The Southern Gothic genre discusses the more macabre side of Southern literature, which often depicts the South as idyllic, cozy, and fertile for drama and romance to unfold. Southern Gothic, instead, uses the Southern United States often rural landscape and isolated communities to create a more sinister picture of the South, especially considering the legacy of slavery and segregation in the South. Race and the Southern Gothic are both intertwined in many works and, prior to now, there is and was little scholarship discussing their relationship and just how authors use the genre to speak on racism, segregation, and race in general. This paper aims to discuss how authors of the traditional Southern Gothic (1930-1994) use tropes and their subsequent imagery and evocation of fear to discuss the landscape of Civil Rights in the South, whether it be Jim Crow, segregation, the legacy of slavery, or even the aftermath of segregation in a fully integrated society. Authors often use the grotesque or a similar “freak trope” to either promote integration, display the brutality of racism, or create satire and parodies of bigoted figures. This research provides a fill-in to the gap previously discussed between the genre and racial discussions. Therefore, it allows scholars to further touch on the subject more in depth as a whole and in specific works.