Q&A: Elizabeth Herbin-Triant, Mark Schultz, and Robert Hunt Ferguson on The Politics of White Supremacy in the Aftermath of the 2020 Election

We sat down for a Q&A with three historians who have examined the politics of white supremacy in their groundbreaking books. Elizabeth A. Herbin-Triant is author of Threatening Property: Race, Class, and Campaigns to Legislate Jim Crow Neighborhoods. Mark Roman Schultz is author of The Rural Face of White Supremacy: Beyond Jim Crow. Robert Hunt Ferguson is author of Remaking the Rural South: Interracialism, Christian Socialism, and Cooperative Farming in Jim Crow Mississippi. They discuss their interpretations of past racism in the rural South, reflect on the current predicament and grievances of white rural Americans, and share their thoughts on a way forward. 

It should be cited as: AHS Q&A, "The Politics of White Supremacy in the Aftermath of the 2020 Election," with Elizabeth A. Herbin-Triant, Mark Roman Schultz, and Robert Hunt Ferguson, The Short Rows, February 10, 2021. https://www.aghistorysociety.org/ahs-blog/qampa-the-politics-of-white-supremacy-in-the-aftermath-of-the-2020-election

Agricultural History Society: The three of you have explored rural white people and the politics of white supremacy in detail in three different states: NC, GA, MS.  Do you have any thoughts about how politics and practices differed from place to place, and in what ways they were similar?

EHT: There were fewer lynchings in North Carolina than in Georgia and Mississippi, which suggests that there were other, preferred, methods of keeping African Americans “in their place” in the state.  But—rather than accepting the argument some people have made that North Carolina was more progressive than other southern states—we have to remember that North Carolina was also the site of one of the worst examples of mass violence enacted upon black people, in Wilmington in 1898.  Prior to the Wilmington massacre (or coup, as some scholars characterize it), African Americans enjoyed real successes in this majority-black city.  They held good jobs, including political offices, and they owned property in desirable sections of the city.  An interracial “Fusion” coalition of Republicans and Populists led the city.  A group of nine Democratic elites organized a coup in order to remove Fusionists from political office as well drive blacks from the city.  (The deep racism that shaped this coup is revealed in the vow of Alfred Moore Waddell, one of the organizers, that “we will never surrender to a ragged raffle of negroes, even if we have to choke the current of the Cape Fear with carcasses.”)  A mob stirred up by these elites attacked Wilmington’s black residents and their property, killing perhaps hundreds of African Americans and driving out about 1,400.

MRS: Throughout the Jim Crow period, white supremacy shaped politics across the nation.  But as Elizabeth writes, it varied in methods and rhetoric. In the black-majority plantation belt of Georgia, planters were secure in their economic, political, and social control. They used their power and the rhetoric of paternalism to exploit the labor, social deference, and political votes of their sharecroppers and other dependents. Poor whites had no such rhetorical device. To politically cooperate with African Americans, they had to do so as equals, which they found galling. This poverty of language ultimately undercut biracial Populism.  

RHF:  As both Elizabeth and Mark point out, white supremacy was the driving force behind regional and national politics throughout the era. Yet, exactly how white supremacy was weaponized played out differently from location to location. In rural Mississippi in the Jim Crow era, it was the economically powerful and politically well-connected who wielded--and carried out--threats of racial violence. As a result, white supremacists were most effective in small towns where they had tacit support and participation from private and municipal groups such as the Citizens’ Councils or local law enforcement. Poor whites were far more likely to throw their economic and political fates in with poor African Americans. But as Mark says, a paucity of language around interracial cooperation meant that proponents had to turn to the high-minded rhetoric of liberation theology or socialism to try to convince the rural poor that their futures were bound together. That ultimately proved risky and ineffective in the face of the suffocating ubiquity of white supremacist ideology.   

AHS: What’s the importance of how political protest and violence are labeled?  The current debate over "protests" versus "riots" has me thinking about the historical contention over violence in the South, from Colfax to Wilmington to Elaine.  What was a "riot" and what was a "massacre"?  What did it mean to label a killing a "lynching" rather than "murder"? How should we label what happened at the Capitol?

