Scholars have long debated the complicity of Southern white women after the Civil War in helping create a racialist and racist regional identity and denying or delaying civil rights for African Americans. These studies have largely focused on the activities of elite white women property owners, club members, and writers. Yet few scholars have…

Given the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of E. Franklin Frazier's award-winning "Black Bourgeoisie", this article reconsiders the political nature of a respectability discourse among black teachers in the Jim Crow South. Writing against Frazier's image of a materialistic and status-addicted black middle class, I argue that the…

From 1880 through the mid-1920s, reformers labored to make a "New South" through the agency of public education. During those years, North Carolina led the way in building thousands of new schoolhouses, professionalizing teacher training, and developing an elaborate educational bureaucracy. Southern educational reform turned on the…