Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, a seventh-generation North Carolinian, is Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor
of HIstory at Yale University.
Sample Chapter
Chapter One Excerpt
PLACE AND POSSIBILITY
"Some would say that woman is good in her place. This reminds me of what some white people say of the Negro:
that 'He is good in his place.'"(1) Sarah Dudley Pettey challenged the idea of "place," not simply
through words such as these but also through her acts. She was an African American woman, the daughter of slaves,
who lived in obscurity in a small North Carolina town. In 1896, when she wrote these words, Dudley Pettey thought
she saw the day coming when a person's place would depend not on sex or color but on energy and ability.
Since historians enter a story at its end, they some times forget that what is past to them was future to their
subjects. Too often, what they lose in the telling is what made their subjects' lives worth living: hope. This
is a book about hope, about African American women such as Dudley Pettey whose alternative visions of the future
included the equity in society they had learned to expect in their families, schools, and marriages.(2) Their progressive
visions, if realized, would have ended white supremacy. These were lives on the cusp of change.
With a less prosperous white elite than Virginia or South Carolina, a fast-growing, but ferociously struggling,
middling group of people of all hues, and some chance for two-party government, North Carolina's people contested
power-economic, social, and political-more openly and more heatedly than many other southerners. In the western
mountains, this upper South state resembled its neighbor eastern Tennessee, with pockets of bitter Unionists, an
entrenched Republican Party, and a sparse African American population. In the east, where plantations produced
cotton and tobacco, black majorities voted in the 1880s and 1890s, and rough port cities could only aspire to the
grandeur of Charleston or Savannah. Inhabitants of the crossroad Piedmont hamlets, where whites barely outnumbered
a growing black urban population, struggled to turn their locations into a reason for existence and then, as now,
looked toward Atlanta with a mixture of envy and disgust.(3) North Carolina's geographical, economic, and historical
diversity resulted in close gubernatorial and national elections and a legislature bristling with Republican representatives,
not to mention the odd Prohibitionist or Silverite. Shared power among political parties meant that legal segregation
came late to the state-not until 1899 did the state legislature demand that railroads provide Jim Crow cars-and
that disfranchisement trailed the 1890 Mississippi law by a decade.(4)
Black North Carolinians realized the precariousness of their position even as they imagined the future. North Carolinian
Charles Chesnutt, a child genius whose precocity and fair complexion often led whites to draw him into conversation,
learned, along with his daily lessons in German and Latin, the depths of southern white prejudice. In his teenage
years in the 1870s, before whites perfected Jim Crow institutions, Chesnutt confided to his diary the absurdity
of walking around in a place where the color line moved under his feet. Later, after he had left North Carolina
and became a renowned novelist, Chesnutt borrowed from mythology to describe his memories of the limited social
space assigned African Americans in his home state. He compared white North Carolinians to Procrustes, the innkeeper
at Attica, who indulged his fetish that each guest be made to fit his bed perfectly. If one was too short, Procrustes
stretched him to new dimensions. If another was too tall, Procrustes simply cut off his legs so that he fit just
right.(5) According to Chesnutt, African Americans in North Carolina slept each night in similarly circumscribed
spots. "It was a veritable bed of Procrustes, this standard which the whites had set for the Negroes,"
Chesnutt commented. "Those who grew above it must have their heads cut off, figuratively speaking-must be
forced back to the level assigned to their race." On the other side, the lynch rope swayed. "Those who
fell beneath the standard set had their necks stretched, literally enough, as the ghastly record in the daily papers
gave conclusive evidence."(6) There would be little rest for African Americans as the century drew to a close.
Nonetheless, even as black North Carolinians saw repression creeping across the South in the 1890s, they hoped
to turn the tide in their own state. Reading their story from beginning to end, rather than teleologically, we
can see-as they did-that North Carolina could have been the pivot upon which national race relations turned. If
people like Sarah Dudley Pettey and Charles Calvin Pettey had been able to hold their ground in the last decade
of the nineteenth century, the trend toward disfranchisement and segregation might have been reversed and the history
of the twentieth century rewritten. Certainly, black men and women in the state were equal to the task. Many enjoyed
fine educations, economic success, and political power, and they saw clearly the danger that awaited them. They
tried everything possible to save themselves. Their counterstrategies lay bare two lost worlds: one actual, the
other woven from hope.
African Americans hoped that their success would offer testimony to convince whites to recognize class similarities
across racial divides; they hoped to prove to whites that they could be Best Men and Best Women. Instead of undermining
white supremacy, however, postbellum black progress shored it up. White men reordered southern society through
segregation and disfranchisement in the 1890s because they realized that African American success not only meant
competition in the marketplace and the sharing of political influence but also entailed a challenge to fundamental
social hierarchies that depended nearly as much upon fixed gender roles as they did on the privileges of whiteness.
Black progress threatened what southerners called "place."
Summary
Glenda Gilmore recovers the rich nuances of southern political history by placing black women at its center.
She explores the pivotal and interconnected roles played by gender and race in North Carolina politics from the
period immediately preceding the disfranchisement of black men in 1900 to the time black and white women gained
the vote in 1920. Gender and Jim Crow argues that the ideology of white supremacy embodied in the Jim Crow
laws of the turn of the century profoundly reordered society and that within this environment, black women crafted
an enduring tradition of political activism.
According to Gilmore, a generation of educated African American women emerged in the 1890s to become, in effect,
diplomats to the white community after the disfranchisement of their husbands, brothers, and fathers. Using the
lives of African American women to tell the larger story, Gilmore chronicles black women's political strategies,
their feminism, and their efforts to forge political ties with white women. Her analysis highlights the active
role played by women of both races in the political process and in the emergence of southern progressivism. In
addition, Gilmore illuminates the manipulation of concepts of gender by white supremacists and shows how this rhetoric
changed once women, black and white, gained the vote.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Place and Possibility
2 Race and Womanhood
3 Race and Manhood
4 Sex and Violence in Procrustes's Bed
5 No Middle Ground
6 Diplomatic Women
7 Forging Interracial Links
8 Women and Ballots
Epilogue