EHT: Historians have debated what to call the events in Wilmington. While the attack on black people and property was traditionally described as a “riot,” historians have more recently rejected this term as it makes the events sound spontaneous, rather than carefully planned out, which they were. The term “massacre” highlights the intentionality of the killing (which we can see in Waddell’s vow), while “coup” emphasizes the political aim of replacing one government (here, an interracial one) with another (a white supremacist government). 

Turning to what took place at the US Capitol, I think that “insurrection” is helpful in describing participants’ goal of overturning the results of a fair election, and it captures the violence that many of them had planned to carry out.

MRS: Whiteness covers over horrific crimes with a cloak of respectability, in the past and the present. What “upstanding” white citizens of southern small towns and farm country did during the age of lynching or white urbanites did in episodic racial pogroms, north and south, was responsible citizenship in action, according to its violent practitioners. Upstanding whites defended mob violence as the “necessary and natural” defense against their social construct, the “black beast.” 

In contrast, whites viewed/view even unarmed, moderate black protest as somehow a threat to the general order and an attack on civilization. Simple political demonstrations and parades frequently drew white supremacist violence that was condoned or organized by local authorities. 

And whites used any examples of actual black violence to beat back black people’s claims for basic civil rights.  When local reports of crimes committed by black people proved inadequate to stoke white anxiety, white opinion shapers went to great lengths to supplement them. In Hancock County, Georgia, when poor whites joined with black voters in the Populist Movement, the Democratic planter controlled county newspaper began to sift national news reports for any sensational evidence of black criminality. Casual white readers must have felt that they were at risk of a black crime wave, probably not noticing that they had never before read about murders from as far away as California. By manufacturing this image and accumulating evidence day-by-day, the planters sowed terror and rage, which spilled over in the shootings and lynchings, the disfranchisement and segregation, that marked the 1890s as the high tide of white supremacy.  

RHF: I teach the history of the Wilmington coup each semester to my undergraduate students.  Most come away from those lectures and discussions doubly appalled. They are first shocked that, even though most of them grew up in North Carolina, they have never heard of the violent events of 1898. Next comes stunned confusion: “How come this was allowed to happen? Why didn’t the federal government step in?” Their dismay reveals a lot about their nascent perceptions of justice and American history. But it also reveals the extent to which the Wilmington coup was thoroughly whitewashed by participants and supporters. As the events played out, leaders of the coup used violent rhetoric to demand that the white mob take back their city and restore “honest” government. Fomented by the exhortations of their leaders (such as the chilling quote from Alfred Waddell), the mob carried out murder. The coup was successful and white supremacists violently took control of the Wilmington government. But as time rolled on and supporters of the violence rose to prominence in state and national politics, the coup was discussed as something unfortunate but necessary. Eventually, city, state, and national leaders obscured the events so completely that it was nearly erased from living memory. 

That the 1898 coup still results in shock for some students helps explain why so many Americans were taken by surprise when a mob—incited by the rhetoric of elected leaders—stormed the capital on January 6. Even as the mob forced its way into the building, some political leaders and commentators sought to paper over the events. In order to avoid the whitewashing that enveloped Wilmington, and to understand that what happened at the Capitol was part of a long history of white violence, it is necessary to use the most accurate language at our disposal, informed by historical context. The events of January 6, 2021 were an attempted coup led by insurrectionists aiming to overturn a fair and democratic election.  

AHS: Do you see parallels between the histories you’ve reconstructed in your scholarship and the political climate of today? 

EHT: Sadly, in both my research and today, I see aggrieved white people turning to white supremacy, thinking it will be the solution to their problems. These are people who are alarmed by the successes of African Americans (successes in gaining property and political office both over a hundred years ago and today), people who think that any opportunity available to nonwhites means that there is less opportunity for them. They feel entitled to opportunity, and they are open to taking drastic action—severely limiting the rights of others—in order to regain or maintain opportunity for themselves.  

MRS: The 1890s saw an economic downturn for white yeomen in both absolute and relative terms. Many of them lost their land and fell into sharecropping because of market forces well beyond their control or comprehension. They were living simply and working hard, yet, they were failing in this land of opportunity. Simultaneously, they witnessed large numbers of African Americans rising to farm ownership. Their relative decline was all the more galling because of their white supremacist attitudes, which told them that the “natural order of things” had been inverted. Resentment, bewilderment, and racism in the late nineteenth century fueled uprisings both against the planter class and against African Americans.  

