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WORK TITLE: Lynched: The Victims of Southern Mob Violence
WORK NOTES: with Amy Kate Bailey
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 7/24/1951
WEBSITE: http://faculty.washington.edu/tolnay/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://soc.washington.edu/people/stewart-tolnay * http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=44360
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born July 24, 1951.
EDUCATION:Everett Community College, A.A.; University of Washington, B.A., M.A., Ph.D., 1981.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Sociologist, educator, writer, and editor. University of Georgia, Athens, instructor, 1981-88; State University of New York, Albany, faculty member, 1989-2000; University of Washington, Seattle, professor, c. 2000–, chair of the Department of Sociology, 2003-08, became S. Frank Miyamoto Endowed Professor.
AWARDS:
Recipient of research grants, including from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
WRITINGS
Contributor to professional journals, including Annual Review of Sociology, American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Social Forces, and Sociology of Education. Editor of Demography, 2003-08.
SIDELIGHTS
Stewart E. Tolnay is a sociologist whose interests include demography, ecology, family, race and ethnicity, and social stratification and inequality. He has devoted most of his research to examining the social and demographic history of African Americans, beginning with his doctoral dissertation. His studies include a look at the southern lynchings of blacks and the Great Migration of southern blacks to the North and the West. Among the results of his research is the development of a new and confirmed inventory of lynching victims in ten southern states between 1882 and 1930. Tolnay is a contributor to professional journals and the author, coauthor, or coeditor of books focusing on his areas of interest.
The Changing American Family
Tolnay served as coeditor with Scott J. South of The Changing American Family: Sociological and Demographic Perspectives. The book presents twelve papers from the conference “Demographic Perspectives on the American Family: Patterns and Prospects.” Focusing on the changing dynamics in American families, the papers included discussions of both historical and contemporary aspects of family life. Most authors are either historians or sociologists.
Papers in The Changing American Family are presented in three sections according to a central theme, beginning with a section on historical issues concerning how American families were formed and structured. The second section focuses on marriage and cohabitation, while the final section examines the roles of parents and children. “As a whole, the book suggests that there is fertile ground yet to be plowed for interdisciplinary work on the economics of marriage and family,” wrote Southern Economic Journal contributor Paul W. Grimes.
The Bottom Rung
Tolnay’s monograph The Bottom Rung: African American Family Life on Southern Farms draws from public records dating back to the early twentieth century. Tolnay uses these records to dispute the belief that blacks migrating from the South to northern cities brought with them a family culture that led to the matriarchal patterns found in modern African American families. Some sociologists have claimed that the feature of families being dominated by the mother or another woman was established in the old southern plantation system. Tolnay counters this cultural thesis by proposing that black family-building has suffered primarily due to social, economic, and political conditions.
To substantiate his thesis, Tolnay uses a wide range of data, ranging from public records and earlier studies to census counts and microdata, to compare family situations during the era of southern sharecropping and the eventual movement of blacks into factory jobs in the North. He notes substantial differences between the lives and cohabitation practices of southern sharecroppers and those of their counterparts working in the northern United States, where African Americans were more likely to marry and more likely to separate. Tolnay notes that in the twenty-first century, more than two-thirds of African American children are not only born out of wedlock but also typically live with only one parent, or in many instances with no parent at all. “Tolnay sees what has happened as confirmation of his hypothesis that family life reflects the strategies of families to cope with the problems of everyday life,” wrote Social Forces contributor Ida Harper Simpson.
American Diversity
As coeditor with Nancy A. Denton of American Diversity: A Demographic Challenge for the Twenty-First Century, Tolnay presents a series of essays focusing solely on the demographics of diversity in the United States. Divided into four sections, the book begins with essays focusing on population numbers. The next section examines how immigration, fertility, and mortality affect ethnic and racial diversity. The third section explores the social cycles of diversity, focusing on factors such as segregation, employment, education, and intermarriage between people of different ethnicities and races.
The book’s final section provides a single chapter giving an overview of the contributors’ findings in terms of the implications for diversity. The chapter also offers some summary conclusions and a discussion of racial inequality in society as it relates to the size of minority populations combined with social structure changes. Population and Development Review contributor Lee Bouvier felt that the book should have included a chapter concentrating on cultural adaptation but went on to call American Diversity “an excellent collection that should inform scholars and nonspecialists alike.”
Lynched
Tolnay is coauthor with Kate Bailey of Lynched: The Victims of Southern Mob Violence. Drawing from a wide range of new sources, including a new database of lynch victims that the authors link with census records, Tolnay and Bailey provide an in-depth look at many of the men and women who were lynched in the American South. They examine and compare the characteristics of African American men who were lynched and those who were not. They are thus able to zero in on factors that made some people more vulnerable targets, ranging from age and job status to marital status and literacy.
The book features a chapter focusing solely on how the data was compiled, such as drawing from the 2010 Beck-Tolnay Confirmed Inventory of Lynch Victims. Tolnay and Bailey discuss how they created a new set of data focusing on mob violence, and drawing from this data, they counter some ideas popularly held by historians and sociologists. For example, the authors find that blacks who were more vulnerable to mob violence were often in this position due either to their marginal lives in their communities or, surprisingly, to being overly successful in the eyes of their white counterparts. In other words, according to Tolnay and Bailey, standing out from the overall black population on either end of the socioeconomic spectrum was dangerous.
“It is … no exaggeration to say that Lynched is the single most important piece of scholarship yet produced on the victims of lynching,” wrote Bruce E. Baker in a review for the Journal of Southern History. Writing for H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, William Carrigan noted that the authors’ “research took many, many years of painstaking hard work and was carried out by a large team of individuals, including over a dozen undergraduate research assistants, all properly credited in the preface.” Cardigan affirmed, “There is much for historians to learn from these sociologists.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Journal of Southern History, August, 2016, Bruce E. Baker, review of Lynched: The Victims of Southern Mob Violence, p. 701.
