided to try the Sweets for conspiracy and premeditated murder, telling the all-white jury that “it wasn’t unreasonable for the community association to want to maintain the racial purity of their neighborhood” and that the man had been killed because “the Sweets and their friends were uppity [and] didn’t propose to be driven out” (65). Sweet was defended by the renowned lawyer Clarence Darrow, who argued that the right of self-defense was sacred, and that if the situation were reversed, and white men had shot and killed a black man in defense of their home, “nobody would have dreamed of having them indicted […] [t]hey would have been given medals instead” (64). After an initial mistrial, the Sweets were acquitted, but the trial had come at great cost. Sweet’s wife and baby daughter contracted tuberculosis in an unsanitary jail awaiting trial, and Dr. Ossian Sweet eventually committed suicide. The Great Migration saw African Americans move north in huge numbers to escape the Jim Crow South and earn a better living for themselves and their families, and it is exactly that betterment, Anderson argues, that causes outbursts of white rage. 

This chapter explores the context and aftermath of the landmark Supreme Court decision in the case of Brown vs. Board of Education (1954). After decades of court battles waged by the NAACP and the black community, the court had ruled that segregation was inherently unequal and thus unconstitutional, but governors and legislators across the South fought hard to resist integrating black and white schools. As in previous instances Anderson has documented, it didn't take much for the white rage against integration to erupt into senseless violence against black people. But this fight also turned against schools themselves. Southern states ignored federal education funding and fought to abolish public education, and the local property taxes that funded it, entirely, rather than send black and white children to school together. The organized, intentional, and systematic fight against integration by legislators and public officials was given the name “Massive Resistance,” and in 1956, an extraordinary declaration called the Southern Manifesto was signed by no fewer than 101 members of Congress.

The Southern Manifesto declared that:

the Supreme Court had violated states’ rights, abused judicial authority, and undercut the separation of powers, [giving] sanction from the highest levels to use the levers of government to defy the U.S. Supreme Court until, with the federal judiciary and African Americans tiring of the fight, Brown simply collapsed (79).

This meant that Congress and state governments of Southern states had openly declared war on the Supreme Court because of its decision to integrate schools, casting their refusal to obey the law of the land as a principled stand in defense of the Constitution. Numerous school segregation laws were passed under Massive Resistance that the legislatures knew were unconstitutional, simply because the court battles required to repeal them would be long and costly, thus preserving segregated schools for a bit longer.

One case study that is given particularly close attention is the school system of Prince Edward County in Virginia. In 1955, the state of Virginia, under Governor James Lindsey Almond, refused federal-court orders to admit black students to schools in white areas by closing the white, well-funded schools. The Gray Commission (led by State Senator Garland Gray) abolished the property tax that funded public schools; since private schools could still refuse to admit black students, the money cut from public schools was used instead for tuition grants to send white students to the private, all-white Prince Edward Academy. The public-school system of Prince Edward County remained closed for five years, during which African-American children had no place to go to school, causing serious learning deficits and psychological damage to the locked-out kids. One student, Henry Cabarrus, testified that:

[W]hen you have such strong white resistance against you as a person such that they can take away the most fundamental thing–education–if someone can take that away from you, your esteem is so small that [...] you’re always looking over your shoulder for who is going to attack or criticize (85).

These effects were especially crippling as the nature of the American economy changed in the late 60s and 70s; by the time Prince Edward County finally began to comply with the Brown v. Board of Education decision and integrate public schoolswell into the 1970s, industrial and unskilled labor jobs that required no college degree were disappearing:

the economy was primed for those who had the benefit of years of good schools and, in particular, for whites who had a well-funded public school system that went all the way through the twelfth grade and graduated the lion’s share of them as college-ready (86).

The transition to a knowledge-based economy made African Americans who were denied the right to an education more disadvantaged than ever on the job market.

The effects of an unequal and underfunded education system continue to be felt to this day, Anderson claims, as "the states of the Deep South, which fought Brown tooth and nail, today all fall in the bottom quartile of state rankings for educational attainment, per capita income, and quality of health" (96).