Justice under Scrutiny: Exploring Legal Failures and Racial Prejudice in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird

Jim Crow Networks: African American Periodical Cultures

The International American Studies Association is dismayed to see the explosion of anger, bitterness and desperation that has been triggered by yet another senseless, cruel and wanton act of racialized violence in the United States. We stand in solidarity with and support the ongoing struggle by African Americans, indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities, migrants and the marginalized against the racialized violence perpetrated against them.
 As scholars of the United States, we see the killing of George Floyd and many before them as acts on the continuum of the history of the powerful committing racialized violence against the powerless in the United States from before the birth of that country to the here and now of the present day. This continuum stretches from the transatlantic slave trade, the genocide of the indigenous population, the denial of rights and liberties to women, through the exploitation of American workers, slavery and Jim Crow, to the exclusion and inhumane treatment of the same migrants who make a profit for American corporations and keep prices low for the U.S. consumer. As scholars of the United States, we are acutely aware of how racialized violence is systemic, of how it has been woven into the fabric of U.S. society and cultures by the powerful, and of how the struggle against it has produced some of the greatest contributions of U.S. society to world culture and heritage.
 The desperate rebellion of the powerless against racialized violence by the powerful is in turn propagandized as unreasonable or malicious. It is neither. It is an uprising to defend their own lives, their last resort after waiting for generations for justice and equal treatment from law enforcement, law makers, and the courts. In too many instances, those in power have answered such uprisings with deadly force—and in every instance, they have had alternatives to this response.
 We are calling on those in power and the people with the guns in the United States now to exercise their choices and choose an alternative to deadly force as a response to the struggle against racialized violence. You have the power and the weapons—you have a choice to do the right thing and make peace.
 We are calling on U.S. law makers to listen and address the issues of injustice and racialized violence through systemic reform that remakes the very fabric of the United States justice system, including independent accountability oversight for law enforcement.
 We are calling on our IASA members and Americanists around the world to redouble their efforts at teaching their students and educating the public of the truth about the struggle against racialized violence in the United States.
 We are calling on our IASA members and Americanists around the world to become allies in the struggle against racialized violence in the United States and in their home societies by publicizing scholarship on the truth, by listening to and amplifying the voices of black people, ethnic minorities and the marginalized, and supporting them in this struggle on their own terms.
 We are calling on all fellow scholarly associations to explore all the ways in which they can put pressure with those in power at all levels in the United States to do the right thing and end racialized violence.
 There will be no peace in our hearts and souls until justice is done and racialized violence is ended—until all of us are able “to breathe free.”
 
 Dr Manpreet Kaur Kang, President of the International American Studies Association, Professor of English and Dean, School of Humanities & Social Sciences, Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, India;Dr Jennifer Frost, President of the Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association, Associate Professor of History, University of Auckland, New Zealand;Dr S. Bilge Mutluay Çetintaş, Associate Professor, Department of American Culture and Literature, Hacettepe University, Turkey;Dr Gabriela Vargas-Cetina, Professor of Anthropology, Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, Mexico;Dr Paweł Jędrzejko, Associate Professor of American Literature, University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland;Dr Marietta Messmer, Associate Professor of American Studies, University of Groningen, The Netherlands;Dr Kryštof Kozák, Department of North American Studies, Charles University, Prague;Dr Giorgio Mariani, Professor of English and American Languages and Literatures, Department of European, American and Intercultural Studies, Università “Sapienza” of Rome;Dr György Tóth, Lecturer, History, Heritage and Politics, University of Stirling, Scotland, United Kingdom;Dr Manuel Broncano, Professor of American Literature and Director of English, Spanish, and Translation, Texas A&M International University, Laredo, USA;Dr Jiaying Cai, Lecturer at the School of English Studies, Shanghai International Studies University, China;Dr Alessandro Buffa, Secretary, Center for Postcolonial and Gender Studies, University of Naples L’Orientale, Italy;

