Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow

Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow is a 2019 work of nonfiction focusing on Black history, from Reconstruction to segregation. Written by Henry Louis Gates Jr., an award-winning literary critic, historian, and documentary filmmaker, Stony the Road not only sheds light on critical periods in US history, but also explains how these eras continue to affect the lives of Americans today. The title comes from James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (1900), a hymn about enslavement and the hope for full emancipation widely known as the Black national anthem. The book received positive reviews in the New York Times, NPR, Washington Post, and The Nation.

This guide refers to the 2019 edition published by Penguin Random House.

Content Warning: The source material contains references to anti-Black racism, oppression, and violence. The author uses the word “Negro” throughout the text, the standard term for Black until the late 1960s. This study guide quotes and obscures the author’s use of the n-word.

Summary

Stony the Road comprises four chapters, each of which is subdivided into several sections and followed by a collection of images. Chapter 1, “Antislavery/Antislave,” connects the past and present by presenting the contemporary US against the backdrop of the post-Reconstruction period. Gates compares the election of Barack Obama to the US presidency in 2008 to the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, the legal abolishment of enslavement in 1865, and the Reconstruction Acts of 1867-68, three major events in Black history. For many pundits, Obama’s election marked “the end of race and racism” in the US (2). It also revived the post-Reconstruction metaphor of the New Negro, a “new” type of Black person who was middle-class, educated, and cultured. The end of enslavement, however, did not end anti-Black racism, but instead gave rise to new forms of discrimination, including sharecropping, convict leasing, and Jim Crow segregation. Gates compares the erosion of Reconstruction gains to the rollback of Obama’s policies by his successor, Donald J. Trump. He also draws parallels between the growing public expression of white supremacy after Obama’s election to the virulent white supremacy triggered by Reconstruction.

Chapter 2, “The Old Negro: Race, Science, Literature, and the Rise of Jim Crow,” explores the rise of scientific racism in the US. Scientists promoted racist ideas about the origins of the races before and after the Civil War. Christian adherents of monogenesis, for example, argued that Black and white people originated from Adam and Eve, but that Black people were corruptions of the original archetype. By contrast, Christian polygenists held that the races had separate origins, a belief that underpins white supremacist ideology. Gates traces the evolution of scientific racism and its use to justify racial inequality. The science of phrenology, for instance, associated Black people’s physical features with low mental capacities and a lack of moral character, while Social Darwinists held that the biological superiority of white people also made them culturally superior. The idea of natural white superiority fueled anti-miscegenation laws, segregation, and the eugenics movement, which aimed to create superior beings and eliminate social ills through genetic manipulation.

Chapter 3, “Framing Blackness: Sambo Art and the Visual Rhetoric of White Supremacy,” focuses on the proliferation of racist imagery on everyday objects after Reconstruction. Sambo imagery depicted Black and white people in oppositional terms. Easily consumed, digested, and internalized, Sambo art depicted Black people as uncivilized, ugly, and immoral. The imagery reinforced expressions of racism by the courts, journalists, novelists, and politicians, normalizing the idea that Black people were subhuman. Gates singles out depictions of Black rapists as an important type of Sambo image, arguing that white people’s fear of Black male sexuality and its threat to white women was used to justify lynching. Sambo imagery, alongside blackface performances and films, not only helped erode Reconstruction gains, but also drowned out the achievements of Black people. Efforts to subvert these racist stereotypes centered on the idea of the “New Negro,” which provided a counternarrative to white supremacy.

Chapter 4, “The New Negro: Redeeming the Race from the Redeemers,” explores how educated Black people challenged white supremacy and the rise of Jim Crow laws. Gates traces the origins of the “New Negro,” a term that emerged after Reconstruction to differentiate middle-class, educated, and cultured Black people from poor, uneducated formerly enslaved people and their descendants. He argues that the concept developed in response to the end of Reconstruction and the rise of racist policies during the Redemption and Jim Crow eras. Segregation was enshrined in law during Jim Crow. Vigilantism and social customs reinforced these laws. Black people responded by forming their own social and cultural institutions. This emerging class of Black intellectuals, artists, and activists deepened existing class divisions in the Black community. Successive versions of the New Negro developed over time, including a militant strand that used force, rather than activism, to enact social change. The New Negro Movement of the 1920s and 1930s, now called the Harlem Renaissance, showcased the artistic, literary, and musical talents of Black people. The movement remains a potent and enduring symbol of Black culture and achievement.