Population and Development Review, March, 2003, Lee Bouvier, review of American Diversity: A Demographic Challenge for the Twenty-First Century, p. 131.
Social Forces, June, 1996, Kent Redding, review of A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930, p. 1450; September, 2001, Ida Harper Simpson, review of The Bottom Rung: African American Family Life on Southern Farms, p. 375; December, 2001, Ida Harper Simpson, review of The Bottom Rung, p. 737; September, 2003, Eric Fong, review of American Diversity.
Southern Economic Journal, January, 1994, Paul W. Grimes, review of The Changing American Family: Sociological and Demographic Perspectives, p. 774.
ONLINE
H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, http://www.h-net.org/ (November 1, 2015), William Carrigan, review of Lynched.
University of Washington Web site, https://soc.washington.edu/ (February 16, 2017), author profile.
Stewart
Tolnay
Professor
S. Frank Miyamoto Endowed Professor
(206) 685-2284
tolnay@uw.edu
Personal Website
CV (92.28 KB)
Savery 233
Office Hours:
By appointment
Fields of Interest
Demography
Ecology
Family
Race and Ethnicity
Social Stratification/Inequality
Background and Experience
Summary(active tab)
Research
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Ph.D., University of Washington, 1981
Research
Throughout my career I have devoted most of my research time to exploring the social and demographic history of African Americans. This journey began with my dissertation which used the newly available 1900 Public Use Microdata Sample to study the African American fertility transition. Because the black population in the U.S. around the turn of the 20th Century was so heavily concentrated in the South, and because my first academic appointment was at the University of Georgia, my interests in the African American experience gradually expanded beyond fertility to include other topics. With support from the National Science Foundation, my colleague Woody Beck and I constructed a new and confirmed inventory of lynch victims in ten southern states between 1882 and 1930. We used that inventory in our award winning book, A Festival of Violence, and in a series of papers some of which appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review, and Social Forces. The inventory also has been used by many other scholars in their research. My interest in southern lynching continues and I am now working on another book manuscript, Lynched. The Victims of Southern Mobs, with Amy Kate Bailey. Lynched is based on a new database comprised of lynch victims linked with their census records (also supported by NSF).
I have also done extensive research on the Great Migration of southern blacks to the North and West. This research program has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Articles resulting from the Great Migration project have appeared in the American Sociological Review, Social Forces, the Annual Review of Sociology and Sociology of Education among other journals.
Teaching
I enjoy teaching courses at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. Recently, my undergraduate teaching has been concentrated on "The Foundations of Social Inquiry," (SOC 300). At the graduate level, I have taught regularly "Demography & Ecology," (SOC 513), and "Fertility and Mortality"(SOC 531). I have also taught special topics seminars on "Regimes of Racial Control in the U.S. After Slavery," (SOC 590) and "The Great Migration: Causes and Consequences." I serve on a large number of MA Thesis and Ph.D. Dissertation committees.
Biography
I received my AA Degree from Everett Community College and my BA, MA, and Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Washington. I held previous academic appointments at the University of Georgia (1981-1988) and The University at Albany - State University of New York (1988-2000). From 2003 through 2008 I served as Chair of the UW Department of Sociology. From 2010 through 2013 I was Editor of Demography, the flagship journal of the Population Association of America.
LC control no.: n 86841963
Personal name heading:
Tolnay, Stewart Emory
Found in: nuc86-68384: His The fertility of Black Americans in 1900,
1981 (hdg. on DHU rept.: Tolnay, Stewart Emory; usage:
Stewart Emory Tolnay)
His A festival of violence, c1995: CIP t.p. (Stewart E.
Tolnay)
The bottom rung, c1999: CIP t.p. (Stewart E. Tolnay) pub.
info (b. July 24,1951)
================================================================================
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Lynched: The Victims of Southern Mob Violence
Bruce E. Baker
Journal of Southern History. 82.3 (Aug. 2016): p701.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Full Text:
Lynched: The Victims of Southern Mob Violence. By Amy Kate Bailey and Stewart E. Tolnay. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. [xx], 276. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-2087-9.)
Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck revolutionized the study of lynching twenty years ago by constructing a definitive list of lynchings to replace the flawed lists compiled by antilynching organizations. This data underlay a series of important articles and the book A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930 (Urbana, 1995). Now Tolnay and one of his Ph.D. graduates, Amy Kate Bailey, have used similar methods to compile a dataset of the victims of lynching. Many historians have done extensive research on a few victims as part of case studies of particular lynchings or more cursory research on a wide range of victims as part of statewide studies, but Bailey and Tolnay's work here is much more systematic and extensive than anything previously accomplished and should provide the basis for much further research.
An entire chapter is dedicated to a detailed explanation of how the authors compiled the data on the lynching victims. They began with the 2010 Beck-Tolnay Confirmed Inventory of Lynch Victims, which included data on the date, the county and state, the alleged offense, the name or names of the victims, their race, and their sex. Then Bailey and Tolnay connected this inventory to records in the U.S. census by a very precise process. In the end, they were able to link 935 of the more than 2,400 victims in the inventory with records from the last census before the person was lynched. While this number is only about a quarter of the victims of lynching between the 1880s and the 1930s, these findings represent a prodigious accomplishment.