Reviewed by: Raising Racists: The Socialization of White Children in the Jim Crow South Anya Jabour (bio) Raising Racists: The Socialization of White Children in the Jim Crow South. By Kristina DuRocher. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011. Pp. viii, 237. $40.00 cloth) In this slim but hard-hitting book, Kristina DuRocher offers a damning assessment of the socialization of white children in the Jim Crow South. Examining white Southerners' memoirs, advertisements for household products, school textbooks, parenting manuals, children's literature, toys and games, and dramatic productions, Raising Racists reveals the multiple interlocking and mutually reinforcing methods white Southerners used to perpetuate white supremacy in the post-Reconstruction South. "During the height of Jim Crow," DuRocher contends, "continued survival of segregation and white supremacy required the participation of whites of all ages, but especially those of the rising generation, in upholding a strict social order," based above all upon race distinctions but also resting upon a foundation of strict gender roles (p. 5). Recognizing the importance of training future generations, southern white parents, teachers, ministers, and public officials conducted a remarkably coherent and coordinated campaign to indoctrinate white youth in racism. For DuRocher, racial violence, particularly the highly stylized lynching ritual, was part and parcel of this effort not simply to subordinate black Southerners to white authority but also to instruct white youngsters in the theory and practice of white supremacy. "Segregation ultimately was a system enforced by violence," she argues, "both in small daily acts of injustice and in large public acts of brutality" (p. 8). White children were central to both of these methods of preserving racial segregation and white supremacy. Reading DuRocher's account of the "seamless" socialization into racism, it is at times difficult to see how Jim Crow ever ended (p. 63). Yet, she argues, paradoxically, the intense focus on socializing children in racism reveals the weaknesses as well as its strengths of the system. At least some white children eventually rejected white supremacy, often when they encountered Jim Crow in its most violent form, the lynch [End Page 495] mob. "Racial brutality became the site in which boys and girls either upheld their youthful lessons by taking on their predetermined adult roles," she explains, "or rejected them and the larger system of white supremacy they represented" (p. 94). DuRocher relies heavily on the adult memoirs of the latter group, who ultimately joined black Southerners in a successful assault on racial segregation. By focusing on the role of children in the Jim Crow South, Du-Rocher addresses many of the same themes as Jennifer Ritterhouse's Growing Up Jim Crow: How Black and White Southern Children Learned Race (2006). Both authors rely heavily on what DuRocher calls "racial awakening narratives" (p. 95). Both also call attention to what Ritterhouse calls "the significance of day-to-day patterns of domination and subordination" (p. 14). But while Ritterhouse includes both black and white children in her study, DuRocher focuses on white children. Moreover, while Ritterhouse focuses on the more subtle forms of racial socialization, or what she calls the "etiquette of race relations," DuRocher calls attention to the most blatant-and often violent-means of inducting the next generation into the culture of Jim Crow (p. 22). Finally, while both authors address both the successes and the failures of racial socialization, Ritterhouse gives more space to children's resistance to dominant racial ideologies, while DuRocher devotes most of her text to children's acceptance of racial segregation. A complete understanding of children's important role in both maintaining and challenging racial hierarchies must take both of these approaches into account. Interested readers should also consult Stephanie Shaw's What a Woman Ought To Be and To Do: Black Professional Women Workers During the Jim Crow Era (1996) for valuable insights into how black parents taught their daughters to survive Jim Crow and resist white supremacy. [End Page 496] Anya Jabour Anya Jabour is professor of history at the University of Montana in Missoula, Montana. She is the author of Scarlett's Sisters: Young Women in the Old South (2007) and Topsy-Turvy: How the Civil War Turned the World Upside Down for Southern Children (2010...

Reclaiming the Revolutionary

“Down Where the South Begins”: Black Richmond Activism before the Modern Civil Rights Movement, 1899–1930

Today's Black Lives Matter movement has drawn attention to racial violence, especially lethal police violence, and compared it to the 'Jim Crow' U.S. South. However, this comparison requires more specific information about racial violence during this period. Uncovering and organizing this information are the main objectives of the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive. It documents racial killings in the American South, 1930-1954. Racial killings refer to killings where racial animus, or perceived infraction of Jim Crow norms, are documented or reasonably inferred from newspaper reports or U.S. government and civil rights organization documents. This research note discusses how the Archive contributes to basic comparative politics topics of democratic governance and subnational authoritarianism and methodological concerns, including the creation of databases used in the comparative study of collective vigilantism.

