Caste & class

In this history of African-American society from the end of Reconstruction to the end of World War I, Fon Louise Gordon focuses on dissent within Arkansas's black community. In particular, Gordon studies friction between elites and the agricultural and laboring classes over ideological and procedural aspects of their response to the caste strictures of Jim Crow. Because opinions on how to oppose segregation and disfranchisement ran along class lines, Gordon is also able to offer one of the most discerning portrayals to date of that era's black society. It was, Gordon demonstrates, a society…