“THE RELATION OF MASTER AND SERVANT”

It is helpful to first sketch the account of wage labor that was operative in the postbellum South. In subsequent sections, I show how race connected with this account and the sense in which the emerging free-labor ideology was in tension with both. In 1865, at the end of the Civil War and with the fate of slavery all but sealed, northern abolitionists hoped to replace the “peculiar institution” with “free labor.” But, as Julie Saville put it, “Free labor marched southward to battle against slavery to the strain of discordant notes” (Saville Reference Saville1994, p. 3). Although some were beginning to defend wage labor as “free labor,” the dominant conception of free labor revolved around small producers who, owning the land and tools needed for production, were thus politically and economically independent. Based on this conception, wage labor was at best a transition to the status of free property owner, at worst, “a modified servitude” (Saville Reference Saville1994, p. 3; Foner Reference Foner1970; Sandel Reference Sandel1996; Pettit Reference Pettit1997). Although redistributing land to freedpeople remained a live issue through 1866, the new Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, or the Freedmen's Bureau as it became known, quickly adopted the strict enforcement of formal, annual labor contracts between laborers and planters as the principal means to attain justice for freedpeople (Scott Reference Scott, Cooper, Holt and Scott2000; Davis Reference Davis1982; Dawson Reference Dawson1982; Eiss Reference Eiss1998; Ripley Reference Ripley1976).Footnote ³ Nevertheless, the idea remained to create a free labor force. Through wage labor, freedpeople would be able to accumulate enough capital to lease or buy land, so that ultimately a free Black yeomanry would emerge (Davis Reference Davis1982, pp. 75–78). With this aim in mind, the Freedmen's Bureau imposed the rigors of wage labor on reluctant planters and freedpeople alike.Footnote ⁴

Clearly the aim was not achieved. By the late 1880s, sharecropping “had emerged as the dominant mode of agriculture and rural society in the South” (Davis Reference Davis1982, p. 58).Footnote ⁵ Most former slaves and their descendants worked as sharecroppers, often hopelessly indebted to their landlords.Footnote ⁶ Nevertheless, sharecropping, the form of labor relations in which most Black laborers found themselves, had been defined by Louisiana's courts (and courts across the South) precisely as a form of wage labor. As Harold Woodman (Reference Woodman1995) has argued, at a formal level the law clearly distinguished sharecroppers from tenants. Whereas tenants had administrative control of any land leased to them and also ownership of the crop produced (subject to the privilege of the landowner for rent due), the sharecropper had neither of these things. Sharecroppers were instead employees whose relationship to their employer was regulated under laws governing master-servant relations. As such, sharecroppers were legally a form of “free servants.” But this further entailed a lower social standing. As wage laborers, sharecroppers were seen as dependents of their employer in a way that tenants were not.

In some sense, then, the vision of northern reformers did become a reality, and wage labor replaced slavery. But local contexts and institutions shaped the social meaning of this shift, not the free-labor ideology of abolitionists.Footnote ⁷ The resulting system was perplexing to many outsiders. One contemporary observer from Britain, traveling through rural Alabama in 1870, declared the “system of share and share alike betwixt the planter and the negro … outrageously absurd,” even “semi-communistic” (Somers Reference Somers1965, pp. 128–129). Yet throughout the Reconstruction period, supreme courts across the South determined that the “obvious distinction” between sharecropping and tenancy lay in the master-servant relation created between parties to the former type of agreement (Woodman Reference Woodman1995).Footnote ⁸

Sharecropping, therefore, was a form of wage labor, and wage labor entailed dependence. And race was also implicated in this link between wage labor and dependency, but not simply as a matter of distributing people who were marked as belonging to different racial groupings across different tenancy arrangements.Footnote ⁹ Whether sharecroppers, tenants, or, more rarely still, owners, freedpeople were on a trajectory out of an antebellum plantation system in which Blackness and servility had become “intertwined” (Roediger Reference Roediger1991, p. 56). The struggle of freedpeople to establish independence was thus also a struggle to break that link. Here, as elsewhere, they were met with the intransigence of their former masters who continued to see them as a dependent labor force. Indeed, for Southern planters, dependency through labor and independence through ownership formed the “true dividing line between the negro and the white man” (DeBow's Review 1868, p. 136).

