Essay Questions for Thinking through Sources 16

Document Links:

Document 16.1 HENRY GRADY, The New South (1890)

Document 16.2 Testimony of North Carolina Industrial Workers (1887)

Document 16.3 Sharecropper’s Contract (1882)

Document 16.4 Mississippi Constitution (1890)

Document 16.5 JUSTICE HENRY BILLINGS BROWN, Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

Essay Questions for Thinking through Sources 16

Consider Continuity and Change: These five sources shed light on the idea of the New South and its reality in the 1880s and 1890s. Based on the information in these documents, write an essay that compares the New South of the post–Reconstruction era to the Old South. In what ways did the so-called New South differ from the Old South, and in what ways did the patterns and values of the Old South continue into the late nineteenth century?

Assess Perspectives: Whose perspectives on the New South do these documents express? What do the authors or narrators have in common? What do these documents suggest about the assumptions the authors/narrators made about African Americans and their role and place in southern society? How did these assumptions shape their messages?

Notice What’s Missing: What perspectives and voices are missing from this collection of documents that might add other dimensions to your understanding of the post-Reconstruction South? What types of documents would you seek if you were interested in additional perspectives? Using information from the textbook readings on this topic, what might you expect to find?

Consider Outcomes: According to these documents, the post-Reconstruction South remained primarily agricultural and dominated by white supremacist ideas, institutions, and practices. What do the sources suggest about the ways that a more thoroughly industrialized South might have been different from an agricultural one? To what extent was the persistence of white supremacy linked to the region’s agricultural economy? To what extent do you think white supremacist ideas and thinking operated independently from other factors?