Managing White Supremacy

“Managing White Supremacy is an intricate book, subtly and effectively written, lucidly conceptualized, persuasively argued, and thoroughly researched.” — North Carolina Historical Review

“Historians have uncovered a 'hidden transcript' of African American attempts to undermine the seemingly impregnable fortress of Jim Crow in the 1920s and 1930s. Now J. Douglas Smith in a masterly study documents the anxieties and fears of elite whites in Virginia as they struggled to maintain control of the state and to manage race relations between the wars. Smith’s brilliant dissection of the limits of elite paternalism is essential to understanding why African Americans would expose the myth of harmonious race relations in the 1940s and 1950s and why white Virginia leaders would resort to massive resistance as a final, futile attempt to manage white supremacy.” — Tony Badger, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge University,

“J. Douglas Smith’s Managing White Supremacy is an important contribution to the historiography of southern race relations. It is also beautifully written, respectful of complexity, and compellingly presented. Anyone who wants to understand what racial segregation was about and why the civil rights movement freed southern whites, too, should read this book.” — John Kneebone, Library of Virginia