A startling and gripping reexamination of the Jim Crow era, as seen
through the eyes of some of the most important American writers
"Walker has opened up a fresh way of thinking about the
intellectual history of the South during the civil-rights
movement."-Robert Greene, The Nation In this dramatic reexamination
of the Jim Crow South, Anders Walker demonstrates that racial
segregation fostered not simply terror and violence, but also
diversity, one of our most celebrated ideals. He investigates how
prominent intellectuals like Robert Penn Warren, James Baldwin,
Eudora Welty, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O'Connor, and Zora Neale
Hurston found pluralism in Jim Crow, a legal system that created
two worlds, each with its own institutions, traditions, even
cultures. The intellectuals discussed in this book all agreed that
black culture was resilient, creative, and profound, brutally
honest in its assessment of American history. By contrast, James
Baldwin likened white culture to a "burning house," a frightening
place that endorsed racism and violence to maintain dominance. Why
should black Americans exchange their experience for that? Southern
whites, meanwhile, saw themselves preserving a rich cultural
landscape against the onslaught of mass culture and federal power,
a project carried to the highest levels of American law by Supreme
Court justice and Virginia native Lewis F. Powell, Jr. Anders
Walker shows how a generation of scholars and judges has
misinterpreted Powell's definition of diversity in the landmark
case Regents v. Bakke, forgetting its Southern origins and
weakening it in the process. By resituating the decision in the
context of Southern intellectual history, Walker places diversity
on a new footing, independent of affirmative action but also free
from the constraints currently placed on it by the Supreme Court.
With great clarity and insight, he offers a new lens through which
to understand the history of civil rights in the United States.
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