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The Rural Face of White Supremacy: Beyond Jim Crow. By Mark Schultz. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005. xviii, 305 pp. $42.00, ISBN 0-252-02960-7.)
It took Mark Schultz sixteen years to documentthe complex .personal relationships betweenwhite and black inhabitants of rural Hancock County, Georgia. He recorded more than 180 oral interviews with residents who represented a cross-section of the race, class, educational, and occupational variables in the county. Their memories prompted him to rethink southern history and to claim that "segregation is simply an inadequate model to understand race relations" (p. 7). Schultz found that, until World War II, rural whites in Hancock County constructed their supremacyon a foundation of selective intimacy with blacks, an intimacy based in "ritualized deference and highly personalized violence" (ibid.). Rural whites used oppressive personal relationships more than legalized segregation to limit rural blacks' opportunities. Thus, "in the rural South,...