Deep Roots: How Slavery Still Shapes Southern Politics

On 2 February 1893, the mayor of Paris, Texas, gave the town’s white children the day off from school so that they could attend a lynching. They joined their families in a procession that accompanied a carnival float pulled by four white horses to a gallows erected at the edge of town. There the crowd watched and cheered as local whites tortured and hung Henry Smith, a black man accused of murdering a white girl. The authors of this careful study tell this story to illustrate the “intergenerational socialization” (p. 161) of white southerners, whose views, they argue, are still shaped by the inheritance of racial slavery. The history of American slavery is well known, but it is usually thought of in the past tense. In 1860, four million enslaved African Americans labored throughout the dynamic southern economy. An interstate slave trade that broke up thousands of black families concentrated enslaved people in particular counties. Jefferson County, Mississippi, for example, was 81 percent enslaved in 1860, while Buncombe County, North Carolina, was only 15 percent enslaved. These numbers reflected variations in agricultural suitability; the most profitable agricultural regions drew the most slaves. But remarkably, the authors have found that the prevalence of slavery in a particular county in 1860 has a measurable impact upon the racial attitudes of the white community in that county today.