Retrieving the distinction between tenancy and sharecropping, then, allows us to see more than just the different economic choices and obstacles that various categories of agricultural labor faced. It also allows us to reconstruct the social stakes involved in holding, or attempting to escape from, these various positions. In the next section I explore how the precept that wage laborers were dependents connected with the expectation that “negroes” would be laborers.

“IS NATURAL AND UNALTERABLE”

In Louisiana, it was not until 1870 that the supreme court clearly ruled that sharecropping was a form of wage labor (Bres and O'Brien v. S. C. and J. A. Cowan, R. W. Faulk Intervenor 1870). In 1876, a second Louisiana Supreme Court decision confirmed the view. The details of the case are not crucial. At issue is whether freedmen had property rights over the crops they produced. But the language of the decision is worth pondering:

The word hirelings is noteworthy, recalling antebellum struggles over the status of wage laborers as the northern states began to industrialize. Antebellum White wage earners sought to escape both the generally social and specifically racial “opprobrium” attached to the status of servant or hireling. Free government, in this loosely Jeffersonian tradition, required independent farmers and artisans—independent in the sense that they owned productive property. Hirelings were by definition dependent, and thus their fitness for self-government was automatically in question. More seriously, if generalized, the institution of wage labor threatened the basis of free government itself. Antebellum producers were thus strategically torn between attacking “white slavery” (wage labor) as such and defending the dignity of “free white labor” (Roediger Reference Roediger1991, pp. 45–47). In either case, “Whiteness” involved a claim to freedom and independence. Master-servant law made this claim fragile, however. The legal status of workers was shifting as new understandings of labor influenced state court decisions in the antebellum North. But White wage workers had to work hard to avoid the label of servant and the imputation of dependence, because legally this was precisely their position (Orren Reference Orren1991; Schmidt Reference Schmidt1998). As such, White workers were seeking not only to distance themselves from the status of “negro slaves” but also to carve out a social and economic position that escaped the confines of master-servant law.

Of course northern and southern views of wage labor were not uniform. But the differences were less than one might think, and they tended toward a more radical rejection of wage labor in the South. As we have seen, the concept of free labor was not yet applied to wage labor, even in the North. In Louisiana and elsewhere in the South this was not a mere absence. Southern defenders of slavery, such as William Harper, John Calhoun, and George Fitzhugh, had been developing for decades a powerful critique of “wage slavery,” chastising hypocritical abolitionists for their blindness to the poverty and degradation of northern White labor. As James Oakes (Reference Oakes1990) argues, proslavery ideologues and advocates of “free White labor” could draw on a common set of republican concerns about dependency and labor.Footnote ¹⁰

Master-servant law thus afforded masters of servants much the same conceptual resources as slavery had afforded masters of slaves. That is, the legal relation between masters and servants continued to subordinate the personality and will of the latter to the former.Footnote ¹¹ A number of essays published in the late 1860s in the New Orleans publication DeBow's Review provide a useful lens into planter thinking. They suggest that planters sought to portray freedpeople as inherently unfit for any type of labor but agricultural, and assumed that labor entailed dependence and subordination, whether it was contractually engaged or not. In “The South: Its Duties and Destiny,” L. Reynolds (Reference Reynolds1866) draws explicitly on the language of master and servant to discuss the “crisis” caused by emancipation. Acknowledging that “the stern arbitrament of the sword has decreed [slavery's] extinction,” Reynolds asks what was to him the “vital question for the South at the present time … : Can the colored man be profitably employed as a free laborer?” Comparing the South to the British West Indies, the author answers that the chances are good. “Our people,” he suggested “have been civilized and christianized. They are intelligent, have been trained to habits of industry, and can appreciate the importance of regular and well-directed labor” (Reynolds Reference Reynolds1866, pp. 71–72). Reynolds emphasizes “our people” (as opposed to those owned by Whites in the West Indies)—the possessive, indicating not only continued ownership of a dependent people, but also a relation to “these” people, whom “we” have civilized.

