Alec Ainsworth

465
Zenderland
12/12/20
Unbreakable Triad of the South

There is no other location in America where history is as fundamental for the way of life

as the South. After the Civil War, the South could never be the same slaveholding

region it thrived in for the last few centuries. Southerners of all colors now had to create

an environment coexisting with one another. Wyton Marsalis, one of the world's most

renowned trumpet players from New Orleans, stated that: “You have people who don’t

like each other, but they have to deal with each other. Because they’re living together

and they share in this culture.” (Gumbo, 16:12) Race, gender, and class were incredibly

ingrained in Southern life, to the point that they determined a Southerner’s destiny at

birth. However, in every century since Reconstruction, the grasps that held those three

key factors fluctuated in relation to their portrayal in media, political tactics, and in the

creation of Southern music.

In recanting the South’s history and the experiences Southerners had, it is

impossible to negate race. Before the Civil War, race determined if someone was

property or a free citizen. During Reconstruction, African Americans were no longer

enslaved with the 13th amendment, became citizens of the United States officially with

the 14th amendment, and were given the right to vote with the 15th amendment. But

with these advancements and making whites equal legally to blacks came an outcry of

white Southerners. “By 1877, when Reconstruction ended, my estimate is that about

2,000 black men held some official position.” (Foner, South Carolina’s Forgotten Black

Political Revolution) The Klu Klux Klan arose to reclaim the Southern way of life lost
during reconstruction, and a new form of media that took America by storm and gave

the Klan a boost in their efforts to cleanse the South of equality. Blackface, which was

invented in the North, portrayed blacks as lazy, imbecilic sexual deviants that cannot

function in the white world. “Despite the overt racism, the minstrel show was a blend of

lively music, knockabout comedy, and sophisticated elegance. A bizarre and

complicated ritual in which blacks and whites would interpret and misinterpret each

other for decades.” (Gumbo, 17:09) The Klan took blackface to promote their own

portray of blacks. “Many early Klansmen also wore blackface, simultaneously

scapegoating and mocking their victims.” (Kinney, How the Klan Got Its Hood) The Klan

killed deliberately based on race. “Journalist Walter White, whose ability to pass as

white enabled him to interview the murderers themselves, he reported that they had

hung Mary upside-down, set her on fire, cut out her fetus and stomped it, then shot

Mary’s body multiple times.” (Kinney, How the Klan Got Its Hood) The Klan even

“staged the mock lynching of a man in blackface; they lassoed black spectators.”

(Kinney, How the Klan Got Its Hood) Blackface was utilized to distribute racism in a

colorful light, neglecting the atrocities and violence that befell African Americans and the

relentless fear they lived in the South.

Blackface and the Klan were combined 50 years after the Civil War when W.D.

Griffith created one of the first major motion pictures, Birth of a Nation (1915). In the

film, black soldiers and actors who were essential to the film were all in blackface. One

of the most significant factors of the film was not how racist the film was towards black

people, but the fact that it was shown and praised at the White House set tightened the

grip on Southern life for the difference between white and black life in the south. “As
African Americans made political and economic progress during the postbellum era,

whites often expressed racial fears by focusing on black male sexuality and the need to

protect white women from purported threats to their purity.” (Kershenbaum, 9) The Klan

benefited by proving the be the saviors of the white maiden, that must be protected from

negro domination and miscegenation. “The myth of "negro domination" over white

womanhood became the powerful tool that the white supremacists used throughout

their campaign to dismantle African Americans' political and economic power and to

restore Democratic hegemony.” (Kershenbaum, 9) The first woman senator, Rebecca

Lamiter Felton had stated that: “If it takes lynching to protect woman’s dearest

possession from drunken, ravening human beasts, then I say lynch a thousand a week

if it becomes necessary.” (Kinney, How the Klan Got Its Hood) After reconstruction, the

Klan and other whites found themselves attempting to “close off opportunities for a

whole generation of talented and ambitious black men.” (Foner, South Carolina’s

Forgotten Black Political Revolution) Even women participated in the Klan. “Shortly after

the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, the Klan auxiliary organization “Women of

the Ku Klux Klan” formed.” (Kinney, How the Klan Got Its Hood) In regards to a media

that represented racial relations between whites and blacks, Birth of a Nation could not

be further from the truth. In the film, black soldiers toss aside white votes, but after

