Mary R. Gardner

Allison Davis

Burleigh Bradford Gardner

First published in 1941, Deep South is the cooperative effort of a team of social anthropologists to document the economic, racial, and cultural character of the Jim Crow South through a study of a representative rural Mississippi community. Researchers Allison Davis, Burleigh B. Gardner, and Mary R. Gardner lived among the people of Natchez, Mississippi, as they investigated how class and caste informed daily life in a typical southern community. This Southern Classics edition of their study offers contemporary students of history a provocative collection of primary material gathered by conscientious and well-trained participant-observers, who found then, as now, intertwined social and economic inequalities at the root of racial tensions. Expanding on earlier studies of community stratification by social class, researchers in the Deep South Project introduced the additional concept of caste, which parsed a community through rigid social ranks assigned at birth and unalterable through life, a concept readily identifiable in the racial divisions of the Jim Crow South. As African American researchers, Davis and his wife, Elizabeth, along with his assistant St. Clair Drake, were able to gain unrivaled access to the black community in rural Mississippi, unavailable to their white counterparts. Through their interviews and experiences, the authors vividly capture the nuances in caste-enforcing systems of tenant-landlord relations, local government, and law enforcement. But the chief achievement of Deep South is its rich analysis of how the southern economic system, and sharecropping in particular, functioned to maintain rigid caste divisions along racial lines. In the new introduction to this edition, Jennifer Jensen Wallach situates this germinal study within the field of social anthropology and against the backdrop of similar community studies of the era. She also details the subsequent careers of this distinguished team of researchers.

A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class

Deep South

Isabel Wilkerson

Burleigh B. Gardner

W. Lloyd Warner

A classic examination of the lived realities of American racism, now with a new foreword from Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson. First published in 1941, Deep South is a landmark work of anthropology, documenting in startling and nuanced detail the everyday realities of American racism. Living undercover in Depression-era Mississippi—not revealing their scholarly project or even their association with one another—groundbreaking Black scholar Allison Davis and his White co-authors, Burleigh and Mary Gardner, delivered an unprecedented examination of how race shaped nearly every aspect of twentieth-century life in the United States. Their analysis notably revealed the importance of caste and class to Black and White worldviews, and they anatomized the many ways those views are constructed, solidified, and reinforced. ​ This reissue of the 1965 abridged edition, with a new foreword from Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson—who acknowledges the book’s profound importance to her own work—proves that Deep South remains as relevant as ever, a crucial work on the concept of caste and how it continues to inform the myriad varieties of American inequality.

Mary R. Gardner

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