Reynolds also relies on “the advantage of climate. Those tropical regions enabled the negro to live upon the spontaneous productions of the soil, and hence tempted him to sloth. But in our climate, work is indispensable to existence. The negro must labor or starve” (Reference Reynolds1866, pp. 72–73). Reynolds does not adopt a full-blown account of wage labor as a commodity, rather he holds that the South is engaged in an “arduous, but benevolent, enterprise” to “elevate” the newly freed “colored population.” This enterprise began with, and was to some degree continuous with, slavery:

Aware now of the resonance of this term hirelings, it alerts us to the limits of our author's “benevolence.” The “elevated” freedperson, “dependent” on “the Southern planter,” would enjoy idyllic relations little different from slavery itself:

This system of “hereditary employment,” in Reynolds's estimation, far “transcends the miserable scheme of mercenary and transient service which pervades the domestic economy of the North” (Reynolds Reference Reynolds1866, p. 74). No dignity of labor here. Instead we get an extended fantasy of paternalistic and harmonious relations between master and servant within the bounds of “the old homestead.”Footnote ¹²

Reynolds's premise is that “the relation of master and servant is natural and unalterable” (Reynolds Reference Reynolds1866, p. 74). As the allusion to England makes clear, the claim is that dependent labor relations in general are natural. Other essayists fuse this premise more directly to claims about the inherent capacities of “Negroes” themselves. Dr. Josiah C. Nott's description of the “negro character,” for example, shows it to be compatible with Reynolds's vision:

What more suitable subjects for “hereditary employment”? The anonymous author of “Negro Agrarianism” goes further: “Nature never intended, and never will permit the races to live together, except as masters and slaves” (DeBow's Review 1868, p. 136). Indeed, nature itself requires “some form of subordination of the inferior race that shall compel them to labor, whilst it protects their rights and provides for their wants” (DeBow's Review 1868, p. 136). Like Nott, the author reads this from the very instincts of the various races:

Laws protecting property, therefore, “arise, not from reason, but from the instincts of the Caucasian race” (DeBow's Review 1868, p. 135). By contrast, “Native and savage tribes, whether negroes or Indians,” had never had any institutions of property, and indeed, were inherently opposed to them (DeBow's Review 1868, p. 135). “They are, from the necessity of their natures, the enemies of property, not of the white race…. [The Haitians], and all other negroes, are naturally and incurably agrarians, the implacable enemies of the institution of private property, not of the white race” (DeBow's Review 1868, pp. 134–135).

The crux of the matter, in any case, is that “the true dividing line between the negro and the white man” lies in their respective instincts toward property (DeBow's Review 1868, p. 136). Vague gestures toward natural instincts are not terribly compelling, however. Nott thought he could do better. In his open letter written to General Howard, head of the Freedmen's Bureau, Nott purports to “show from the physical and civil history of the negro race that it is now, wherever found, just what it was five thousand years ago” (Reference Nott1866, p. 268). Noticing the connection between dependence and the franchise (which we have seen in the antebellum debates above), Nott suggests that the “first question … to be settled is, the capacity of the negro for self-government. Is he capable of taking any part in the march of civilization beyond that of a mere ‘hewer of wood and drawer of water’?” (Reference Reynolds1866, p. 270). Nott openly admits that “a very large proportion of the white population of this and other countries are wholly unfit to vote understandingly on the affairs of the nation, to say nothing of bribery and corruption in the lower classes” (Reference Reynolds1866, p. 271). The incapacity of “the negro race” is more general, however, since “the best educated have been the most vicious,” which means, of course, that the Freedmen's Bureau was mad to encourage any further experiments in that direction. To clinch his point, Nott turns to depictions of ancient Egyptian monuments of “negroes literally by the thousands, as laborers, slaves, traders, etc., with their black skins and wooly heads, peculiar features, etc., as distinctly as if they were drawn from life but yesterday” (Reference Reynolds1866, p. 271)—certain evidence of the unchanging nature of “the negro” and that his nature condemns him to menial occupations (Nott Reference Nott1866, pp. 271–272). One cannot change a bulldog into a greyhound, and nothing “short of a miracle can change a negro into a white man” (Nott Reference Nott1866, p. 272). Cranial measurements, to which Nott also had recourse, are just another way of securing this point.

