Williamson, Joel. The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).

Williamson utilizes a wide array of perspectives--political, social, economic, psychological, and literary--to offer his revisionist interpretation of race relations after Emancipation, a subject until recently somewhat neglected. Indeed, it was not until Woodward published his The Strange Career of Jim Crow that this field of endeavor was opened up. While acknowledging the profound effect of Woodward on his work, Williamson offers a different view--not necessarily an opposite one.

The late nineteenth century served as a crucial turning point in that it marked the birth of a "communion of whiteness" after the War Between the States, a position which pushed the Negro aside. Sambo, once viewed paternalistically by his master, now became a violent and dangerous persona in the social balance of the South; the days of integration witnessed in antebellum days was to be no more. The attempt to free the Negro from slavery served to also feed the fires of racism. Negroes and whites segregated themselves. The white elite now set up a new power base, one based on the close ties to the white mass. In this work, which deals with race relations from about 1850 to the twentieth century, the 1890s is shown to be the crucial stage in a transformation of America and her culture. It was in this turbulent decade that disfranchisement and the Jim Crow system were instituted. Williamson offers an interdisciplinary approach to the different "mentalities" that would evolve in the next couple of decades, thus giving a new slant on the development of race relations in the South.