White trash southerners were classified as a “race” that passed on horrific traits, eliminating any possibility of improvement or social mobility. If these Night of the Living Dead qualities were not enough, critics charged that poor whites had fallen below African slaves on the scale of humanity. They marked an evolutionary decline, and they foretold a dire future for the Old South. If free whites produced feeble children, how could a robust democracy thrive? If whiteness was not an automatic badge of superiority, a guarantee of the homogeneous population of independent, educable freemen, as
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