It is important not to get too drawn in by the language of inherent nature, however. Recall, for example, that the anonymous author of “Negro Agrarianism” wants the “true dividing line” to separate Whites from other races in terms of their instinct for property (DeBow's Review 1868). But don't some with “black skins” own property? Faced with such a case, which would yield? Physical characteristics? Or the classification by property? The former, it turns out. Consider this curious story about Haiti, which the same author attributes to Gustave d'Alaux, “a late French writer.” It is worth quoting in full:

What the Virgin was doing making pronouncements on such matters, neither the author nor d'Alaux divulges, but at first glance she seems to make hash of the author's argument. This, after all, was intended to show that races differed in their instincts when it came to property. But, as the story seems intended to illustrate, the Virgin was a fairly sharp reader of the social landscape. What is crucial is not the claim that each race has different instincts but that the instincts themselves are the “dividing line” between the races. It is tempting indeed to wonder whether a poor illiterate White agrarian might thereby be a “negro,” too.

Or maybe an “albino”? Recall Governor Worth in North Carolina in the mid-1860s who “used racial imagery to describe poor white men, referring to ‘the black and white negro’ and ‘negroes and albinos’” (Edwards Reference Edwards1997, p. 188).Footnote ¹⁴ And, back in North Louisiana, the editor of a local newspaper poured scorn on the “white trash who got down in the ashes with the negroes”—“white ash cats,” as he called them (Ouachita Telegraph 1868). These surely are racial terms. It was not quite as simple as a “rich negro” being a mulatto; but the dependence and subordination with which “poor whites” always flirted opened up a terrain for racial distinctions among Whites. Put differently, race is being produced where independence is suspect, in a way that it needn't be on that rosy English homestead. Here is an opening into how race works. Of course, it is possible to see something merely strategic at work here. Everyone assumes that “negroes” are inferior; calling someone a “white negro” is just an especially nasty insult, a way of keeping wayward Whites on the right side of the existing racial order; it doesn't construct race, it might be argued, but rather presumes its terms.

But this applies too sharp a distinction between production and use. Arguably, the entire edifice of race was constructed strategically in the course of justifying slavery and colonialism, for which Christianity and the “rights of man” provided few resources. All accounts of race must construct the supposedly natural differences that then retroactively justify the hierarchies they name. This, I would suggest, is what Governor Worth is doing when he uses terms like albino and white negro, not simply keeping “poor whites” in line, but articulating the social distance between them and him as a racial difference.Footnote ¹⁵

Or recall the Italians who are as “black as the blackest Negro” (Cunningham Reference Cunningham1965, p. 27). At first sight it is hard to know what to make of such a statement. Is it a metaphor? A joke? A mistake? Again, clarifying the context helps explain the usage. Consider the following account by an historian of immigration to Louisiana (writing in the 1960s, but describing the 1890s and early 1900s):

Notice that the “Negro's work” was “the badge of his inferiority,” not his skin color. And when Italians did “Negro's work,” they “assumed the status of Negroes.” Again, where White elites in Louisiana saw servility and dependence they articulated the resulting social distance as race. Tracing the usage reveals its consistency: race was produced as and through naturalized relations of dependence and independence.

This kind of usage, I would suggest, is relatively impervious to attacks grounded in the facts of human biology. If being “Black” or “albino” means being dependent or servile, the attribution will continue to make sense so long as existing forms of domination are understood to make those dominated servile and dependent. Thus, it is important to note that the use of race words in these examples is not (only) taxonomic—those who use them do not simply mean to apply labels, in the way we might apply the label “red” to a stop sign. A biologist might define races genetically, and then apply (or fail to apply) the resulting taxonomy to human populations. An economist might give an objective definition of laborer, and then apply or fail to apply it in the same way. But in each case the purpose is to properly classify the phenomena under investigation as a prelude to scientific study. Our everyday use of race words is different however. It is not just that our usage conforms to other rules, or departs from scientific exactness; it is that our usage is partly constitutive of the phenomena so named. Race simply is the social practices constituted by our race talk. When we use race words, then, we are sometimes applying labels. But we are also constructing statuses, imposing norms of behavior, policing boundaries, and justifying hierarchies of domination. And this is how we construct race.Footnote ¹⁶