Reviewed by: Hanging Bridge: Racial Violence and America's Civil Rights Century by Jason Morgan Ward Tameka Bradley Hobbs Hanging Bridge: Racial Violence and America's Civil Rights Century. By Jason Morgan Ward. ( New York and other cities: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. xviii, 326. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-19-937656-8.) Over the course of the twentieth century, the bridge that spans the Chickasawhay River in Clarke County, Mississippi, was the site of terrible violence. In December 1918 two pairs of siblings—Major and Andrew Clark, and Maggie and Alma Howze—were lynched on the bridge for allegedly conspiring to murder their employer. Later, in October 1942, white vigilantes in Shubuta lynched two teenaged black boys, Ernest Green and Charlie Lang, hanging them from the same bridge because they had the misfortune of being spotted in the company of a white girl. By 1966, as civil rights groups campaigned in Mississippi, the so-called Hanging Bridge had become a visible warning to those who would dare to challenge the racial status quo. In his book Hanging Bridge: Racial Violence and America's Civil Rights Century, Jason Morgan Ward offers a masterful and multilayered exploration of lynching through the lens of place and memory to powerful effect. Like many trees, riverbanks, and courthouse squares throughout the South, Shubuta's bridge, as a site of horrendous violence, became an enduring symbol of white [End Page 734] supremacy. As Sherrilyn A. Ifill has written, "public spaces were used to enforce the message of white supremacy, often violently. Lynching, particularly in the twentieth century, was most often an explicitly public act" (On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-First Century [Boston, 2007], 16). Ward, following the methodology of Mary L. Dudziak and Carol Anderson, recasts these atrocious incidents and the responses to them through a prism of national and international politics, building out concentric circles of impact from the local to the national to the international. "In 1918, and again in 1942," Ward notes, "the UnitedStatesembarkedonglobal crusades to secure freedom and democracy while denying those privileges to millions back home" (p. 15). During both World War I and World War II, civil rights groups and the black press took advantage of the breach between American rhetoric and reality to advance the cause of black equality. Instances of lynching were very powerful weapons on that front. Ward assiduously details the circumstances of these two lynching incidents, skillfully balancing newspaper articles and editorials from white-owned and black-owned publications, archival records, and personal accounts from African Americans, reconstructing the varying interpretations of the events held by black and white communities. In the book's third part, "1966," Ward meanders from the site of the Hanging Bridge that served as the geographic anchor of the first two parts. By that year, the civil rights movement had come to Mississippi, with the Congress of Racial Equality establishing its base of operations in Meridian, just one county over from Shubuta. Ward profiles local black leaders like Rev. Jesse Charles Killingsworth and John Otis Sumrall, who, through their activism, made sure that the civil rights movement did not bypass Shubuta. As in many communities throughout the South, they employed the tactics of marching, sit-ins, and boycotts; however, one of the more intriguing facets of the struggle in Shubuta involved the fight over Head Start. Through the Child Development Group of Mississippi, women like Jimana Sumrall, Mamie Jones, Allie Jones, and Garlee Johnson led what Ward describes as a "quiet revolution," using federal funds to care for impoverished youth, to support struggling parents, and to empower the community by allowing them the ability to shape and administer programs for their own benefit—activities that had been unavailable to them during the height of the Jim Crow era (p. 192). The program's efficacy, however, was ultimately eroded by the white leaders who maintained political control in the new Jim Crow system erected in the aftermath of the civil rights revolution. In this new era, Ward argues, poverty continued to be a form of violence that whites employed to contain and control African Americans and their political aspirations. A skilled storyteller, Ward has...