Some of the conclusions Bailey and Tolnay reach reinforce ideas that historians have assumed to be the case, but several conclusions are new and surprising and paint a more complex portrait of the phenomenon of lynching and its victims. For example, one old debate centered on whether African American men who were marginal to their communities were more vulnerable to mob violence or whether black men who were successful drew the wrath of their white neighbors for that very success. Bailey and Tolnay effectively argue that both were true: as the Japanese proverb says, "the nail that sticks out shall be hammered down," and that appears to have been the case for poor, transient African Americans in more settled communities and for successful African Americans in poorer areas. Being well-off where more people were well-off, or rootless and new where most of one's neighbors were also new, offered some protection against being a victim of lynching.
While Lynched: The Victims of Southern Mob Violence is a huge step forward for understanding the people most directly affected by lynching, the study does have limitations, which are readily acknowledged by the authors. The most significant of these has to do with the famous fire in 1921 that burned up the 1890 census schedules. Since the peak of lynching happened in the early 1890s, this loss is particularly unfortunate because it means that Bailey and Tolnay must rely on the 1880 census to try to find lynching victims from the mid-1890s. The authors have managed to find only about 35 percent of the victims in the 1890s, while for other decades their success rate is between 40 and 50 percent. The other more puzzling limitation echoes Beck and Tolnay's earlier work: the study includes only ten southeastern states, omitting Virginia, Texas, and Missouri. While very few lynchings occurred in Virginia, this was certainly not the case in Texas. Perhaps ambitious students will expand Bailey and Tolnay's work to cover those states. Despite these limitations, it is still no exaggeration to say that Lynched is the single most important piece of scholarship yet produced on the victims of lynching.
BRUCE E. BAKER
Newcastle University
Baker, Bruce E.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Baker, Bruce E. "Lynched: The Victims of Southern Mob Violence." Journal of Southern History, vol. 82, no. 3, 2016, p. 701+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460447794&it=r&asid=6aa9f1f52629c51be9cceb5190f9090f. Accessed 21 Jan. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A460447794
American Diversity: A Demographic Challenge for the 21st Century. (Book Reviews)
Lee Bouvier
Population and Development Review. 29.1 (Mar. 2003): p131.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Full Text:
NANCY A. DENTON AND STEWART E. TOLNAY (EDS.)
American Diversity: A Demographic Challenge for the 21st Century
Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. xiii + 303 p. $73.50; $24.95 (pbk.).
The next time a student asks me for a good explanation of American diversity, I will recommend American Diversity. In less than 300 pages, this excellent collection of essays covers much of what one always wanted to know about the subject.
The editors' introduction outlines the purpose of the contributions and justifies the volume's deliberate limitation to demographic explanations. The intention was not to include articles from, say, the late Julian Simon or Ben Wattenberg on one side and those from Richard Lamm or Peter Brimelow on the other. Although I would have liked to have seen their inclusion, the chosen approach is strictly demographic. The book is divided into four sections. Part I looks at "Population: The initial numbers." In Part II, the impact on ethnic and racial diversity of three demographic processes--immigration, fertility, and mortality--is examined. Part III looks at the "Life cycle and diversity." Part IV outlines the implications and offers conclusions.
Mary Waters is the author of the first article dealing with racial and ethnic identity. After discussing the various problems in defining these concepts, Waters offers three possible scenarios for the future. I especially favored the third option. A "scenario for the future could be a blurring of the lines of distinction across all of these ethnic and racial categories--in effect a melting pot model that included all Americans regardless of color" (p. 45). I have written elsewhere on the same theme and labeled it 'pluralistic assimilation."
Charles Hirschman addresses the issue of population projections, a vital ingredient if one is to comprehend the importance of demography in explaining diversity. Hirschman rightly points out that racial definitions are constantly in flux, and intermarriages blur these definitions further. The author is evidently not convinced of the usefulness of long-term projections. "[T]here is a healthy skepticism about the limits of population projections beyond the short-term of 10 to 20 years. Beyond this time frame, unforeseen changes in fertility, mortality, and migration frequently lead to population trends that diverge from prior projections" (p. 51). This is undoubtedly true--witness the late-1930s projections that did not anticipate the baby boom. However, an important point is missed here. Demographer Peter Morrison said it well: "[T]he purpose of projecting the future population is not exclusively, or even primarily, to make accurate predictions. It is, rather, to identify and chart the likely effects of influ ences and contingencies that will determine future population size" ("Overview of population forecasting for small areas," Rand, June 1975, pp. 1-2). By looking at current demographic patterns and extending them into the future, demographers provide a useful tool for policymakers.
The data on the three basic demographic processes discussed in Part II are generally well known to demographers. Gray Swicegood and Philip Morgan detail differences in fertility among racial and ethnic groups, looking at changes over time and between generations. Richard Rogers, in his chapter on mortality, reports data that are not always easy to find. Douglas Massey's piece on immigration is especially insightful. He reexamines the successful assimilation that took place among European immigrants and their offspring during the first half of the twentieth century. Americans are justifiably proud of this accomplishment, which led at the highest political levels to the nomination for vice president in 1968 of two "ethnic Americans," Spiro Agnew and Edmund Muskie. Massey also explains how those successes will be more difficult to reach for recent immigrants from Latin America and Asia.
Part III on life cycle and diversity offers a good deal of information on housing segregation, education and employment, ethnic and racial intermarriage, and the elderly. Each article presents enlightening new data. For example, Michael White and Eileen Shy discuss figures on mortgage lending and fair housing, and Joseph Hotz and Marta Tienda explore the inequality surrounding the school-to-work transition among blacks, whites, and Hispanics. Gillian Stevens and Michael Tyler point out the differences in intermarriage between the mid-twentieth century (when that term related to marriages between Irish and Polish, for example) and today when such unions are no longer considered intermarriage, but marriages between blacks and whites or Hispanics and whites are. In the last chapter in this section, Cynthia Taeuber deals in great detail with the ethnic and socioeconomic characteristics of the over-65 population. Part Ill alone is worth the price of the book for the voluminous data it presents so concisely.