It is from this perspective that I want to suggest that race is (to the extent that it is) constructed out of the social practices that surround it (and which it in turn partly constitutes).Footnote ¹⁷ Consider the relation between race and labor implied in the notion of “the Negro's work.” Here we learn what “Negro” means in part by understanding the nature of agricultural work. The servility and dependence thought to be entailed in working on a plantation form part of what it means to be racially inferior; thus when Italians and poor Whites are positioned as servile and dependent through association with the same kind of work, the implied inferiority is cast as a racial one.Footnote ¹⁸ At the same time, the nature of “Negroes” tells us something about plantation labor, that “no self-respecting white man” (Brandfon Reference Brandfon1964) would do it. Because “Negroes” are what “Negroes” (ought to) do.

As long as we are clear about what we are saying—and that this is a purely contingent claim about race in the late nineteenth-century South—it makes sense to say that race and labor are mutually constitutive here. Again, one mustn't imagine taking two taxonomic tables, one for labor and one for race, and laying one on top of the other to discover that the definition of laborer is “a person with origins in one of the Black racial groups of Africa”—as if these taxonomic categories, abstracted from use, were themselves mutually constitutive. The Census Bureau's definition of Black, is after all, besides being tautological, carefully crafted so as not to mean what southerners meant by the word Negro. Rather than a taxonomy, then, we have a social status embedded within a series of partially overlapping social practices and constituted by the sum of what was meant by “the Negro's work.”

The contingency matters, however. I intend no mere reduction of race to class here. Instead, I am suggesting race naturalizes a particular form of subordination, one that casts relations of mastery and servitude in terms of dependence and independence. The central connection, indeed, links race to dependence, not race to labor. Where subordinate labor relations lack this feature, there is no reason (on my account) to expect the production of race.Footnote ¹⁹

“NEW BEINGS”

I have been arguing that in this period, wage labor entailed dependence, and dependence produced race. But what if this account of labor itself comes under pressure? The existing social and economic order saw rapid and transformative change at the turn of the century as the South became a more urban and industrial society. I want to read the resulting challenges to the existing racial order in terms of mobility. But I mean to convey something more precise than mere “bodies in motion.” Mobility made clear that supposed racial dependents were fully capable of independent action, and thereby destabilized fixed social relations across a wide range of contexts. This, I want to suggest, was the crucial problem to which legal segregation, antimiscegenation laws, lynching, and to some extent disfranchisement responded. We can also see why Reconstruction failed to pose quite the same kind of challenge. Sharecropping, as a status relationship, preserved the crucial element of social inequality on which the racial order itself depended. Mobility, I am suggesting, challenged just this necessary ground.

Take legal segregation. Many scholars point out that legal segregation was mainly a phenomenon of urban spaces and railroads, and some argue it was essentially a response to the incipient urbanization and industrialization of the South in these years (Ayers Reference Ayers1992; Woodward Reference Woodward1974; Williamson Reference Williamson1968; Cell Reference Cell1982; Rabinowitz Reference Rabinowitz1978, Reference Rabinowitz1992). If the puzzle is to account for the timing of legally mandated segregation (from about 1890 on), this is compelling. But these accounts take the racial character of the phenomenon for granted. What remains unexplored is exactly how urbanization and industrialization posed a challenge to the way race was constructed, and how legal segregation constituted a response to that challenge. In other words, the causal mechanisms may be relatively clear (if one accepts these accounts), but the nature of the change remains underspecified. I want to propose a general relationship between mobility and the various racist practices that marked the turn-of-the-twentieth-century South. Or, more precisely, I want to propose that different kinds of “mobility” problems provoked specific, but distinct, kinds of responses.Footnote ²⁰

