Legitimacy Of Concerns Over Black Violence Summary

The Legitimacy of Concerns Over Black Violence and Black-White Relations in the South History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850, by James Ford Rhodes, tells the history of the Civil War era. The piece, published 15 years after the end of Reconstruction, has several volumes that touch on topics including the Reconstruction era. Black Reconstruction in America, by W. E. B. Du Bois and published in 1935, covers the same period, and both pieces of literature extensively cover the relationship between Blacks and whites in the South. Rhodes depicts a Southern environment in which Southern whites are inundated with fear of violence from Blacks, and anti-Black actions are a response to the safety and economic concerns that whites have.

Rhodes writes that the Black terror that was influential in the South was “not known and therefore not appreciated in the North” (Rhodes, 558). He further says that the “difficulties of the [Southern] problem were not generally comprehended in the North” (Rhodes, 556). The Southern “problem,” of course, was the racist belief that free Black people, as an inferior race, threatened the safety and economic prosperity of the South. More to the point, Rhodes argues that anti-Black sentiment and laws were not a repudiation of Northern values; the South was simply confronted with issues that the North couldn’t understand. Rhodes claims that anti-Black actions by Southern whites were in response to safety and economic concerns and were unrelated to the North. Du Bois argues that there was anti-North sentiment throughout the South. He writes that in the post-antebellum South, “The hatred of the Yankee was increased,” and “The defeated Southern leaders were popular heroes” (Du Bois, 384). He makes the direct claim that anti-North sentiment existed by claiming that there was hatred for Northerners throughout the