Reviewed by: A Curse upon the Nation: Race, Freedom, and Extermination in America and the Atlantic World by Kay Wright Lewis Stephen E. Maizlish A Curse upon the Nation: Race, Freedom, and Extermination in America and the Atlantic World. Kay Wright Lewis. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017. ISBN 978-0-8203-5127-8, 292 pp., cloth, $64.95. Kay Wright Lewis's goal is to correct past accounts of slavery and its aftermath that have inadequately acknowledged the fear and trauma created by the racialized violence African Americans experienced. In A Curse upon the Nation: Race, Freedom, and Extermination in America and the Atlantic World, Lewis claims that "extermination was part of a racialized ideology used to sustain" slavery (2). For African Americans, the memories of that violence in the antebellum South and in the Jim Crow society that followed "remained significant into the Civil Rights era" (2). Whites in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Lewis argues, believed that emancipation and black equality would lead to a race war and the extinction of both races. It was to avoid this outcome that whites employed exterminating racial violence against blacks. Racial violence in America began with the first European settlements. It was initially directed against native peoples. As the colonies expanded, this culture of exterminating brutality came to dominate race relations generally, eventually extending to the imported African population. Lewis traces this growing determination to eliminate or enslave those whom European settlers considered barbarians through the entire colonial period. White people's fear of what they believed to be the warrior past of the Africans they enslaved drove them with particular force to treat their slaves with harsh and gruesome cruelty. Nevertheless, African slaves resisted their enslavement. That in turn, argues Lewis, led to retaliation and even more widespread exterminating white violence. This bloodletting persisted into the antebellum period and intensified in the aftermath of Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831. The result of this new explosion of terror was a series of lasting traumatic memories that haunted the black community for many years. Fear of a race war continued to consume the antebellum white South following Turner's insurrection and its bloody aftermath. Dread of a race war dominated the Virginia debates over slavery and formed the basis for Southern opposition to the reopening of the Atlantic slave trade. Lewis argues that this dread also explains the panicky Southern white people's reaction to John Brown's raid. The memory of the exterminating horror that came after Turner's upraising led African American slaves to be wary of and ultimately reject participation in Brown's plan for a slave insurrection. They feared a bloodbath, but even though they had not responded positively to Brown, one followed the raid anyway. Lewis follows her analysis of racial violence in antebellum America with the claim that South Carolina left the Union not only in reaction to its perception of Northern hostility to slavery but also from a belief that the Federal government [End Page 299] would no longer protect the South from a slave insurrection, that is, from the very race war Southerners had long dreaded. Slaves saw the war for the Union, unlike John Brown's raid, as an opportunity to at last achieve their dream of freedom, so they willingly participated in the Northern war effort. The white Southern response was predictable. As they had been for centuries, African American civilians, along with captured black soldiers, were slaughtered by white Southerners in another exterminating reign of terror that continued after the war and traumatized the black populations for decades to come. That trauma, Lewis explains, was only reinforced during the years of Jim Crow and by the violence visited upon returning black soldiers following the First and Second World Wars. Civil Rights leaders of the 1950s and 60s had different views of how to counter white violence, but, Lewis reminds us, they all recognized that this violence needed to be confronted. Lewis is correct to focus on the ever-present Southern concern over a mutually destructive war of the races. It is impossible to examine the Southern white past without continuously encountering this obsessive anxiety over racial conflict. Lewis's...

Preface. 1. Prologue: The Great War - Black Americans in Europe. 2. The Early War Years: First Encounters. 3. Attitudes and Anxieties: Jim Crow and the British Government. 4. Jim Crow in Britain: The US Army and Racial Segregation. 5. Novelty to Familiarity: The Home Front. 6. Dixie Invades Britain: The Racial Violence. 7. The Watchdogs: Jim Crow Under Close Scrutiny. 8. 'No Mother, No Father, No Uncle Sam': Sex and Brown Babies. 9. The Black GI in Britain: Reflections and Results. Notes. A Select Bibliography. Index.

Born of Conviction: White Methodists and Mississippi's Closed Society and One Mississippi, Two Mississippi: Methodists, Murder, and the Struggle for Racial Justice in Neshoba County