Labor law itself, for example, was undergoing substantial change as the old master-servant law gave way to a more modern employer-employee law grounded in the notion of “freedom of contract.” “Equality of conditions,” Tocqueville wrote, “makes new beings of servant and master and establishes new relations between them” (Tocqueville [1835] Reference Tocqueville, Delba Winthrop and Delba Winthrop2000, p. 549). The mobility inherent in “democratic” labor relations prevents the consolidation of classes in the feudal sense of the word, that is, classes with distinct ways of life. As a result, the authority of the master is nothing but contractual—“the temporary and free accord of their two wills,” as Tocqueville ([1835] Reference Tocqueville, Delba Winthrop and Delba Winthrop2000, p. 549) would put it—so that from the points of view of both master and servant, there is no natural hierarchy implied in the temporary submission of one to the other. As Tocqueville says of tenant farmers and property owners, the two sides are “two strangers whom interest brings together and who rigorously discuss between themselves an affair whose sole subject is money” ([1835] Reference Tocqueville, Delba Winthrop and Delba Winthrop2000, p. 554).

In distilled form, this captures the ideology of free labor as applied to wage labor relations—a free contract that is limited both in its terms and duration by the wills of the contracting parties. No statuses are created, and the contracting parties may leave “at will.” When Tocqueville voiced his concerns about such “democratic” relations, few would have applied the idea to wage labor. But by the end of the century, such applications were becoming, at least in law, relatively routine. I hope it is obvious that there is at least something of a logical tension between this application of the doctrine of free labor and the conception of race I have traced so far. The essayists in DeBow's Review took it as given that contractual relations had replaced slavery. But Southern planters, their representatives, and their propagandists continued to view labor contracts as status contracts—contracts that created a hierarchy between the persons involved.Footnote ²¹

These competing conceptions of labor relations (as purposive or status contracts) coexisted, even in the North, until at least the early twentieth century. In their 1905 Lochner decision, the U.S. Supreme Court applied the “liberty of contract” doctrine to wage-labor relations for the first time—to protect workers from invidious state interference in their pursuit of an early death and, Karen Orren (Reference Orren1991) argues, to assert the continued jurisdiction of the courts over labor relations.Footnote ²² But this was the culmination of a long-term shift in the status and nature of wage labor in the United States, in part tracking the rise of an industrial labor force and increasing labor conflict.Footnote ²³

The South was not wholly divorced from these developments in legal doctrine or in the industrialization of its labor force, though in the latter respect the lag was far greater. In 1900, Southern judges in federal courts began to apply free-labor ideas to what had become known as peonage—the result of a welter of state laws, often passed within the previous decade, intended to bind agricultural laborers to their place of employment.Footnote ²⁴ Both the peonage laws themselves, however, and the decisions that struck them down, reveal that the legal status of labor was shifting. Each type of law, at least in its effects, violated the free-labor principle that a laborer was free to exit the contract “at will” without facing criminal penalties or the threat of compulsion. Yet these laws had a curious feature, as Robert Steinfeld (Reference Steinfeld1991) notes in passing, in that they implicitly recognized the principle they intended to thwart: “The formal rationale for these statutes was that they were intended to punish fraud, not to enforce labor contracts” (Steinfeld Reference Steinfeld1991, p. 184). These were attempts to ward off the effects of a shift in the legal status of laborers that state lawmakers themselves could no longer avoid.

Planters and state lawmakers were concerned, of course, about labor mobility. Naturally sharecroppers had been able to move from plantation to plantation in search of decent wages and working conditions since the early years of Reconstruction. Such mobility was in a sense implied by the end of slavery itself. But the increasing mobility of Black and White laborers after the 1890s—from rural areas to small towns and cities or from one state to another or from South to North—threatened labor shortages and thus upward pressure on wages and conditions. Peonage laws were one way to tackle the problem. Of course mobility from rural to urban areas (and Southern towns grew at a rapid pace in this period) posed problems in the towns as well as the country—the system of master and servant that structured race relations in rural areas was wholly absent from the towns. Since those who moved to town were frequently younger than those who stayed behind, “racial radicals” argued that a new generation, born after slavery, had been loosened from its restraints and norms of deference. There is no need to adopt this account, constructed in a self-serving manner to emphasize the “mistake” of abolishing slavery (Ayers Reference Ayers1992, p. 68).Footnote ²⁵ But it highlights the sense of an old order breaking down, of old rules no longer followed, which such “radicals” sought to tap. Segregation, in part, ordered urban public spaces and residential areas, frequently remapping those spaces and areas to separate lower-class from upper-class Whites, as well as Blacks from Whites (Bartley Reference Bartley1995, pp. 106–119).

