Jim Crow Citizenship
This fine book brilliantly explores how Americas liberal tradition coexisted and evolved alongside white supremacy in the early twentieth century south. By honestly surveying a distinctively southern progressive movement that interwove commitment to liberal values with patriarchal racial hierarchies, Steedman shifts the ground for future considerations of liberalism and race in American politics. Highly recommended for scholars of liberal theory, race and political development, and legal history, but also for anyone who wants to understand the roots of contemporary racial politics in the United States.
Julie Novkov , University at Albany, SUNY
Marek Steedman has done an exceptional job in tracing the contours of southern political thought. In Jim Crow Citizenship , Steedman rightfully returns the study of southern political thought to its important role in shaping American political thought and American political development. Students of the south and especially of Southern Progressivism will have to grapple with the enduring questions of race, citizenship and American liberalism that Steedman confronts.
Kimberley Johnson , Barnard College
In the late 1860s the U.S. federal government initiated the most abrupt transition from slavery to citizenship in the Americas. The transformation, of course, did not stick, but it did permanently alter the terms of American citizenship and initiated a century long struggle over the place of African Americans in the American polity.
White southern Progressives, crucial in this account, were faced with a significant ideological challenge: how to reconcile their liberal principles with their commitments to racial hierarchy. The ideological work performed by white southern Progressives was instrumental to the establishment of white supremacist institutions in the heart of a putatively liberal democracy and illuminates how combinations of liberal and illiberal principles have affected the history of American political thought.
In this work, Marek Steedman demonstrates how white southern Progressives combined commitments to liberal, even democratic, politics with equally strong commitments to the maintenance of racial hierarchy. He shows that there are systematic features of the traditions of liberal and republican thought, on the one hand, and ideologies of race, on the other, that facilitate their combination. Jim Crow Citizenship relates familiar developments in American state-building, legal development, and political thought to race, thus showing how race intertwines with these developments, often shaping them in decisive fashion.
Marek D. Steedman is associate professor of Political Science at the University of Southern Mississippi.
Routledge Series on Identity Politics
Series Editor: Alvin B. Tillery, Jr.
Rutgers University
Group identities have been an important part of political life in America since the founding of the republic. For most of this long history, the central challenge for activists, politicians, and scholars concerned with the quality of U.S. democracy was the struggle to bring the treatment of ethnic and racial minorities and women in line with the creedal values spelled out in the nations charters of freedom. We are now several decades from the key moments of the twentieth century when social movements fractured Americas system of ascriptive hierarchy. The gains from these movements have been substantial. Women now move freely in all realms of civil society, hold high elective offices, and constitute more than 50 percent of the workforce. Most African-Americans have now attained middle class status, work in integrated job sites, and live in suburbs. Finally, people of color from nations in Latin America, Asia, and the Caribbean now constitute the majority of Americas immigration pool.
In the midst of all of these positive changes, however, glaring inequalities between groups persist. Indeed, ethnic and racial minorities remain far more likely to be undereducated, unemployed, and incarcerated than their counterparts who identify as white. Similarly, both violence and work place discrimination against women remain rampant in U.S. society. The Routledge series on identity politics features works that seek to understand the tension between the great strides our society has made in promoting equality between groups and the residual effects of the ascriptive hierarchies in which the old order was rooted.
Some of the core questions that the series will address are: how meaningful are the traditional ethnic, gender, racial, and sexual identities to our understanding of inequality in the present historical moment? Do these identities remain important bases for group mobilization in American politics? To what extent can we expect the state to continue to work for a more level playing field among groups?
Titles in the Series:
Black Politics Today
Th e Era of Socioeconomic Transition
Th eodore J. Davis Jr.
Jim Crow Citizenship
Liberalism and the Southern Defense of Racial Hierarchy
Marek D. Steedman
First published 2012
by Routledge
711 Th ird Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Simultaneously published in the UK
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
2012 Taylor & Francis
Th e right of Marek Steedman to be identifi ed as author of this work has been asserted by him
in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark Notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identifi cation and explanation without i ntent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Steedman, Marek D.
Jim Crow citizenship : liberalism and the Southern defense of racial hierarchy / Marek D.
Steedman.
p. cm.
1. Southern States--Politics and government18651950. 2. African Americans
Suff rageSouthern StatesHistory. 3. CitizenshipSouthern StatesHistory.
4. Liberalism Southern StatesHistory. 5. RacePolitical aspectsSouthern States
History. 6. Southern StatesRace relationsHistory. I. Title.
JK1929.A2S74 2011
323.1196073075--dc23
2011023101
ISBN13: 978-0-415-89053 -3(hbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-203-82947-9 (ebk)
Printed and bound in the United States of America on acid-free paper.
For Lev, Jacob, and Gabriel
