Brent M. S. Campney, "This is Not Dixie;" Southern Spaces

Sectional and regional differences are attributable not only to demonstrable historical, economic, and demographic differences but to the power of stories told about them, within and outside of their shifting boundaries. Adherence to the Free State narrative compelled some white Kansans to reject the call to racist violence associated with the South, which they might otherwise have deemed justifiable. Conversely, dominant narratives about the South suggested few alternatives to violence as a means of racial control. In a passage subsequently quoted by anti-mob activist Ida B. Wells, the Memphis Daily Commercial insisted around 1890 that the "'Southern barbarism' which deserves the serious attention of all people North and South, is the barbarism which preys upon weak and defenseless women. Nothing but the most prompt, speedy and extreme punishment can hold in check the horrible and beastial propensities of the Negro race." 52 Because the sentiments expressed in the Commercial reflect widespread popular and scholarly assumptions about the essence of the nineteenth century South, it is easy to read them as a simple reflection of "reality." However, southern racist violence was not inevitable but was justified, in part, by self-fulfilling narratives, confirming historian Christopher Waldrep's contention that "our history never 'caused' us to be violent" even if "scholars have often argued that Americans cannot help themselves." 53

Examinations of the ways that the imagined South has been, and is, constituted through its linkages to "other" places may be as fruitful to critical regional studies as examinations of the diverse regions and places within the South. The tendency to examine sections and regions of the nation in isolation has helped to create fixed identities of these complex and dynamic spaces. The extensive analysis of racist violence in "Dixie" to the exclusion of other areas of the country both responds to and perpetuates the attempts by Americans outside of the South to deny or minimize the extent of their participation in racist violence. In his work on the previously neglected topic of sundown towns, Loewen suggests that this is the case. He finds that these all-white towns, enforced by violence or its threat, were unusual in the South but were a defining characteristic of race relations in the Midwest. 54