Reconstruction, “where 95% of the city’s black men had been registered to vote, just 1%

was now eligible to go to the polls.” (Gumbo, 33:17) Race in the South tarnishes the real

portrayal. In both blackface and Birth of a Nation, the historical truths are fogged by the

recounts of white Southerners reclaiming their dominance in the South and establishing

a clear difference in equality that was legally there but not enforced.
 Blackface and the Klan helped promote covert racism, but the Long Southern

Strategy allowed overt racism with gender and class distinctions in the South. “The

Long Southern Strategy targeted white Southerners who felt alienated from, angry at,

and resentful of the policies that granted equality and sought to level the playing field for

all of these groups” (Maxwell & Shield, 8) The Long Southern Strategy was the perfect

plan for Klan members and white Southerners who felt that they had been betrayed by

letting the once enslaved African Americans be equal. “Though several generations

removed, the memory of Confederate disenfranchisement during postwar military

occupation, and the resulting election of hundreds of former slaves and freedmen to

local, state, and even national office, made the threat to white power anything but

abstract.” (Maxwell & Shield, 5) The Southern Strategy was planned out in the middle of

the 20th century and successfully carried out by Nixon who “could at least, prevent any

additional erosion of the Southern white way of life.” (Maxwell & Shield, 6) Nixon’s

Southern Stragedy offered a “two-for-one deal (to) criminalize black men while silencing

white women and keep Southern white male power unchallenged.” (Maxwell & Shields,

9) One of the focal points of the Southern Strategy was to maintain paternalism,

specifically white paternalism. “And if that program was portrayed as leveling the playing

field between whites and blacks or even men and women, or if it was the signature

accomplishment of an African American leader or advocated for by a feminist, then

opposing it—as irrational as it may seem—becomes part of a larger campaign to defend

the southern white way of life, even as it pragmatically makes daily life that much

harder.” (Maxwell & Shield, 35) However, to maintain the promising Southern Stragedy

and maintaining a higher status, whites had to forfeit some of their own power. “At the
base of that fear was what Smith calls the “grand bargain” of white supremacy,

buttressed by paternalism and evangelicalism, whereby the Southern white masses

relinquished political power to the few in exchange for maintaining their social status as

better than the black man.” (Maxwell & Shields, 1) In the South, even poor whites

desired to be above blacks. In terms of class, poor whites were often at the same level

of poverty. “Poor Southern whites have long been conditioned to forfeit a personal battle

in the service of winning an imagined war from which they do not benefit.” (Maxwell &

Shield, 35) Race triumphs over class, poor white Southerners, in the Southern Strategy

had the advantage. “In the South, emphasizing the undeserving status of blacks and

their responsibility for their own poverty acquitted and applauded white southern culture

while further distancing poor white southerners from African Americans.” (Maxwell &

Shields, 11) One severe example of a successful Southern Stragedy was the horrific

case of Emmett Till.

Emmett Till, a middle-class, 14-year-old African American boy from Chicago,

visited Mississippi and was murdered brutally for false accusations of the white wife.

“Successful black men constituted a challenge to the established order; white racists

responded by disseminating images of animalistic black rapists who preyed on virginal

white women at any opportunity.” (Kershenbaum,10) Emmett was a young middle-class

boy who was visiting the rural, poor Southern city of Money, Mississippi. Roy Bryant and

his half-brother brutally beat and murdered an innocent boy who was convicted of

whistling at Bryant’s wife. An all-white jury acquitted the two men. Race, class, and

gender all collide and align with Emmett Till, he was a black boy who grew up in a

middle-class environment and was accused of harassing Bryant’s wife. In the South,
Emmet could not have more money than a poor white person nor have the gall to look

in the direction of a white woman because he was black. The Southern Strategy allowed

Jim Crow laws to thrive, validated racism, and creating an “otherness” environment.

Had Bryant been a woman of color and been raped by white men, “she stands before

the white judge as a black woman, she is already hypersexualized within a context of

power relations defined by race.” (Daivs, 108) In the Southern Strategy’s political world,

race reigns at the top of the chain and is distorted even more by the complexly of

gender and class.