I think we are witnessing the same politics of resentment today. Many white Americans feel economically marginalized by mechanization and globalization. Poor whites’ sense of relative displacement is played up by irresponsible social media and ultimately blamed on the “overreach” of a “bloated,” out-of-touch federal government. Many poor whites see themselves as “true Americans,” whose faith and guns can restore America to the nostalgic greatness of the 1950s. They are lashing out in different directions. Many who have sought their salvation in an anti-establishment, authoritarian president are coming out to vote for the first time.  They think they are the heroes in this story.  

AHS: What can we take from your studies of Southern history to help us better understand the culture and politics of rural America more broadly?

EHT: My research looks at white supremacy among white southerners as influenced by class interests. While white southerners generally supported a set of policies that fit under the banner of white supremacy in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries (such as the segregation of public spaces), there was a limit to how much their interests aligned. When it came to policies that affected their own economic opportunity—including access to property ownership, decent wages, and cheap workers—the things that separated white southerners from one another led to bitter disagreement. The example that I focus on is residential segregation; I found that middling whites generally supported programs to segregate neighborhoods in rural and urban North Carolina to protect them from having to compete with African Americans, while elites did not, as they wanted to keep black workers at hand.

I investigated dynamics in which poor and middling whites bought into white supremacist lies put out by elite whites, often about the perceived threat black men posed to the purity of white women.  White elites—who might or might not believe these lies themselves—used lies and their effects on nonelite whites to further their own political goals. When white supremacist lies motivated middling whites to push for legally segregated neighborhoods, elites ignored their demands.

Ezra Klein wrote a piece in the New York Times recently that made me think of what I’d seen in my research. He pointed out that Republican leaders have not believed Donald Trump’s lies, but that Trump’s followers—many of them in rural America—have. They believe that the election was stolen and that it is up to them to protect our democracy from those who would commit fraud to get the election result they want. As in my research, you see here a group of people—riled up by a narrative that they cannot see is false—who take matters into their own hands, expressing their rage and trying to enact their own agenda.

MRS: When I was interviewing elderly black and white farmers in middle Georgia during the 1980s, they told me that social and residential segregation were marks of urban white supremacy, which was far less possible or desired in rural space.  (Elizabeth’s work has driven home this point in North Carolina.) Because rural folk of both races shared space and overlapped in culture, complex personal relationships formed across the race lines. Whites had the power to fill these relationships with petty cruelty and exploitation, or with shades of neighborly mutuality. Even the most intimate relationships between rural individuals or individual families almost never led whites to stand publicly in solidarity with African Americans in general.  Yet, they did allow personal exchanges to take place, sometimes understood as controlling patronage, sometimes as neighborly or Christian kindnesses. Like Nate Shaw of Alabama, these elderly farmers continued to puzzle out the meaning of these distant relationships within the context of a white supremacist culture.  

As a young historian, I felt hopeful that remembering these perplexing, nearly-forgotten relationships might help to open new models of race relations, by urging southerners to transplant old traditions of interpersonal connectedness into the new soil of equal citizenship.  Now, I fear that for many Americans, the gulf of segregation has only grown. For these people, simplistic media portrayals have replaced complex relationships with actual others across the race line. Yet, I feel that the solution to the long national tragedy of racism must somehow involve individuals coming to know each other.  

RHF: My research on rural Mississippi highlighted the ways in which impoverished whites and African Americans banded together to challenge white supremacy and the plantation economy.  My book is also chock full of instances when interracial cooperation utterly failed. In some ways, their challenges to entrenched hegemonic structures seems insurmountable. In order to have a remote chance at success, leaders had to first convince poor white southerners that white supremacy was a destructive ideology and second, that capitalism was an inherently exploitative labor arrangement. What they found, however, was that the rural poor, black and white, were ready for new and radical approaches to help alleviate the smothering poverty they experienced. What this demonstrates is that rural life in the 1930s was, as it is now, a precarious existence. The Great Depression was a unique historical moment, but instructive for the present. Some of my readers were surprised that white supremacy and capitalism could be so blatantly challenged in Jim Crow-era Mississippi. If it could happen then, why can’t something similar happen now? In the 1930s, rural Americans were desperate for radical solutions due to the Great Depression. Since then, decades of economic uncertainty, the take-over by corporate agri-business, and environmental and public health crises have led rural Americans, yet again, to rightly believe that they are an afterthought when it comes to enacting policies. They are desperate once again. 