The sole chapter in Part IV is titled: "Rethinking American diversity: Conceptual and theoretical challenges for racial and ethnic demography." Hayward Horton presents a population and structural change thesis which "argues that changes in the relative size of the minority population interact with changes in the social structure to exacerbate the level and nature of racial inequality in society" (p. 264; emphasis in original). Referring to projections indicating that the dominant population in the United States will become a numerical minority in the future, Horton suggests that all things being equal this would happen. "But all things have never been equal in the United States. The history of the use of power by the dominant population would suggest that controls will likely be implemented to forestall racial and ethnic minorities from becoming a numerical majority" (p. 268; emphasis in original). He suggests the inclusion in demographic models of the concept of racism in conjunction with the more familiar categories of race and racial inequality. Clearly this is food for thought.
In my view, one glaring omission from this collection is a chapter that concentrates on cultural adaptation. This term is seldom mentioned here, although assimilation and multiculturalism are discussed briefly. But given the demographic profile that is emerging, how will the United States adapt to such a radical change in its population composition? We can go back to the early twentieth century and the works of Horace Kallen and others; we can look at the 'melting pot" or "salad bowl" concepts. But what about today and the future? Will Horton's prediction be correct or not? This omission aside, American Diversity is an excellent collection that should inform scholars and nonspecialists alike.
Bouvier, Lee
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bouvier, Lee. "American Diversity: A Demographic Challenge for the 21st Century. (Book Reviews)." Population and Development Review, vol. 29, no. 1, 2003, p. 131+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA101862434&it=r&asid=626bd72c8f8b121fcdc462312344c6d6. Accessed 21 Jan. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A101862434
The Bottom Rung: African American Family Life on Southern Farms. (*) (Book Reviews)
Ida Harper Simpson
Social Forces. 80.2 (Dec. 2001): p737.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2001 Oxford University Press
Full Text:
By Stewart Tolnay. University of Illinois Press, 1999. 232 PP. Cloth $49.95; paper, $19.95.
The Bottom Rung counterposes two theories of the rise of the current conditions of the African American family: a cultural and an adaptation theory. The long-held cultural view holds that the matricentric features now common among African Americans were normalized in the plantation system of southern agriculture and transplanted to the North by migrants from the South. Tolnay rejects the cultural thesis in favor of an adaptation view that the social-economic conditions of making a living carry incentives and disincentives for family building. The book examines these two competing theories. Tolnay reasons that, according to the cultural thesis, matricentric family features should be (1) more evident among African American farm families than northern nonfarm families, (2) more evident in earlier periods historically closer to slavery than in later periods, and (3) more evident among recent southern farm migrants to the North than among northern urban residents. To test his adaptation thesis, Tolnay hypothesizes that the black farm family closely resembles the white farm family but differs from nonfarm families in the South and in the North.
Tolnay assembles an impressive variety of data from public records, earlier studies on the South and on African Americans, and censuses, including public-use microdata samples for 1910 and 1940. He uses the microdata to compare family demographics for the two dates, the 30 years between which mark the pivotal period during which sharecropping reigned and its demise got underway.
The Bottom Rung situates the African American farmer within the context of racial segregation in the South and the structure of southern agriculture as it evolved from the end of slavery through the first four decades of the twentieth century. African American farmers were concentrated in Black Belt counties, where the plantation system organized the local economy with cotton as its cash crop. Tenancy organized production, and sharecroppers' families provided the labor. In sharecropping, the owner supplied the land, technical resources (seed, fertilizer, mules, plows, and other tools), housing and land for a garden, and the cropper supplied the labor in exchange for one-half or another fraction of the profits of the cash crop. Croppers' farms were small, around 50 acres. White croppers outnumbered African Americans, though sharecropping was more prevalent among African American than white farmers.
A farm, like any other production unit, needs a dependable workforce. Marriage, family stability, size of household, fertility, and living arrangements of children met that need for the cropper farm family. Tolnay's comparisons of African American and white farmers' family demographics reveal striking similarities, with the races largely indistinguishable in family structure in 1910 and in 1940. The most noticeable racial exception among the farm families was the living arrangements of children. In 1910, around 20 percent of black children under the age of 14, compared with slightly under 10 percent of white farm children, did not live with both parents. Tolnay reasons that this racial difference should not be interpreted as evidence for the survival of a cultural norm from slavery of female-headedness, because in 1940, 30 additional years past the end of slavery, "Blacks' likelihood of living in a disrupted family rose by 16 percent," an increase "dwarfed by the corresponding 43 percent increase in the North ."
In contrast to the racial similarities among farm families were the regional and occupational differences among African Americans. Among northern nonfarm African Americans, marriage was far less prevalent than among southern farm men and women; separations were more prevalent; completed fertility was lower; and school attendance was higher, as was children's living apart from both parents. The within-race comparisons of southern farm and northern and southern nonfarm families elaborate and give solid evidence of the effects of ways of making a living on family demographics.
By the middle of the twentieth century, southern farming had undergone a major technological revolution that drastically cut labor needs. Farmers in the South had almost doubled in number since the Civil War to increase population pressures on the farm economy. These occurred in conjunction with growth of industrial and service occupational opportunities in the North. The confluence of these "push" and "pull" forces brought about two demographic revolutions among African Americans: a virtual exodus of blacks from southern agriculture and their migration to the urban North. By 1970, African Americans were concentrated in inner cities of the North, spatially segregated from whites, and jobs were rapidly moving outward to the suburbs and had begun to move overseas, depleting northern African American communities of steady, well-paying job opportunities. The African American family responded to these economic and social challenges by fragmenting and individualizing itself at the expense of family stability and tw o-parent living arrangements for children. Today, more than two-thirds of African American children are born out of wedlock, and living with only one or no parent is normal. Tolnay sees what has happened as confirmation of his hypothesis that family life reflects the strategies of families to cope with the problems of everyday life. Out-of-wedlock births, unmarried mothers, and living arrangements of children are as much an adaptation to depleted opportunities in the inner cities as the stable farm family with its higher fertility was an adaptation to the plantation system of agriculture. Thus, cultural views survive across generations only if economic and social forces are stable.
