The Uplift Generation ─ Cooperation Across the Color Line in Early Twentieth-Century Virginia

The Uplift Generation presents stories across the color line. It looks at Virginian reformers over 30 years (1900 and 1930), who, with a variety of motivations, believed in interracial cooperation from one-on-one to large organizations, and the consequences they wrought. Interracial cooperation in Virginia before the late 1920s was a means to create and mold rather than oppose Jim Crow. Activism on the African American side of the color line tried to preserve their rights and opportunities in an atmosphere of increasing racism and the constraints of segregation. Pinpointing motivations on the white side is more complicated. Some acted out of a humanitarian impulse, while the work also fulfilled other purposes—moral paternalist, as well as progressive fervor for “bettering” society that often really meant social control. African American leaders, like Thomas Walker, hoped for a day when they could convince whites that notions of racial superiority were inherently flawed. Seven chapters with conclusion are: paternalism and cooperation in the old dominion; encroaching segregation; public welfare and the segregated state; women and cooperation; race and war; contested authority; rethinking alliances; conclusion: new strategies in a changed world. Annotation ©2017 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)

Clayton McClure Brooks, Assistant Professor of History at Mary Baldwin University, is editor of A Legacy of Leadership: Governors and American History.