This is a participant-observer’s account of African American life in a small Southern town just prior to the Civil Rights era.Consisting of
Blackways of Kent
(1955),
Millways of Kent
(1958), and
Townways of Kent , the
Kent Trilogy
forms a remarkable southern ethnography that maps the social stratification of the Piedmont town of York, South Carolina, in the late 1940s, after the Great Depression and before Civil Rights era. In 1946 the University of North Carolina’s Institute for Research in Social Science commissioned a series of southern community studies from which these volumes resulted.Lewis offers a participant-observer’s views on small-town southern race relations in the mid-twentieth century. Based on Lewis’s interviews with community informants and experiences working in York between 1948 and 1949, the dynamic descriptions of individuals and rich explorations of institutions and traditions bring the community to life once more. Wholly segregated from the townfolk and from the poor whites of the mill village, the black community constructed a fully realized culture all its own. Most telling in Lewis’s astute observations into the hierarchy of this community is that, unlike the rigid white class structure based in ancestry and wealth, stratification in the black community was governed by personal behavior. This edition is expanded with a new preface by Reed on the origins and impact of the
Kent Trilogy
and new introduction by Stanfield detailing Lewis’s field research for this volume as well as his subsequent career.