Remembering Robert Charles:Violence and Memory in Jim Crow New Orleans K. Stephen Prince (bio) In I938, jazz legend Jelly Roll Morton told folklorist Alan Lomax about a song that was too dangerous to sing. It described the events of July 1900, when the city of New Orleans erupted in a four-day spasm of racial violence after a black man named Robert Charles shot and killed several white police officers. Though Morton remembered many details of the riot (and fabricated several others along the way), he adamantly insisted that the words of the Robert Charles song were lost to history. "This song was squashed very easily by the [police] department," Morton said, "due to the fact that it was a trouble breeder. So that song never did get very far. I once knew the Robert Charles song, but I found out it was best for me to forget it and that I did in order to go along with the world on the peaceful side."1 Perhaps Jelly Roll Morton had truly forgotten the ballad of Robert Charles by the time of his interview with Lomax. Perhaps he was simply unwilling to share it. Either way, Morton's peculiar relationship with the Charles story—unable to forget but unwilling to remember—offers a striking point of departure for a study of popular memory and racial violence in the Jim Crow South. Relying on Jelly Roll Morton's recollections, a number of scholars have argued that the tale of Robert Charles's stand against the New Orleans Police Department was kept alive in the city's African American homes and workplaces for decades. In Carnival of Fury, an impressive piece of historical detective work first published in 1976 that still stands as the only book-length study of the Robert Charles riot, William Ivy Hair writes, "Among lower class blacks [Charles] became [End Page 297] an immediate folk hero and 'the Robert Charles song,' praising his exploits, would occasionally be played at all-black gatherings for years to come."2 Other scholars offer similar assessments, using Morton's reminiscences to make a claim for the clandestine persistence of the Charles story.3 In these treatments, Robert Charles is elevated to mythic status, a part of the folk culture of black New Orleans in the early twentieth century. There is much that is satisfying about this narrative, which treats the durability of the Charles story as evidence of deep-rooted cultural resistance to the Jim Crow regime. At the same time, such a framing has limitations. It assumes that the veneration of Charles took place exclusively in secret gatherings and behind closed doors. An unknown, unseen cast of thousands may have cultivated the memory of Robert Charles through whispers and late-night jam sessions, but historians are denied access to their deeds, their thoughts, and even their names. Such details would seem to be lost forever, along with the words to the Robert Charles song. This willingness to simply assert or assume Charles's status as a folk hero has prevented historians from asking further questions about the legacy of the 1900 New Orleans riot and, by extension, about the nature of popular memory and its role in resisting racial oppression. It is possible, and necessary, to move beyond generic references to the lost ballad of Robert Charles. The subject demands much greater analytical specificity, in terms of personnel, content, and context. We do not need to settle for a faceless and nameless black working class; it is possible to bring actual people into the study of folk memory—to learn who remembered the Robert Charles story, when they remembered it, and why they remembered it. This approach creates memory studies from the bottom up, a social history of popular memory. [End Page 298] This article uses the commemoration of Robert Charles and the 1900 riot to explore the relationship between popular memory and black resistance in the Jim Crow South. In so doing, it extends the discussion of early-twentieth-century black resistance to Jim Crow from the organized—streetcar boycotts and antilynching campaigns—to the realm of everyday life.4 The story of Robert...

Reviewed by: Realist Ecstasy: Religion, Race, and Performance in American Literature by Lindsay V. Reckson Carolyn M. Jones Medine Lindsay V. Reckson. Realist Ecstasy: Religion, Race, and Performance in American Literature. New York: New York UP, 2020. 319 pp. $29.00. In Realist Ecstasy: Religion, Race, and Performance in American Literature, Lindsay V. Reckson uses the current scholarship on secularism to examine, as she notes, a period that this theory has ignored: post-Reconstruction America and the emergence of Jim Crow. Reckson argues that this era, with its consolidation of notions of race and its creation of racial segregation, is “central to . . . a regulatory regime of secularism” (5). African American uneasiness with the secular regime, held in place by a predominately Protestant Christian majority culture, is performed in racial, ethnic, artistic, and religious forms. Ecstatic performance of racialized persons, therefore, is multiply located—behind, before, and beside the dominant culture (234)—a formulation that she takes from the “Bacchic performance” (236) in a church in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928). Reckson argues that “realism gives us a sense of how deeply encoded the secular is with structures of white supremacy” (3). As she examines the semiotics of the “frenzied black body,” Reckson argues that even as realism struggles to forget how it is implicated in white supremacy, its effort to leave it behind is haunted by what it tries to contain. For example: “Naturalizing racial and spiritual boundaries as part of its steadfast attention to the material world, realist practice nevertheless remains strikingly animated by ecstasy’s occluded histories of violence” (234), signaling a “very real proximity between ecstasy and terror.” Realism’s autonomy, therefore, is “haunted by what [it] can ever completely forget.” Ecstatic performance, however, happens not just within but also beside these ongoing histories, opening often occluded possibilities of freedom as they both archive the past and present and open “(counter)investments” (235). In Jim Crow America, Reckson writes that secularism is a drama “at or of the skin” (7). Therefore, performance is constrained by a Gordian knot of “racial violence, compulsion, and the ‘religious’ ” (2). Her objects of inquiry are sites of inspiration, contagion, and enthusiasm, religious forms and gestures emerging from the Second Great Awakening, which included emotional, ecstatic, and personal conversion experiences, and which, in its relative openness to people of color, led to reform movements and progressivism. Yet for Reckson, these movements reinscribe rather than transcend racism as they stand within its structures and strictures. Reckson examines the particular fascination in Black spiritual experience with Black and other racialized bodies in ecstasy, while also demonstrating how progressivism is interwoven with racially coded white supremacy. The stability of this secular order is continuously haunted, however, by a Derridean return of what post-Reconstruction America thought or hoped was dead and buried. This return happens because the material world is structured by this haunting, by the “pervasive systems of racial capital, imperialism, and genocide” that shaped the present moment. Haunting, Reckson argues, “might be the dominant affect of secularism,” and is “integral to what it means to be modern” (5). Secularism is both epistemological and formative as it disciplines the reason and the imagination (6), as her opening example of the figure of Henry Johnson in Stephen Crane’s The Monster (1898) demonstrates. Alongside this disciplining, however, Reckson recognizes how Black bodies in ecstasy and in the case of the Ghost Dance, Native American bodies as well, threaten [End Page 353] secular intelligibility: They stand somewhat outside the regulatory frame. Race and personhood are problems that the secular realm struggles to make legible and interpret. Racialized bodies in ecstasy approach, open, or suggest only a meager proximity, an attenuated space in which freedom can be performed. These performances suggest the possibility of arrangements other than those of the reigning secular order, as bodies in motion unsettle fixed understandings. As Reckson writes, “This unsettling, transfixing, spellbinding performance of the unintelligible— circulating in dynamic ways through realism’s taxonomic enthusiasms, its broadside effort to forge sense out of a turbulent social sense—is at least part, I want to suggest, of what Jim Crow secularism feels like” (3). The possibilities, as we have noted, are not...

