William Alexander Percy’s Lanterns on the Levee chronicles Percy’s white planter class life in a stream-of-consciousness poetic style. While Percy’s work is undoubtedly well written and entertaining, Percy’s observations, particularly the sweeping generalizations of other racial groups and ethnic groups, reveal that even though he was considered as more of a progressive of his time, his planter-class paternalism and white supremacy is strikingly evident to the modern day reader. It’s as if he is so deeply immersed in the waters of the planter class that he doesn’t realize he is swimming in it. This is especially true with Percy’s perspective on Southern manners. For Percy, the Southern ideal is in the planter’s paternalism, decadence with food and drink, and knowledge of the great artists, poets, and writers of Europe. However, he fails to acknowledge that the ability to pursue and enjoy this way of life was largely based in an exploitive, race-based economic system.  

In Charles Reagan Wilson’s The Southern Way of Life, Wilson argues that Percy had a place for African Americans in his ideal of Southern society, but only to work, serve, and entertain. It was not to become equal. Wilson shows Percy’s distaste for the South’s poor whites, whom he blamed for the Ku Klux Klan and who he thought lacked the grace and manners of Percy’s idea class of Southerners. It is also helpful to consider Percy’s worldview in dialogue with W. J. Cash’s The Mind of the South. Mentioned in the introduction by William’s nephew, Walker Percy, it was published the same year as Lanterns on the Levee. While also highly critical of Southern poor whites, Cash argues that the planter class and poor whites were more similar than different, and that the aristocratic South was largely a myth. Cash’s background from a working-class family in the Piedmont region provides a helpful foil to Percy’s more elitist Delta perspective. Cash differs from Percy in the fact that he argues poor whites succumbed to ignorance and manipulation, not lack of manners and virtue.

With both Percy and Cash we see how racial politics, even between whites, have shaped the region. Anthropologist, Hortense Powdermaker, helps us make sense of the puzzling dynamics of racial politics in her 1939 work, After Freedom: A Cultural Study in the Deep South. Powdermaker observes that a poor white’s hatred of African Americans goes beyond merely the economic situation, but social status. For poor whites, the planter class despised them, and African Americans despised him. Powdermaker shows how lynchings and other acts of violence were ways of venting frustrations of being stuck in this type of social hierarchy. While not excusable, it does help us parse out a logic for why these types of racial politics have historically hindered the South from building class consciousness across racial lines. Powdermaker argues that proximity between poor whites and African Americans could lesson the hatred and could lead towards greater solidarity. As we see today, especially in a place like the Mississippi Delta, proximity and racial integration is still an ongoing challenge.