White Rage by Carol Anderson is an examination of racism in America through the perspective of the racist policies that were enacted by white Americans to keep Black Americans oppressed. So often when white people talk about racism, they will say racism=bad, and even oppose specific racist policies, without acknowledging who has been enacting and supporting those racist policies.
“The bottom line was that Black economic independence was anathema to a power structure that depended on cheap, exploitable, rightless labor and required Black subordination.”
Anderson dives deep into reconstruction, and the lengths that white people in the south went to to stop reconstruction.
“The government “never deemed itself authorized to expend the public money for the rent or purchase of homes for the thousands, not to say millions, of the white race who are honestly toiling from day to day for their subsistence,” so why would it do so for the freedmen?
“This bill, he was convinced, was designed to set up Black dependency on the federal government. And he was having none of it.”
I also didn’t know that Andrew Johnson had done so much to end reconstruction and stop the efforts of the Freedmen’s Bureau.
“While claiming that the government had never provided access to land for “hard toiling whites,” Johnson simply erased the nineteen years that he had worked for the passage of the Homestead Act to ensure that his constituency was given 160 acres wrested or browbeaten from Native Americans. Meanwhile, he cringed that the formerly enslaved would lease forty acres abandoned by those whom he had once called “traitors.”
“In effect, Southern courts transferred full control of black people from the plantation owner to a carceral state.”
To me, this directly ties into the era of mass incarceration we’re in now – it reminded me of a lot of the ideas from the documentary, 13th.
“In Lexington, Kentucky, a black man, William Garner, had tried to vote. The registrars, Hiram Reese and Matthew Foushee, refused to hand Garner a ballot because he had not paid a poll tax. Yet, the Black man had an affidavit that the tax collector had refused to accept his payment. The registrars scoffed. With one wing of local government demanding proof of payment and the other flat out refusing to accept the funds, Garner knew his right to vote had been violated. The U.S. Supreme Court, in an 8-1 decision, disagreed.”
I had never heard of this supreme court case before reading this book, and it strikes me as illogical and blatently racist.
“They would soon find out that the stories of the North as the promised land, where drive, hard work, and ambition would be rewarded regardless of color, had little to no relationship whatsoever to the actual conditions above the Mason-Dixon Line.”
I’ve definitely heard of the Great Migration prior to reading this book, but I had never learned about the lengths white people in the south went to to try and stop the Great Migration. The narrative that I learned about the great migration was more that Black people had come to cities in the north for better job opportunities.
“Corporations like the Pennsylvania Railroad Company hired labor agents to go below the Mason-Dixon Line and convince Black people to abandon Dixie and come north.”
I had never learned about this before – about the efforts that white people in the south took to try and prevent Black people from seeking better opportunities for themselves.
“Regardless of Southern officials’ efforts, wave after wave of Black people continued to leave. Nothing seemed to stop the flow. The officials, therefore, decided to go after the railroad system. The logic was simple: If the ideas that lead to the exodus couldn’t be stopped, then certainly the physical means by which hundreds of thousands had already left the region could be. A variety of tactics was employed. One was to physically prevent the trains from moving. A waylaid train could wreck havoc with schedules even under optimal conditions, but conditions weren’t optimal. With World War I raging, the shipment of personnel and material was crucial to supporting the allies. Nevertheless, white Southern leaders prioritized their need to stop the advancement of African Americans above all other considerations, including victory over the nation that had sunk the Lusitania and killed nearly twelve hundred passengers and crew members. It was most egregious in Mississippi, where in Greenville, Greenwood, and Brookhaven, trains were stopped and sometimes sidetracked for days. The federal government finally stepped in when the police chief in Meridian, Mississippi, held up a train on a technicality. The U. S. marshal arrested the city’s highest-ranking lawman on the spot. Recognizing that there was more than one way to disrupt the flow, Jackson, Mississippi’s officials threatened to rig pending court decisions if the railroads did not stop handing out passes for African Americans to go north.”
Anderson also dives into the history of racism and white violence in Detroit. This is particularly relevant to me because I’m from Metro Detroit, and my family has lived in Detroit since before 1910 – they were certainly in Detroit at this point in time.
“While spared a full-blown riot during the first wave of the Great Migration (1915-40) Detroit simmered in unmasked hatred against the tens of thousands of blacks who now called that city home. Previously, there had been an uneasy truce between the white community and the relatively small number of African Americans in Detroit. But during the exodus, in just eighteen months, the African American population in the Motor City quadrupled, as the automobile industry provided job opportunities and possibilities for advancement almost unimaginable to those who had dealt with Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia.”
Before reading this book, I had never heard of Dr. Turner and what white people did to him when he tried to move into a white neighborhood in Detroit.
“Tired of the cramped living conditions and exasperated with paying exorbitant rents for ramshackle housing that the landlords refused to repair, Black professionals sought to move away from Black Bottom. That aspiration, however, was fraught with danger. While a few managed to find homes in white neighborhoods, others faced the wrath of mobs and homeowners’ associations. In the summer of 1925, for example, Dr. Alexander Turner, Dunbar Hospital’s co-founder and head of surgery, tried to move into the home he had purchased in an all-white part of town, Tireman. Within five hours of his unpacking his first box, bricks and rocks rained down as a mob a thousand strong moved in to drive him out. With Detroit police officers watching, “he was compelled to sign a deed and relinquish ownership of the property” at gunpoint. The police then escorted Turner and his family back to the black side of town.”
After discussing Dr. Turner, Anderson discusses Dr. Ossian Sweet, and the mob of angry white people who attacked him when he moved into his home in a white neighborhood in Detroit, and the ensuing trial. This book was probably the most in depth history of this period of Detroit history I’ve ever read.
Everything I’ve dug into here is in about the first quarter of the book – there’s more later in White Rage about school segregation, voter suppression, and so much more.
This book was a really worthwhile read – I feel like it gave me a new perspective on civil rights in the United States – a perspective that I knew existed but never had a clear way to articulate. Anderson covers up to the Trump presidency, so it’s pretty current in covering the way white people’s anger is shaping politics in the present day.