While I applaud Tolnay for his insights and careful analyses, the book's heavy emphasis on describing family demographics tends to obscure its theoretical argument. The book is also a bit thin in portraying significant features of farm work. Thus, the reader wishes for a fuller explication of the processes of family adaptation to labor-intensive farming.
(*.) When this review first appeared, in our September 2001 issue (80:375-77), it contained numerous typographical errors. All errors were the fault of the journal, which apologizes to the reviewer and author. We publish the review again, with all errors corrected.
Simpson, Ida Harper
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Simpson, Ida Harper. "The Bottom Rung: African American Family Life on Southern Farms. (*) (Book Reviews)." Social Forces, vol. 80, no. 2, 2001, p. 737+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA81161093&it=r&asid=63fad7674a12cacccd2a07583edfad0b. Accessed 21 Jan. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A81161093
The Bottom Rung: African American Family Life on Southern Farms
IDA HARPER SIMPSON
Social Forces. 80.1 (Sept. 2001): p375.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2001 Oxford University Press
Full Text:
By Stewart Tolnay. University of Illinois Press, 1999. 232 pp. Cloth $; paper, $.
The Bottom Rung counterposes two theories of the rise of the current conditions of the African American family: a cultural and an adaptation theory. The long-held cultural view holds that the matricentric features now common among African Americans were normalized in the plantation system of Southern agriculture and transplanted bo the North by migrants from the South. Tolnay rejects the cultural thesis in favor of an adaptation view that the social-economic conditions of making a living carry incentives and disincentives for family building. The book examines these two competing theories. Tolnay reasons that, according to the cultural thesis, matricentric family features should be (1) more evident among African American farm families than Northern nonfarm families, (2) more evident in earlier periods of historically closer to slavery than in later periods, and (3) more evident among recent Southern farm migrants to the North than among Northern urban residents. To test his adaptation thesis, Tolnay hypothesizes that the Black farm family closely resembles the white farm family but differs from nonfarm families in the South and in the North.
Tolnay assembles an impressive variety of data from public records, earlier studies on the South and on African Americans, and censuses, including publicuse microdata samples for 1910 and 1940. He uses the microdata to compare family demographics for the two dates, the 30 years between which mark the pivotal period during which sharecropping reigned and its demise got underway.
The Bottom Rung situates the African American farmer within the context of racial segregation in the South and the structure of Southern agriculture as it evolved from the end of slavery through the first four decades of the twentieth century. African American farmers were concentrated in Black Belt counties, where the plantation system organized the local economy with cotton as its cash crop. Tenancy organized production, and share croppers' families provided the labor. In share cropping, the owner supplied the land, technical resources (see, fertilizer, mules, plows, and other tools), housing and land for a garden, and the cropper supplied the labor in exchange for one-half or another fraction of the profits of the cash crop. Croppers' farms were small, around 50 acres. White croppers outnumbered African Americans, though sharecropping was more prevalent among African American than white farmers.
A farm, like any other production unit, needs a dependable work force. Marriage, family stability, size of household, fertility, and living arrangements of children met that need for the cropper farm family. Tolnay's comparisons of African American and white farmers' family demographics reveal striking similarities, with the races largely indistinguishable in family structure in 1910 and in 1940. The most noticeable racial exception among the farm families was the living arrangements of children. In 1910, around 20 percent of Black children under the age of 14, compared with slightly under 10 percent of white farm children, did not live with both parents. Tolnay reasons that this racial difference should not be interpreted as evidence for the survival of a cultural norm from slavery of female headedness, because in 1940, 30 additional years past the end of slavery, "Blacks' likelihood of living in a disrupted family rose by 16 percent," an increase "dwarfed by the corresponding 43 percent increase in the Nort h."
In contrast to the racial similarities among farm families were the regional and occupational differences among African Americans. Among Northern nonfarm African Americans, marriage was far less prevalent than among Southern farm men and women; separations were more prevalent; completed fertility was lower; and school attendance was higher, as was children's living apart from both parents. The within race comparisons of Southern farm and Northern and Southern nonfarm families elaborate and give solid evidence of the effects of ways of making a living on family demographics.
By the middle of the twentieth century, Southern farming had undergone a major technological revolution that drastically cut labor needs. Farmers in the South had almost doubles in number since the Civil War to increase population pressures on the farm economy. These occurred in conjunction with growth of industrial and service occupational opportunities in the North. The confluence of these "push" and "pull" forces brought about two demographic revolutions among African Americans: a virtual exodus of Blacks from Southern agriculture and their migration to the urban North. By 1970, African Americans were concentrated in inner cities of the North, spatially segregatted from whites, and jobs were rapidly moving outward to the suburbs and had begun to move overseas, depleting Northern African American communities of steady, well-paying job opportunities. The African American family responded to these economic and social challenges by fragmenting and individualizing itself at the expense of family stability and t wo-parent living arrangements for children. Today, more than two thirds of African American children are born out of wedlock, and living with only one or no parents is normal. Tolany sees what has happened as confirmation of his hypothesis that family life reflects the strategies of families to cope with the problems of everyday life. Out-of-wedlock births, unmarried mothers, and living arrangements of children are as much an adaptation to depleted opportunities in the inner cities as the stable farm family with its higher fertility was an adaptation to the plantation system of agriculture. Thus, cultural views survive across generations only if economic and social forces are stable.
