Race Harmony and Black Progress: Jack Woofter and the Interracial Cooperation Movement [Hardcover]

Founded by white males, the interracial cooperation movement flourished in the American South in the years before the New Deal. The movement sought local dialogue between the races, improvement of education, and reduction of interracial violence, tending the flame of white liberalism until the emergence of white activists in the 1930s and after. Thomas Jackson (Jack) Woofter Jr., a Georgia sociologist and an authority on American race relations, migration, rural development, population change, and social security, maintained an unshakable faith in the effectiveness of cooperation rather than agitation. Race Harmony and Black Progressexamines the movement and the tenacity of a man who epitomized its spirit and shortcomings. It probes the movement's connections with late 19th-century racial thought, Northern philanthropy, black education, state politics, the Du Bois-Washington controversy, the decline of lynching, the growth of the social sciences, and New Deal campaigns for social justice.

White southern intellectuals and the Negro Problem

Mark Ellis is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland, and author ofRace, War, and Surveillance: African Americans and the United States Government during World War I(IUP, 2001).

[E]llis uses Woofter to examine the southern movement for interracial cooperation between the two world wars. . . Ellis also provides insights into the development of the social scientific study of race relations, particularly in the South. . . Anyone interested in the anti-lynching movement, southern rural life, and the social sciences should find the study useful. In addition to rescuing Woofter from historical neglect, Ellis may make his most important and controversial contribution with his critical defense of that elusive phenomenon called southern liberalism.2015 120.3

This book makes a persuasive case that the interracial cooperation movement played a bridge role bel£w