In the space of violence: African Americans the dynamics of racial supremacy and survival after slavery.

Abstract

In 1865, black and white southerners tested the long-disputed question that had defined abolitionist debates since the American Revolution: whether the two races could coexist outside slavery. Coexist they did but not without consistent and varied crossracial contests for power, authority, and autonomy. At the heart of these clashes were African Americans' daily refusals to submit to white people's attempts to exercise their authority over matters of land, labor, sex, politics, and social interaction. African Americans' determination to establish lives free of white influence and intrusion and their defiance of white southerners' efforts to dominate them, politicized southern life and incited whites to demonstrations of racial supremacy. Black southerners' defiant responses to these displays educed a daily, ordinary violence that consisted of slaps, rapes, assault, and murder. Black people's persistent refusals to defer to white authority eventuated extraordinary violence of ku kluxing, racial rioting, and lynching and eventually inspired African Americans from across the nation to turn racialized violence into a vehicle through which to advance civil rights reform. This dissertation traces African Americans' strategies to navigate the dynamics of white supremacy after slavery. With a focus on black women and men's agency, action, and subjective experiences in individual incidents of racialized violence, its chapters illuminate African Americans' sundry responses to a continuum of violence. These responses ranged from deference to defiance, were individual and collective, and informed by black people's sense of well-being, self-preservation and their appreciation for the motivations behind and the consequences of violent racialization. The chapters utilize testimonials about experienced violence, newspapers, investigative reports, and personal appeals for federal and northern relief. This project also illuminates the processes of violence, the influence of national events on localized responses and vice versa, and cross-regional politics of reform. This work maintains that an appreciation of African Americans' behavior in southern spaces of violence is integral to understanding their experiences of racialized violence. The southern African American experience after emancipation is largely about how black women and men identified and created spaces---personal, communal, institutional---to undo the continuum of white supremacist violence and its impact on black life.