While I applaud Tolnay for his insights and careful analyses, the book's heavy emphasis on describing family demographics tends to obscure its theoretical argument. The book is alos a bit think in portraying significant features of farm work. Thus, the reader wishes for a fuller explication of the processes of family adaptation to labor-intensive farming.
SIMPSON, IDA HARPER
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
SIMPSON, IDA HARPER. "The Bottom Rung: African American Family Life on Southern Farms." Social Forces, vol. 80, no. 1, 2001, p. 375. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA79002106&it=r&asid=9d0b95068aa3cdb8e59544ea32440693. Accessed 21 Jan. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A79002106
American Diversity: a Demographic Challenge for the Twenty-first Century
Eric Fong
Social Forces. 82.1 (Sept. 2003): p432.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2003 Oxford University Press
Full Text:
Edited by Nancy A. Denton and Stewart E. Tolnay. State University of New York Press, 2002. 303 pp.
Reviewer: ERIC FONG, University of Toronto
This is an excellent book that addresses race and ethnic issues in the U.S. from a demographic perspective. Through the discussion of various demographic processes and life cycle events, the editors want to demonstrate how demographic studies contribute to the understanding of American racial and ethnic diversity. They clearly have accomplished their goal.
The book begins with an introduction by Nancy Demon and Stewart Tolnay. They nicely explain the themes of the book and discuss how each chapter is related to the themes. The next two chapters of the book caution readers about the basic conceptual and measurement issues of studying race and ethnicity. The chapter by Mary Waters argues that most demographic research on race and ethnicity treat race and ethnicity as fixed categories. However, racial and ethnic identity are affected by social factors and can fluctuate. Compounded by the challenges of classifying children of interracial couples, the study of race and ethnicity can be complicated. The discussion by Charles Hirschman in the following chapter further supports this assertion. Hirschman points out that population projection, especially by race and ethnicity, has to rely on good data and valid definition of ethnic categories. However, the changing measurement of Hispanic and Asian populations over the years, the presence of children of intermarriage, and the fluctuation of ethnic identity all contribute to the difficulty in projecting racial and ethnic populations.
The next three chapters highlight how basic demographic processes can contribute to an understanding of population diversity. Douglas Massey in his chapter shows how any new immigration wave interacts with the social context to shape race and ethnic relations. He suggests that recent immigrants with unique cultural and linguistic backgrounds cluster geographically and face a growing segmented labor market with diverse economic returns. Subsequently, ethnic communities are more likely to be developed. Gray Swicegood and Philip Morgan studied the different fertility rates of different racial and ethnic groups. They found that blacks and Hispanics have higher fertility rates, which, they argue, will have considerable impact on the racial and ethnic composition of society in the long run. Richard Rogers in his chapter explores the mortality differences among groups. Data from 1985 to 1987 show that Asians have the lowest infant mortality rate and highest life expectancy, while the opposite is true for blacks. Rogers also identifies specific causes of mortality among groups and notes the importance of socioeconomic effects.
The third part of the book is devoted to the study of various life cycle events in racial and ethnic groups. Michael White and Eileen Shy focus on the residential segregation patterns of various groups. Although survey data show that racial tolerance has increased over time, blacks still experience high levels of residential segregation, and specifically the highest among all racial and ethnic groups in their segregation from whites. The authors cite results from housing audit studies that unfavorable treatment in housing search is far higher for blacks and Latinos than for the majority group. In their chapter, based on the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, Joseph Hotz and Marta Tienda report considerable differences among racial and ethnic groups, blacks especially, in getting jobs after leaving school. They also show that these experiences have significant effects on later labor market experiences. Gillian Stevens and Michael K. Tyler looked at the intermarriage patterns of racial and ethnic groups. They found that intermarriage between racial groups is not common, and they expect the trend to remain low. Although they found the intermarriage of blacks with others has increased over the decades, the rate still remains very low. Finally, Cynthia Taueber studied the elderly population. Using projection, Taueber shows that the percentage of non-Hispanic whites among the population over age 65 has gradually declined. In other words, the elderly population is becoming more racially diverse.
The final chapter, by Hayward Derrick Horton, provides a perspective on the different experiences of different racial and ethnic groups discussed in previous chapters. He suggests that whites still maintain a majority status, even though the racial and ethnic composition of the country is changing, because racism is "inherent in American social structure." Since race and ethnic relations are a social phenomenon, demographic studies should incorporate "social rather than mathematical models."
American Diversity does make a substantive contribution to the study of race and ethnic relations. All analyses are informative and insightful. This is a "must read" book for anyone interested in the topic.
Fong, Eric
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Fong, Eric. "American Diversity: a Demographic Challenge for the Twenty-first Century." Social Forces, vol. 82, no. 1, 2003, p. 432+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA108787490&it=r&asid=bdc228f4d859066f1a00a83d07fb20a9. Accessed 21 Jan. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A108787490
A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930
Kent Redding
Social Forces. 74.4 (June 1996): p1450.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1996 Oxford University Press
Full Text:
Between 1880 and 1930 mobs lynched between 3,000 and 4,000 southerners, most of them African Americans. Since the end of the lynching era dozens of books and scores of articles have been written about one or more of those mob murders. Although Tolnay and Beck's important book is unlikely to stabilize what appears to be a burgeoning scholarly interest in this grisly phenomenon, it is by far the most sophisticated and sustained quantitative analysis to date of the structural correlates of southern lynchings.
Readers who have followed the authors' spate of articles on the topic in various journals will not be surprised by many of the findings reported in their recent book. Still, A Festival of Violence is no mere compilation of previously published work, nor is it a dry reportage of statistical findings. While the writing is sometimes plodding and repetitive, the authors generally do an effective job of integrating the various strands of their previous work and of dramatizing their concerns by weaving into the text narratives of particular lynchings.