Like political tactics and the Southern Strategy, music is nearly impossible to

account for without toiling with race, gender, and class. “Jazz is about freedom. It’s

about a certain kind of liberation…Only African Americans were enslaved, only African

Americans were legally a people who have a legacy and history, historical

consciousness of being unfree in a free country.” (Gumbo, 10:39) Wyton Marsalis’ life

revolved around New Orleans and jazz music. He explained that jazz was only possible

because of the historical enslavement and mistreatment of African Americas. “It’s the

fact of the abolition of slavery that made jazz music possible. It comes from a

consciousness of those who are outside of something but in the middle of it. These are

people who are American in the realest sense.” (Gumbo, 19:21) In a very similar sense,

the blues invoked a similar expressional value to African Americans. “If not for the

blues, many individual tragedies affecting black working-class communities might never

have been recast as social, collective adversities.” (Davis, 111) Unlike the media that

offered black face and the political tactics that delivered the Southern Strategy, jazz and

blues offered an environment for poor, black women to express their sorrows.
“Her heartfelt presentation reveals the extent to which she identified with the countless

numbers of black women for whom domestic service was the only available

occupation.” (Davis, 92) In the film The Green Book (2018), Don Shirley and Tony

Vallelonga traverse into the deep South on a journey to spread jazz from a black

musician. Throughout the entire film, Don and Tony embody the same music and songs

from the 1950s and 1960s jazz and blues artists and songs in every scene radio are

introduced in a scene. Jazz and blues even allowed women of color to express their

sexual lives and not be seen as hypersexual creatures. “The lyrics of women's blues, as

interpreted in the recorded performances of the classic blues singers, explore

frustrations associated with love and sexuality and emphasize the simultaneously

individual and collective nature of personal relationships.” (Davis, 91) One crucial

aspect of female African American blues and jazz singers, sung about their livelihoods

and way of life in the South. “And the overwhelming majority of black working women

cooked, cleaned houses, did the laundry, or engaged in some other form of domestic

service for well-off white people.” (Davis, 98) Race, gender, and class are present and

indiscernible in Southern music, black women working for white families.

Jazz and blues are irreversibly present in the South, and the class distinction of

African American female workers who sang their woes in place of combatting action.

“As surely as the Southern White intends them to “keep their place" the majority of

Negroes are prepared to accept it. They know that they cannot change the world but

that they have to live in it.” (Davis, 93) The African American way of life in the South is

contrived and displayed in jazz and blues music. This is effortlessly displayed in

“Strange Fruit” and “Poor Man’s Blues” (which) has been viewed as an anomaly.
How­ever, this has as much to do with the definitions of social protest music as with the

explicitly racial and class evocations in the lyrics of the two songs.” (Davis, 96) The

collective web that binds race, gender, and class are wound together to form an entire

music genre that sprouted from the enslavement of African Americans.

The grasp of Southern history holds the South in a position for change. One

example of the South disregarding their not-so-recent history is the removal of

Confederate statues. The same statues were built decades after to commemorate the

lost cause and a lost dream. In the South race, gender, and class have always been

both a factor and hindrance for some, but it is nonetheless part of the Southerners’ way

of living in their daily lives. “It is almost impossible for the white American to realize how

tightly he has united against his black fellow citizens.” (Davis, 92) Unless the South’s

history is viewed from an outside perspective, it appears nearly preposterous to imagine

how large a role race, gender, and class molded Southern life from Reconstruction to

the modern-day South. However, gender and class play a more intricate role in a

Southerner’s life than race, the historic grasp that people of color have endured over the

decades since they were granted the same freedom as their white counterparts have

resulted in pure hatred and malice. The usage of blackface and the Birth of a Nation

allowed the Klu Klux Klan to introduce racism freely in the South. Nixon’s Southern

Strategy allowed the jim crow laws and killings of innocent blacks to remain

unchallenged. And finally, in music, without the historic enslavement of African

Americans, there would be no jazz or blues that originated in the South. It goes without

saying that Southern culture and the way of life as a Southerner is bound by the triad

that maintains an unbreakable, consistent balance between race, gender, and class.