Landscapes of Exclusion

In Landscapes of Exclusion William E. O'Brien presents “the untold story of racial exclusion and segregation in southern state parks, from before their creation to the aftermath of desegregation” (p. 4). This well-researched book employs both a national focus on the importance of natural landscapes and a regional narrative of the inequality of access to these spaces and their transformative potential. One of O'Brien's goals is to “encourage wider commemoration” of the shameful past of the racism embedded in the rise of state parks in the South (p. 17). The state park movement developed in the late nineteenth century as the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) decision established the “separate-but-equal” precedent that caused deep inequality for African Americans, especially in the South. In O'Brien's overview of the well-documented exclusion of African Americans in many New Deal policies, including state parks, he argues that “white supremacy was maintained in part by making inequality visibly apparent” (p. 4). Stereotypes that African Americans were not interested in “natural” landscapes and fears of black bodies as sources of pollution or contamination are part of the deeply entrenched sense of white supremacy in the southern state park system. The book also focuses on early efforts by African Americans to use state funds for their own state parks. Early state parks in the South were for whites or blacks only or, more rarely, dual-use parks (where blacks had separate and inferior spaces within white parks

Art · Desegregation · Ethnology · Geography · Inequality · Narrative · Political science · Racism · Sociology · State (computer science · White (mutation · White supremacy · American Environmental and Regional History · Gender Studies · Law