Their basic concern is explaining the considerable variation in lynchings across 50 years and 800 or so counties in 10 states (Texas and Virginia are omitted because of data problems; Kentucky is included as part of the South). Initial chapters provide historical background and descriptive statistics and sketch the basic conceptual model. The heart of the book lies in four chapters, three devoted to testing components to the "threat perspective" of race relations and one to explaining the demise of lynching by 1930.
Using a variety of specifications of time-series and cross-sectional models of lynching, the authors reject both popular-justice and political-competition explanations for lynchings. Whereas contemporaries claimed that lynchings were a form of popular justice, Tolnay and Beck find neither a reinforcement nor a substitution effect of lynchings for executions in either time-series or cross-sectional analyses. Moreover, they report a negative association between Republican (and even Populist) strength and the number of lynchings, and no significant change in lynching patterns after the implementation of formal disfranchisement measures.
Economic-threat models, derived from Blalock, turn out to provide the best explanations of African American lynching patterns. Tolnay and Beck find lynching associated with lower cotton prices over time, cotton dominance and white landlessness across counties, and seasonal demand for labor. These associations reflect both the need of white planters to control black laborers and the economic competition between poor whites and blacks.
Finally, Tolnay and Beck argue that the number of lynchings declined not because of antilynching activism, the advent of New Deal agricultural policies, or improvement in law enforcement. Rather, they find a reciprocal relationship between the great out-migration of African Americans and lynching in the 1910s and 1920s: lynching increased out-migration, and the increase in out-migration resulted in fewer lynchings, as fear of labor shortages may have induced white planters to curtail mob violence.
Fortunately, in the authors' hands conventional statistical techniques are not used as blunt instruments but as tools for testing and contextualizing theoretical and historical explanations. By using their various statistical models in historically sensitive ways, they have significantly advanced our understanding of the patterns of lynching without ignoring the complexities of southern history.
That said, historian W. Fitzhugh Brundage's recent work on lynchings in Virginia and Georgia may lead one to wonder if Tolnay and Beck are justified in treating all lynchings the same, given the different social organization of the mobs used to accomplish them. Contrary to what one might have surmised from having read Tolnay and Beck's book, according to Brundage mass mobs with broad community support were involved in a minority of lynchings in Virginia and Georgia.
Furthermore, in spite of Tolnay and Beck's skillful and nuanced use of regression models, those used in historical research have limitations. In this case they explain the correlates of lynching without explaining the processes, either of how lynchings became the established means for controlling the economic threat of blacks to whites, or of how they were sequentially related to one another. But such problems await new historical research and the application of new methods. In the meantime, we have A Festival of Violence as a fine and definitive work on the social-structural underpinnings of the savagery of southern lynchings.
Reviewer: KENT REDDING, Indiana University
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Redding, Kent. "A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930." Social Forces, vol. 74, no. 4, 1996, p. 1450+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA18538602&it=r&asid=dfdf7c452fe19a643610ae672c23131a. Accessed 21 Jan. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A18538602
The Changing American Family - Sociological and Demographic Perspectives
Paul W. Grimes
Southern Economic Journal. 60.3 (Jan. 1994): p774.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1994 Southern Economic Association
http://www.utc.edu/Outreach/SouthernEconomicAssociation/southern-economic-journal.html
Full Text:
This book follows the growing popular trend in the academic press of publishing works prepared for small specialized conferences. The twelve papers here were originally commissioned for presentation at the "Demographic Perspectives on the American Family: Patterns and Prospects" conference sponsored by the Department of Sociology at the State University of New York at Albany. Conference volumes often contain chapters of inconsistent quality that are disjointed with respect to perspective and methodological approach. Editors Scott South and Stewart Tolnay, however, have prepared a conference book that does not suffer from these inherent difficulties. The papers collected by South and Tolnay reflect an intriguing mix of historical and contemporary views on the changing dynamics of American family life. Although, most of the authors represented are academic sociologists and historians, the empirical techniques and methods of analysis will be quite familiar to those trained in economics. In fact, several authors rely heavily on ideas first put forth by Gary Becker and his followers.
The book is organized into three sections, each containing articles based on a central primary theme. The first section contains three chapters dealing with historical issues of American family formation and structure. Steven Ruggles and Ron Goeken present a long-run analysis of multigenerational families which reveals the expected significant differences between black and white households. Further racial differences are analyzed by Nancy Landale and Tolnay in their chapter on the timing of marriages in the rural south in the early years of this century. Perhaps the most interesting chapter for economists in this section is the one written by Amy Holmes and Maris Vinovskis on the effects of the Federal Pension Program for Civil War Widows. As one of the first large-scale social transfer payment programs, this chapter presents an interesting historical case study of the impact of such programs on living arrangements and family behavior.
The second section of the book concentrates on current issues in marriage and cohabitation. Neil Bennett, David Bloom, and Patrica Craig examine contemporary trends in the timing of first marriages. Their results indicate that marriage patterns are complex for all racial groups but, not surprisingly, are significantly dependent on educational attainment and economic status. Robert Schoen and Dawn Owens discuss the declining popularity of early marriages and the growing trend in cohabitation which increasingly does not lead to eventual marriage. Their results support the view of Ronald Rindfuss and Audrey VandenHeuvel who argue that cohabitation is not a substitute for marriage, but rather an "extension of singlehood." This perspective is based on data which reveal cohabitors are more like single persons than married persons with respect to a large array of demographic and social characteristics. However, in another chapter James Sweet and Larry Bumpass report findings from the National Survey of Families and Households which indicate that 80% of cohabiting couples "intend" to marry their current partners and a majority of those that do not expect to marry their partners do not expect to marry anyone. Making use of the same data, the concluding chapter of this section by South examines the determinants of the expected benefits from marriage. The expected benefits of marriage are obviously found to vary according to age, sex, and socioeconomic status. Across all groups, young black males report the lowest expected return to marriage. This result has important implications regarding the formation and structure of the contemporary black American family.
