Brendan J. J. Payne is Assistant Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at North Greenville University. This interview is based on his new book, Gin, Jesus, and Jim Crow: Prohibition and the Transformation of Racial and...
Jim Crow
Bringing the Bible to the Jim Crow South
In 1900, Henry Nelson Payne, a missionary and president of Mary Holmes Seminary in West Point, Mississippi, a school for Black women, was frustrated that many Bible societies in the former Confederacy were not willing to distribute Bibles to African...
A Texas state representative defends the phrase “purity of the ballot box.” It does not go well.
Watch: The Washington Post has it covered: Early on in a contentious night of debate over a bill that would create newvoting restrictions in Texas, state Rep. Rafael Anchía (D) zeroed in on what he called a “peculiar term.” The bill said...
Why do people say that the Senate filibuster is racist?
Here is Zack Beauchamp at VOX: The question of what to do about the filibuster — the once-arcane Senate rule that creates a de facto 60-vote threshold for major legislation — is arguably the most important topic in Washington, DC,...
*The Brownies Book*
In the 1920s, Black activist and intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois published The Brownies’ Book, a monthly magazine for Black children. Here is Anna Holmes at The Atlantic: Du Bois had a somewhat radical vision of Black children as foot soldiers...
Today Ted Cruz appealed to the Compromise of 1877. Why that isn’t such a good idea.
Earlier today, Ted Cruz invoked the election of the 1876 and the so-called “Compromise of 1877” as a model for dealing with supposed election fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Watch: Let’s set the record straight on what actually happened...
How the history of white evangelical racism has led to Donald Trump’s election and continues to shape support for his presidency
I begin with a caveat. This post is not implying that all white evangelicals are or have been racist. Many white evangelicals have been anti-racist and have fought hard to curb systemic racism in American life. But, as I argued...
The Pietist Schoolman weighs-in on the Confederate monuments debate
Chris Gehrz‘s is known to many readers of this blog as the Pietist Schoolman. Read his Anxious Bench post, “It’s Not ‘Erasing History’ to Remove Confederate Memorials.” Here is a taste: Every pedestal emptied of someone who fought on...
Friday night court evangelical roundup
What have Trump’s evangelicals been saying since yesterday’s update? Eric Metaxas is still attacking systemic racism. Today one his guests said, “systemic racism does not exist. It is a conspiracy theory that the radical Left has been using to try to destroy the...
How the Robert E. Lee Monument Contributed to the Segregation of Richmond
Here is Kevin Levin at The Atlantic: On May 29, 1890, roughly 150,000 people gathered for the dedication of the Robert E. Lee monument in Richmond. It was an opportunity to celebrate a man who many believed embodied the virtues of...
An African-American Pastor Guides His Congregation Through the 1918 Influenza Epidemic
Francis J. Grimké (1850-1937) pastored the 15th Street Presbyterian Church in Washington D.C., an African-American congregation, for nearly fifty years. He was an active member of W.E.B. Du Bois’s Niagara Movement and was involved in the founding of the National...
The Author’s Corner with Adam Domby
Adam H. Domby is Assistant Professor of History at the College of Charleston. This interview is based on his new book, The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory (University of Virginia Press, 2020). JF: What led you to...
Who Was Homer Plessy?
Most school children learn about Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court case that upheld racial segregation laws of public facilities as long as those facilities were “equal” in quality. The case was overturned (defacto) by Brown v. Board of Education (1954)...
Song of the Day
Billie Holiday, “Strange Fruit” [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c52ElU5tQNo&w=560&h=315] Context HT: Don Lemon...
Quick Thoughts on Reagan’s Racist Remarks. Or What Say Ye Dinesh D’Souza and Friends?
By now you should know about the recently released audio recording of Ronald Reagan calling African people “monkeys.” Reagan, who was governor of California at the time, made the remarks to Richard Nixon in 1971. Listen to the remarks here and...
White People Have Denied That They Are Racist For a Long Time
After Donald Trump told U.S Representatives Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley, Tlaib, and Omar to “go back” to their own countries, I heard and read a lot of conservatives say something similar to Fox News commentator Brit Hume: Trump’s “go back” comments were...
Drew Gilpin Faust on Growing-Up in Virginia
In a piece in the latest issue of The Atlantic, Faust, the recently retired president of Harvard and an American historian, reflects on what it was like to growing-up in the racist South. Her piece is a wonderful example of...
Michael Gerson on the Failure of Reconstruction
The Washington Post columnist reminds us of the “horrors” of Reconstruction. The column basically serves as a reflection on Henry Louis Gates’s Stony Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow. Here is a taste: Gates is especially insightful in revealing...
The Author’s Corner with Robert Ferguson
Robert Ferguson is Assistant Professor of History at Western Carolina University. This interview is based on his new book, Remaking the Rural South: Interracialism, Christian Socialism, and Cooperative Farming in Jim Crow Mississippi (University of Georgia Press, 2018). JF: What led you to...
Strivings In Their Souls
Check out historian Ibram X. Kendi‘s recent piece at The Paris Review on the cultural context in which W.E.B. Du Bois’s wrote his famous work The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Kendi situates the work in the context of the Sam Hose lynching...