Reform and racism at the famed industrial school

Founded in 1868, Hampton Institute educated almost 1400 members of sixty-five Native American peoples. Donal F. Lindsey examines the interactions among Indigenous people, Blacks, and whites at the nation’s premier industrial school for racial minorities.

Lindsey's analysis traces the rise and decline of the program for Indigenous Americans while analyzing the program’s impact on the campaign for Native education. Lindsey also examines how the two marginalized races at Hampton viewed each other and white society. Though integration prevailed in much of student life, it resulted in even greater accommodation to a racist society. The weaknesses and strengths attributed to one race were used with “tender violence” to remake the other, in a program in which the powerful and the powerless remained so regardless of segregation or integration.

An innovative, hybrid work of literary nonfiction, Lowest White Boy takes its title from Lyndon Johnson’s observation during the civil rights era: “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket.”

Greg Bottoms writes about growing up white and working class in Tidewater, Virginia, during school desegregation in the 1970s. He offers brief stories that accumulate to reveal the everyday experience of living inside complex, systematic racism that is often invisible to economically and politically disenfranchised white southerners—people who have benefitted from racism in material ways while being damaged by it, he suggests, psychologically and spiritually. Placing personal memories against a backdrop of documentary photography, social history, and cultural critique, Lowest White Boy explores normalized racial animus and reactionary white identity politics, particularly as these are collected and processed in the mind of a child.