Race and Rumors of Race : American South in the Early Forties
Description In the early 1940s, all sorts of rumours about impending and presently occurring race wars were circulating throughout the South among white Southerners: once docile and passive African Americans, it was claimed, were - with the aid of first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, liberals, Yankees, New Dealers, and "bad niggers" - stockpiling ice picks in Charleston, ordering carton-loads of pistols and rifles from the Sears catalogue in Memphis, and plotting insurrection against whites at every turn. Howard W. Odum was so alarmed - and fascinated - by these rumours of race that he set out to collect and catalogue them. This book, first published in 1943, is the result.