At the same time, “Black literacy, black wealth, black businesses, black higher education, and black landowning all increased substantially” (Ayers Reference Ayers1992, p. 140) over these years, creating a new Black professional middle class which might aspire to first-class accommodations on railroads, or might hope to attend the best restaurants and theatres. Here we have another kind of mobility, and another set of segregation laws. Upper- and middle-class Whites publicly professed the problem here to be the unwashed state of their Black fellow travelers. But John Gray Lucas, a young Black legislator in Arkansas in 1891, saw through the bluster:

It was, in other words, the erasure of difference that threatened White elites, not merely mixing with their social or racial inferiors. As Edward L. Ayers (Reference Ayers1992) notes, bars, racetracks, and boxing rings were rarely segregated and were “notorious, and exciting, for the presence of blacks among whites” (Ayers Reference Ayers1992, p. 140). But the thrill of violating a taboo requires a taboo. There was nothing here that threatened the social order, any more than White wives and Black cooks in the kitchen. However, when Andrew Springs, traveling by train to Fisk University in 1891, suggested to a White policeman that far from being a “black rascal” he “were very near as white” as the policeman himself, the two very nearly came to blows (Ayers Reference Ayers1992, p. 138).

Of course, lying close to the surface of this was sexual tension. Ayers (Reference Ayers1992) suggests that “the railroads would not have been such a problem … had blacks not been seeking first-class accommodations where women as well as men traveled, where blacks appeared not as dirty workers, but as well-dressed and attractive ladies and gentlemen” (Ayers Reference Ayers1992, p. 140). Again it is useful to keep in mind that White men frequently had sexual relations with Black women in the context of slavery, while posing no threat to the social order. Whether physically coerced or not, such relationships were part of how masters dominated slaves (Fox-Genovese Reference Fox-Genovese1988). Even with regard to “antimiscegenation” laws, the issue was rarely “blood mixing,” per se; thus such laws targeted interracial marriage, not interracial sex. Such laws focused instead on the prospect of Black men and women meeting White men and women on the plane of social equality (Rosen Reference Rosen, Scully and Paton2005; Hodes Reference Hodes1997). Both segregation and antimiscegenation laws were intended to prevent this outcome.

The threat of sexualized Black men was also prominent in the public defense of lynching. But as many have pointed out, only a minority of cases arose from accusations of rape or sexual assault (Tolnay and Beck, Reference Tolnay and Beck1995). It is easy to think that lynchings were a form of labor control and occurred where Black populations were densest. In fact the opposite was true. Areas with low population density but high rates of Black population growth had the highest lynching rates. In other words, as Black laborers left the main plantation areas and moved into upland regions, seeking employment in the lumber industry or on recently developed plantations, they were likely to meet with active hostility from the mostly White population. Such men, with few or no ties to the local community, were greeted with extreme suspicion (Ayers Reference Ayers1992, p. 156). The phrase “masterless men” (Herzog Reference Herzog1989) comes to mind, but here with the stronger sense of rootless men. Here mobility was met with especially harsh attempts to thwart it—no modern management of populations but an almost medieval “festival of violence” (Tolnay and Beck, Reference Tolnay and Beck1995).

I cannot resist the play on words that the idea of rootless men opens up. These various forms of mobility, as it were, deracinated—they picked apart the construction of race at its roots. As I have sketched it, race was held in place by a set of agricultural labor relations in which racial inferiors were inferior insofar as they were dependent and servile. As Black (and White) men and women pushed at the possibilities that technological, economic, and political change presented, these sources of mobility, and also the simple fact of mobility itself, broke the old relations apart. If the social facts were seriously bucking, however, my suggestion is that legal segregation, antimiscegenation laws, and lynching should be understood as attempts to stay in the saddle. I do not mean to suggest anything like a conscious or coordinated plan of action. The forms of mobility were only loosely linked and appeared in disparate contexts. Various actors responded within those contexts and were not necessarily connected to each other by social class, region, or larger political purpose. The result, however, was a reconfiguration of race itself.