The concluding third section of the book includes four chapters focusing on issues surrounding the roles of parents and children. Two chapters, one by Frank Furstenberg and Kathleen Harris and the other by Jay Teachman, explore the relationship of absentee fathers with their children. Both chapters present evidence of the significant decline in parental support, financial and non-monetary, that occurs after divorce or marital separation. The authors suggest that dramatic changes in the traditional parent-child relationship will result as the institution of marriage evolves over time. In a slightly different vein, Arland Thorton offers an interesting study of intergenerational behavioral patterns within intact families. He finds that some behavioral traits such as early marriage and premarital pregnancy may be linked across generations. The final chapter by Linda Waite and Frances Coldscheider presents an empirical study of the division of labor within the home. The analysis makes use of the National Longitudinal Surveys of Young Women and Mature Women. Their results indicate that the husband's share of household production has increased in response to a reduction in the share of work performed by children. The authors contend that this trend will continue as modern marriages become more egalitarian.
Though primarily written for the academic sociologist, many economists will find something of interest in this collection of papers. The issues and trends discussed throughout the volume are directly related to several areas of research pursued by labor economists. As a whole, the book suggests that there is fertile ground yet to be plowed for interdisciplinary work on the economics of marriage and family.
Paul W. Grimes Mississippi State University
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Grimes, Paul W. "The Changing American Family - Sociological and Demographic Perspectives." Southern Economic Journal, vol. 60, no. 3, 1994, p. 774+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA15138890&it=r&asid=e36302b21f55dd33a4b5e0ee4f1411a1. Accessed 21 Jan. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A15138890
Amy Kate Bailey, Stewart E. Tolnay. Lynched: The Victims of Southern Mob Violence. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Illustrations, tables. 296 pp. $29.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-4696-2087-9.
Reviewed by William Carrigan (Rowan University)
Published on H-Law (November, 2015)
Commissioned by Michael J. Pfeifer
The Victims of Southern Lynching
In the two decades since the publication of Stewart E. Tolany and E. M. Beck’s A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930 in 1995, numerous studies of lynching have appeared. Few are as important and significant as Lynched: The Victims of Southern Mob Violence, another study coauthored by Tolnay, this time with Amy Kate Bailey.
As with the earlier study, Lynched is historical sociology whose foundation and value lies in the creation of a rich data set. The value of the data set in A Festival of Violence was that it was the most accurate inventory of lynching victims yet produced, superseding through rigorous fact checking those previously published by Tuskegee, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the Chicago Tribune. The data compiled for Lynched is not such a refinement but a completely new set of data. Bailey and Tolnay have created, for the first time, a set of data on the victims of mob violence. We now know much more about this largely unknown and forgotten group of individuals, including their ages, their families, their occupations, their ability to read and write, their states of birth, and much more.
How did they create this inventory? In briefest terms, for Lynched, they searched through US census records for individuals confirmed to have been lynched, eventually linking data on over nine hundred lynching victims. Bailey and Tolnay do provide some analysis of white male and female victims in one chapter, but they focus overwhelmingly on African American male victims for the simple and justifiable reason that their numbers eclipsed those of all other groups in the ten southern states of their study. Their research took many, many years of painstaking hard work and was carried out by a large team of individuals, including over a dozen undergraduate research assistants, all properly credited in the preface. The authors detail the process by which the data set was created in chapter 2, but it is worth noting that it was the advent of online resources that was critical. In an age of federal spending cuts, I also want to note that the authors single out the support of the National Science Foundation.
Many of the statistical details that populate the study are not surprising, but there is still great value to having a more precise portrait of the typical African American lynching victim in the American South. Bailey and Tolnay found that more than half of black male victims were married. They also note that the median age at time of lynching for black male victims was twenty-nine years. The youngest individual in their data set was eleven and the oldest was seventy-six. More than two-thirds were between the ages of sixteen and thirty-five when they were executed. The authors also note that most black male victims were lynched near where they grew up and were raised.
The authors consider three different hypotheses in their analysis of their data: the possibility that black male lynching victims were from a lower social status than the average black male in the South; the possibility that black male lynching victims were from a higher social status; and the possibility that black male lynching victims were not statistically different in relation to social status.They find support for both of the first two hypotheses in their analysis but they find a way to reconcile their findings by comparing lynching victims not to the general black male population of the South but to the black male population in the counties that hosted their lynchings. This allows the authors to conclude that “the evidence suggests that standing out as an exception within the general African American population had an important influence on the targeting of lynch victims by southern mobs” (p. 147).
Some of the key findings underlying this conclusion are the following. First, successful black men were MORE likely to be lynched IF they lived in areas with few successful black men. They were otherwise LESS likely to be lynched. Second, being identified in the US census as a “mulatto” reduced one’s risk of lynching but ONLY if one lived in an area with a high number of mixed-race peoples. Third, Being born out of state increased chances of one being lynched if that locality had few individuals born out of the state. Finally, Agricultural workers were more likely to be victimized by lynch mobs than nonagricultural workers but only if they lived in localities with low concentrations of black male agricultural workers.
Historians will not find in Lynched new answers to some of their deepest questions about extralegal violence, namely, the underlying reasons that mobs executed their victims, but that is not grounds for criticism. There is much for historians to learn from these sociologists. In fact, there is much more in this volume than this review can cover, and I strongly recommend anyone with an interest in the history of racial violence and race relations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to read Lynched.