Dr. Janet G. Hudson
Middle Tennessee State University, B.A.
University of South Carolina, M.A. & Ph.D.
Research and/or Teaching Interests
Historian Janet G. Hudson’s recent book, Entangled by White Supremacy, won the 2010 George C. Rogers, Jr. Award for Best Book on South Carolina History published in 2009. In Entangled by White Supremacy, Hudson explains why white southerners failed to construct a progressive society while maintaining a racially segregated one. Even though a cohort of middle-class, white southerners fought to create a progressive society for whites only, pursuing reform while simultaneously perpetuating white domination proved incongruent. By examining South Carolina during and immediately after World War I, a period when African Americans comprised a numerical majority in the state, Hudson demonstrates how white reformers tried and failed to transcend the imperative of white supremacy.
World War I era prosperity fueled a sense of optimism and anticipation among South Carolinians—white and black. White reformers imagined improved education, expanded economic opportunity, and broad social progress in the context of preserving a political, economic, and social system that reserved power and privilege for whites and insured the subordination of African Americans. Black reformers, however, channeled the feelings of hope instilled by a war that would “make the world safe for democracy” into efforts that challenged the structures of the status quo. Hudson’s narrative charts the interplay of black and white reformers as they pursued their competing expectations for progress and explains how every facet of the homefront war effort—the military draft, mobilization of civilians, new military training camps, labor shortages, black out migration, and the woman suffrage debate–became entangled by white supremacy.
Entangled by White Supremacy explains why white southerners failed to construct a progressive society by revealing the incompatibility of white reformers’ twin goals of maintaining white supremacy and achieving progressive reform. In addition, Hudson offers insight into the social history of South Carolina and the development of the state’s crucial role in the civil rights era to come.
History 111—United States History until 1865
History 112—United States History since 1865
History 443—New South
History 492—Modern Civil Rights Movement
History 407—United States History since 1945
History 435—American Revolution
Teaches on the Columbia campus in the evenings; online; and in the Palmetto Program
Entangled by White Supremacy: Reform in World War I-Era South Carolina. Series: New Directions in Southern History. University Press of Kentucky, 2009
Chapter in Winfred O. Moore, Jr. and Orville Vernon Burton, editors, Toward ‘The Meeting of the Waters: Currents in the Civil Rights Movement in South Carolina. “Conflicting Expectations: White and Black Anticipations of Opportunities in World War I Era South Carolina.” University of South Carolina Press, 2008.
Encyclopedia of African American History, ABC-CLIO, 2010
“Houston Mutiny 1917”
“Elaine Race Riot”
“A Rice Planter Confronts the ‘Complications’ of Free Labor: Edward Barnwell Heyward in South Carolina Low country 1865-1868” After Slavery Conference, Charleston, SC March 11-13, 2010
“Black South Carolinians and World War I: Negotiating Class, War, and White Supremacy,” presented at the Race and Place in the American South 6th Biennial Conference, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, April 12, 2008.
“An Unpardonable Crime?: Ben Bess and the Tyranny of White Supremacy” presented at the 2007 Southern Historical Association, Richmond, VA, November 1, 2007