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Article: Seeds of Racism in the Soul of America
- Article from:
- The Journal of Southern History
- Article date:
- February 1, 2002
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright Southern Historical Association Feb 2002. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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Seeds of Racism in the Soul of America. By Paul R. Griffin. Foreword by Gayraud S. Wilmore. (Cleveland, Ohio: The Pilgrim Press, 1999. Pp. xviii, 148. $20.95, ISBN 0-8298-1313-6.)
In this brief but provocative book, Paul Griffin attempts both to discuss the intellectual origins of racism and to explain the persistence of racist ideas in this country after the apparent advances of the civil rights era. Racism endures, he writes, because it is essentially "a religious confession" (p. 4) that originated not among "unlettered... southern slave owners" (p. 11) in the nineteenth century but among the high-minded New England Puritans of the seventeenth century. Rejecting C. Vann Woodward's ...