The long transition of the economic institutions of the rural South, and of the social relations that were rooted in them, provided a strong basis for structural ambiguity, strain, conflict, and violence. Southern farmers and peasants were subject to fluctuating but intense and unrelenting pressure, to the long-term squeeze of agrarian capitalism and modernization that eventually drove most of them off the land. This severe pressure accounts for much, though certainly not all, of the volatile explosiveness of Southern politics in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Yet the dynamics of the South's agrarian history apparently provided the power structure with no imperative need for a new, horizontally organized order of race relations. In rural areas, with the very important exception of self-segregated all-black towns, the personal power of planters and furnishing merchants continued to be institutionalized in crop-lien laws that were enforced by sheriffs, biased courts, and lynch mobs. In rural areas, for the most part, the traditional mechanisms of intimidation remained in good working order as effective instruments of social control. Overwhelmingly race relations continued to be vertical. White was over black.

THE ROLE OF CITIES

The situation was very different in urban areas, with their concentrations of black lawyers, newspapers, colleges, and large churches. City blacks were somewhat more autonomous than their country cousins. The small but growing middle and artisan classes, in particular – bankers, undertakers, insurance salesmen, teachers, barbers, carpenters, masons – were often their own bosses.