Summary

Part II, titled “Backlash: The White Resistance to Black Reconstruction” (39) begins with a series of political cartoons and other propaganda images from 1829-1898. The images are reprehensibly racist, and largely centered around stoking fears about allowing African Americans to vote. Several images depict negative representations of interracial dating, and one features a white man shooting an African American child.

Chapter 2 is titled “The Old Negro: Race, Science, Literature, and the Birth of Jim Crow” (55). It begins with quotes from Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois. Gates explains how the relegation of African Americans to the status of “second class citizens” (56) occurred through four intertwined discourses: racial science, journalism, political rhetoric, and fiction and folklore.

Racial science (which was not science at all, but racist conjecture) posited various theories to assert the inferiority of African Americans. Under the rubric of “monogenis” (57), the...