AHS: If you were asked to advise President-elect Biden and Vice-President-elect Harris on how to gain the trust of rural white Americans and address their political concerns, what would you suggest?

EHT: Combating lies is the big challenge facing Biden and Harris. How can you convince people of the value of your program if their perspective has been so warped by falsehoods that they cannot see what is good and real? I don’t know the best way for politicians to do this, but for those of us who teach, it has never been more important to work with students so that they understand how to differentiate trustworthy sources from untrustworthy ones. 

I think that economic security—such as people might get through new jobs in clean energy, as Biden proposes—would help buffer the despair felt by some rural Americans, allowing them to turn away from the politics of white grievance. But for those white Americans whose issue is less economic insecurity and more that they cannot stomach seeing people of color, women, and LGBT people gain equality—I’m not sure how to address that.

MRS: I agree with Elizabeth. The traditional liberal/Progressive response is to buy the quiescence of rural Americans with economic opportunity. (“It’s the economy, stupid!” was Bill Clinton’s famous slogan.) Maybe that will work again. Offering clean energy jobs in Appalachia, the Rust Belt, and the inner city can’t hurt.  

But like Elizabeth, I fear that we are also faced with ideologues who cannot be bought.  Although the initial impulse has been to define the rioters as semi-literate rubes, sporting uber-masculine beards, camouflage and tattoos, the resulting arrests have demonstrated that many of them are educated people, CEOs, policemen, politicians, nearly a cross-section of white America. Didn’t one woman fly to the insurgency on her own private jet? These are our own versions of Osama bin Laden, the wealthy Saudi terrorist. The roots of their rage lies elsewhere, in dissatisfaction with the opening of America to political, cultural, and economic opportunity to non-whites, and non-straights. Some are misled by fundamentalist cant and Pentecostal prophesies. They are skeptical of all trained, professional authorities, and are trained to trust only information sources that are vetted by their social media cult.  

I don’t know how to reach out to these people.  Religious language and gestures once gave Americans a common language, but faith traditions are diverging between those who emphasize obedience to dogma and those who emphasize freedom and acts of love. As in the 1850s, we no longer trust the legitimacy of each other’s faith.  

RHF: We dismiss rural Americans at our own peril. First, we must remember that rural America is made of diverse communities who do not all think or vote the same. The recent scholarship on Appalachia is instructive here. In the wake of 2016, some analysts simply blamed rural Americans, Appalachians included, for the outcome of the election without fully understanding the electorate. Earlier that year, J. D. Vance had published his widely-read memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. Vance’s work seemed to confirm what outsiders assumed about people in Appalachia: that they were violent, racist, addicts who could not get out of their own way. Since then, responsible scholars -- such as Elizabeth Catte, Leah Hampton, Robert Gipe, Jessica Wilkerson, Anthony Harkins, and an army of others -- have pointed out all the important and perilous ways Appalachia has been misunderstood. While these scholars raise various points and draw unique conclusions, one takeaway is certain. If scholars, progressives, and policy-makers continue to ignore or misunderstand them, it will only push a greater number of rural Americans further toward conservative, reactionary politics. 

Mobilizing the healthcare system to address public health crises and fixing faltering rural economies are the first steps. While affordable, high-quality healthcare and turning to clean energy would be good starts, it’s also important to remember that rural Americans have been fighting these battles for a long time. Materially supporting the progressive movements that have existed in these places for decades is key to success. Still, as Elizabeth and Mark have argued, conspiracy theories and white supremacy must be widely eradicated. There are some who are too far gone down those paths to be extricated. It’s a fool’s errand to believe they can be reformed. Yet others are within reach. The goal is not to placate or “buy” the loyalty of rural Americans by offering them economic security. The goal is to help solve the very real problems that the rural poor face. America is long past due a reckoning of its inability to address the concerns of its impoverished citizens. Now is the time.