The twentieth-century rise of the United States as a global military superpower has resulted in the stationing of American armed forces personnel in dozens of allied countries and client states. On...

Reviewed by: Hostile Heartland: Racism, Repression, and Resistance in the Midwest by Brent M. S. Campney Amy Louise Wood Hostile Heartland: Racism, Repression, and Resistance in the Midwest. By Brent M. S. Campney. (Urbana and other cities: University of Illinois Press, 2019. Pp. x, 240. Paper, $27.95, ISBN 978-0-252-08430-0; cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-0-252-04249-2.) Hostile Heartland: Racism, Repression, and Resistance in the Midwest is a welcome follow-up to Brent M. S. Campney's earlier book, This Is Not Dixie: Racist Violence in Kansas, 1861–1927 (Urbana, 2015), which challenges the popular illusion that Kansas was a bastion of pastoral virtue, free of the racial conflict that consumed the South or urban locales in the North. Instead, Campney argues that racist violence was as important to maintaining racial hierarchy in this midwestern state as it was in the South. Hostile Heartland expands this same argument to the larger region, with chapters that cover histories of racist violence in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Missouri, as well as Kansas. He also extends his time frame, reaching back to the antebellum era and spanning through the 1930s. Campney makes a number of important contributions. First, he is one of just a handful of scholars who have examined lynching as part of a continuum of violence that includes threatened lynchings, homicides, rapes, whippings, and expulsions. Hostile Heartland makes clear that all these various forms of racist violence terrorized African Americans and supported white efforts to institute segregation, by law or custom, in public life. Second, Campney's chapter on [End Page 733] antebellum violence in the Old Northwest upsets the common presumption that Jim Crow–era lynchings represented a new phenomenon. Third, Campney shows how African Americans resisted white attacks, often through armed selfdefense. Black resistance happened organically and locally, rather than through official civil rights activism, and that resistance could engender further attacks and retribution. Fourth, his chapter on the role of law enforcement in aiding and—over time, as the police became more professionalized—stopping lynchings is a careful analysis of the topic that should plant the seed for more scholarship on the relationship between policing and mob violence. Finally, Hostile Heartland contributes to a historiographical trend that seeks to challenge the notion that racism and racist violence were distinctive features of the South. In Campney's reading, what distinguished the South was not white supremacy but demographics; if there were fewer lynchings and other forms of attacks in the Midwest, it was only because there were fewer African Americans in the region. On the whole, white midwesterners targeted African Americans as fiercely as their southern counterparts did. Neither was racist violence merely a product of white southern migrants to the Midwest, as other scholars have assumed. Rather, Campney shows that white migrants from the Northeast were just as protective of white supremacy as those from southern states. The modes of violence that northern and southern migrants used, however, often differed, a point Campney could have elaborated upon. Campney also does not spend much time discussing what motivated this violence beyond white supremacy. He provides thorough context on the racial climate in each state he covers. Readers do not learn much, however, about the political, social, or economic contexts that might have precipitated acts of racist violence. He does note that African Americans were at times targeted because they posed an economic threat to local whites. Were there local circumstances that made those attacks more likely? What other factors might have prompted white attacks? If white supremacy was a persistent fact, why did violence break out only at certain times in certain places—and take the forms that it did? Still, despite these questions, Hostile Heartland is a thickly researched survey that draws a striking picture of just how precarious life was for African American migrants to the Midwest. Amy Louise Wood Illinois State University Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association

