ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the development and elements of white supremacist ideologies in the antebellum and postbellum South, as well as the economic, political, and social circumstances within which they developed. Symbolic racial boundaries and categories in the antebellum slavery South evoked republican notions contrasting "civilization" on one side to "barbarism" on other, particularly in relation to citizenship. The "Sambo" and "Mammy" slave stereotypes were in that regard key features of paternalistic ideology of slavery. The Redeemer Democrats espoused what has been called "conservative" white supremacy—a genteel form of racism that in many respects carried on antebellum paternalistic categories of race and race relations. The Redeemers were hailed across South as heroes for ending the hated Reconstruction, but popular support for them and their conservative white supremacy dwindled as 1880s passed on. The road to Jim Crow was, not straight but crooked, because it was one thing to rhetorically posit white supremacy and a different thing to practically implement it.
