Manufactured Outrage

In the years after the Civil War, New Orleans developed one of the country’s most ambitious experiments in racially integrated public schooling. By the mid-1870s, however, the city appeared to erupt in widespread opposition to integration. Newspapers reported mass outrage and violence seemed to confirm that integrated schools were incompatible with public order. But school integration did not collapse on its own—it had to be undone. Manufactured Outrage traces the rise and dismantling of this experiment by following one mixed-race New Orleans family across the nineteenth century. Sian Elizabeth Zelbo shows that much of what appeared to be spontaneous protest was in fact a coordinated political project designed to manufacture the illusion of popular resistance to the inclusion of Black people in civic life. Working with sympathetic newspapers, the White League staged confrontations, orchestrated protests, and circulated inflammatory narratives that recast the presence of Black children in public schools as a threat to social order. Yet integrated schooling retained meaningful support even as institutional backing gave way under pressure. Manufactured Outrage demonstrates how violence, media, and political theater transformed a functioning, if fragile, system into one that appeared unsustainable. In doing so, it offers a new account of Reconstruction’s collapse—one that foregrounds narrative construction alongside political violence—and provides insight into how movements manufacture outrage to reshape political reality.