The New Career of Jim Crow Stephen Robinson (bio) Stephanie Cole and Natalie J. Ring, eds. The Folly of Jim Crow: Rethinking the Segregated South. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2012. xi + 216 pp. Notes and index. $30.00. Robert Cassanello. To Render Invisible: Jim Crow and Public Life in New South Jacksonville. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013. xv + 188 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $74.95 (cloth); $18.95 (paper). Stephen A. Berrey. The Jim Crow Routine: Everyday Performances of Race, Civil Rights, and Segregation in Mississippi. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. xiii + 331 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95 (paper); $28.99 (e-book). Audrey Thomas McCluskey. A Forgotten Sisterhood: Pioneering Black Women Educators and Activists in the Jim Crow South. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. x +181 pp. Notes, chronology, bibliography, and index. $40.00 (cloth); $39.99 (e-book). William E. O’Brien. Landscapes of Exclusion: State Parks and Jim Crow in the American South. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016. xv + 191 pp. Notes and index. $39.95. Ruth Thompson-Miller, Joe R. Feagin and Leslie H. Picca. Jim Crow’s Legacy: The Lasting Impact of Segregation. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. xvi + 262 pp. Notes and index. $85.00 (cloth); $28.00 (paper); $27.99 (e-book). The scholarship on the Jim Crow South has had a long career. Dating back to C. Vann Woodward’s path breaking book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955), historians have sought to understand when and why de jure segregation was rolled out across the South. Woodward argued that it was the loss of restraining forces by the 1890s—Southern liberalism, radicalism, and Northern intervention—that enabled white Southern lawmakers to find a new way of enforcing strict racial hierarchies. The flexibility and experimentation in race [End Page 457] relations evident in the 1880s gave way to a more rigid system in the 1890s. Path breaking though this book was, it did not take into account earlier forms of segregation, nor did it contain any serious analysis of African Americans’ agency—a lacuna that was filled in part by Howard Rabinowitz’s insightful Race Relations in the Urban South (1978). Over the last fifteen years or so, scholars have sought to extend the contours of the debate. The essays collected in Jumpin’ Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights (2000), edited by Jane Dailey, Glenda Gilmore, and Bryant Simon, fundamentally reshaped our approach to the Jim Crow South. Rather than interpreting this period from the 1870s to the 1970s through a white lens—and thereby implying that the maintenance of white supremacy was the fixed component—these scholars instead argued that it was black resistance to Jim Crow that was continuous. It was white resistance to black political activism (and, later, to desegregation) that was in a constant state of flux. The books under review in this essay build on the work of Dailey et al. Each explores the fruitful scholarly path of black resistance, and a white counter-resistance that was ever changing. Jim Crow, it seems, had many careers, and was forced to change as a result of the persistence of African Americans’ resistance to it. The Folly of Jim Crow: Rethinking the Segregated South, edited by Stephanie Cole and Natalie J. Ring, is a collection of essays that emerged from a 2010 conference on the segregation era. This collection reveals that Jim Crow from the very beginning was not a fixed entity. As a result, the contributors argue that the old debate over timing is ultimately a folly. Indeed, the essays in The Folly of Jim Crow expand on this essential point. A particular strength of this work—and one that informs to some extent the scholarship that follows—is that it takes the long perspective on Jim Crow. As with scholarship on the modern Civil Rights Movement or, more recently, the Reconstruction era, the chapters in this collection do not simply focus on the early years of Jim Crow, or the period of legal desegregation. Instead, they reframe the story: back into Reconstruction and forward into the post–1960s era. As a result...