Graduate Teaching Assistant Our September Spotlight on Inclusive Excellence features Ph.D. Candidate Bryant K. Barnes. Barnes has been awarded the Phelps-Stokes Graduate Fellowship for 2023. This fellowship was established in 1911 by the authorization of a monetary gift to the University of Georgia from the Phelps-Stokes Fund. The fund was a bequest from the estate of Miss Caroline Phelps Stokes (1854-1909), a New York City philanthropist. The recipient must make a scientific study of the role of Black or African American individuals in American society. Barnes' research focuses on interracial political movements in the Gilded Age US South. More specifically, he researches the connections between capitalism and the rise of Jim Crow segregation and disfranchisement. Bryant's dissertation looks at Virginia's Readjuster Party and Georgia's Populist Party to show how they put forward alternatives to both Jim Crow and corporate domination of Southern politics and economy. They envisioned a more democratic, egalitarian society characterized by "equal rights for all and special privileges for none." Both third party movements turned to the state to protect their rights and restrain corporate power and influence. Interracial political cooperation came to be seen as crucial to any successful challenge to the moneyed interests, largely embodied by railroads. Conservative elites closed the doors of biracial reform and opened the doors of Jim Crow. But the reformers' internal divisions and flawed interracialism played an equally powerful role in bringing about Jim Crow as well. The story is one of corruption and reform, violence and protection, cooperation and division. It is the story of the New South as it came to be through the eyes of those arguing for what it could be. Bryant has published peer-reviewed articles in The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Agricultural History, and Genealogy.
