Southern History across the Color Line, Second Edition

The book explores the complex interactions between black and white communities in the South, challenging the notion of a rigid color line in historical narratives. Historian Nell Irvin Painter emphasizes that, despite societal expectations for racial separation, the lives of these groups were deeply interconnected throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This examination seeks to reshape the understanding of southern history by highlighting the entanglements that existed beneath the surface of segregation.