A Short History of Redneck: The Fashioning of a Southern White Masculine Identity

In the cotton counties along the river in Mississippi, where there are three black skins for every white one, the gentlemen are afraid. But not of the Negroes. Indeed, the gentlemen and the Negroes are afraid together. They are fearful of the rednecks . . . who in politics and in person are pressing down upon the rich, flat Delta from the hard, eroded hills. They may lynch a Negro; they may destroy the last of a civilization which has great vices and great virtues, beauty and strength, responsibility beside arrogance, and a preserving honesty beside a destructive self-indulgence. —Jonathan Daniels, A Southerner Discovers the South (1938)