Books like Growing up Jim Crow by Jennifer Lynn Ritterhouse

In the segregated South of the early twentieth century, Jennifer Lynn Ritterhouse investigates how children learned the unwritten racial etiquette that governed every interaction between blacks and whites. She examines the role of parental instruction—white parents reinforcing a white‑supremacist worldview and black parents imparting lessons of respectability and race pride—as well as the everyday encounters that shaped children’s self‑consciousness. The book argues that black youths’ willingness to defend themselves, despite the risks, foreshadowed the emotional foundations of the civil‑rights movement long before overt political change. At the same time, a younger generation of white parents maintained traditional dominance in private life while expanding elaborate public segregation. By mapping the connections between public and private spheres, segregation, racial etiquette, and racial violence, Ritterhouse offers new insights into the dynamics of tradition, change, and the meanings of segregation within Southern culture.

First publish date: 2006