MODERNITY, RACE, AND DEPENDENCE

“But what is this group; and how do you differentiate it; and how can you call it ‘black’ when you admit it is not black?” so W. E. B. Du Bois ([1940] Reference Du Bois1994, p. 153) has his fictitious White friend, Van Dieman, demand in consternation. And the famous answer is “I recognize it quite easily and with full legal sanction; the black man is a person who must ride ‘Jim Crow’ in Georgia.” And yet this ability was the result of laws that had been placed on the books within Du Bois's own (admittedly lengthy) lifetime. These laws represented a political achievement, the victory of White supremacy over the course of the previous half century and more. Yet they were also testament to a profound instability in the concept of race itself. In the nineteenth century, even for a northerner like Du Bois, race had been “obvious and no definition was needed” (p. 100). Du Bois's conversation with Van Dieman in Dusk of Dawn carefully unpacks all the possible ways of making sense of race that had been aired since that time, leading Van Dieman to frustration but leading Du Bois to conclude that race was, in an important sense, a creature of the very laws that presumed only to police it.

Here I have argued that this “obvious” quality of race, at least in the South, was not secured by the fact that southern views of human biology had yet to be challenged (their usage did not conform to these categories in any case), but rather was secured by the structure of the prevailing economic and social order. Various aspects, indeed almost every aspect, of this order underwent fairly substantial change in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was these changes, I have argued, that put race into question during these years. I have also argued that it is useful to read legal segregation, lynching, and so on, as various attempts by White elites to reconfigure race—and not merely conceptually, of course, but in the sense of maintaining power and position. Thus the various statutes approximating a “one drop” definition of Black, or the judicial opinions fretting over the difference between a “person of color” and a “person of the black race,” were produced by the instability of the underlying racial categories to which the laws applied.Footnote ²⁶ One form of racial subordination, based on personal dependence through labor, was coming apart at the seams, but the laws that sought to police the resultant forms of mobility were inadequate to the task. And so epicycles on epicycles, between 1890 and 1910 states across the South mandated segregated accommodations for the races, and after 1910 had to spill copious judicial ink trying to define who belonged to which race.

But I think we can also see that Du Bois ([1940] Reference Du Bois1994) was not quite right. Both before and after Jim Crow there was a certain obviousness to race, legal and scientific difficulties aside. Here again I want to insist that we construct race through the very act of speaking of it, not through our skin or hair color, but through our practice of naturalizing dependence and independence within which supposedly categorical biological differences are deployed. Our race talk partly constitutes the practices that make up race, and refers just to those practices. Insofar as this process is largely self-referential, it can also be relatively insulated from the demands of more exacting discourses. Discourses of law and science, while they might shore up the concept of race when it is under threat, are only tangentially connected to contexts of everyday speech, and the criteria we use in these contexts are quite different. It is quite possible for a concept to be thoroughly demolished in law and science (and this is not wholly true of race) while living on in other contexts, sustained in ways that neither the law nor scientific argument can, by themselves, undermine.

What did undermine a specific concept of race was the development of modern economic and social relations. This will sound strange to those who think race is tailor-made for modernity—or at least cut from its cloth. But I am not suggesting that race is an organic, let alone primordial, attachment atomized by modern impersonal relations. A specific concept of race was built into and out of an agrarian way of life that critics in the 1940s still described as “feudal” (Bartley Reference Bartley1995, pp. 31–33). And modernization did indeed thoroughly undermine this way of life. But, I have suggested, race was simply rebuilt, not as part of a conscious plan of action but as the result of disparate reactions to different aspects of the problems mobility posed. In this article, I cannot pursue the ramifications for how we conceive the relation between race and modernity. For now I want simply to show how a thick description of the process of social construction can offer analytical insights into the nature of social change itself. On this model, social constructionism about race is not just a fancy way of denying biological determinism, nor is it a way to seek the “purification” of race, as Fields (Reference Fields2003) contests. Race emerges, instead, as a specific set of social practices and beliefs centered on naturalizing forms of subordination that are understood in terms of dependence and independence. Social constructionism, in turn, tells us how these practices are built and sustained and how they change. An historical account of such practices, finally, helps to explain patterns of behavior that have otherwise eluded complete explanation.