The White Image in the Black Mind African-American Ideas about White People, 1830-1925

How did African-American slaves view their white masters? As gods,monsters, or another race entirely? Did nineteenth-century black Americans evercome to regard white Americans as innately superior? If not, why not? Mia Baytraces African-American perceptions of whites between 1830 and 1925 to depictAmerica's shifting attitudes about race in a period that saw slavery,emancipation, Reconstruction, and urban migration.Much has been written about how the whites of this time viewed blacks, and abouthow blacks viewed themselves, but the ways in which blacks saw whites haveremained a historical and intellectual mystery. Reversing the focus of suchfundamental studies as George Fredrickson's The Black Image in the White Mind,Bay investigates this mystery. In doing so, she elucidates a wide range ofthinking about whites by blacks intellectual and unlettered, male and female,and free and enslaved.

Mia Bay is Assistant Professor of History and Co-Director of the Center for Historical Analysis at Rutgers University.