Reforming Jim Crow: Southern politics and state in the age before Brown

Historians of the Civil Rights era typically treat the key events of the 1950s Brown v. Board of Education, sit-ins, bus boycotts, and marches--as a revolutionary social upheaval that upended a rigid caste system. While the 1950s was a watershed era in Southern and civil rights history, the tendency has been to paint the preceding Jim Crow era as a brutal system that featured none of the progressive reform impulses so apparent at the federal level and in the North. As Kimberley Johnson shows in this pathbreaking reappraisal of the Jim Crow era, this argument is too simplistic, and is true to neither the 1950s nor the long era of Jim Crow that finally solidified in 1910. Focusing on the political development of the South between 1910 and 1954, Johnson considers the genuine efforts by white and black progressives to reform the system without destroying it. As Johnson powerfully demonstrates, our lack of knowledge about the cumulative policy transformations resulting from the Jim Crow reform impulse impoverishes our understanding of the Civil Rights revolution.

This text reshapes how we think about the origins of the civil rights era. The book paints a complex portrait of racial politics in the South in the first half of the 20th century and shows how the weaknesses in the Jim Crow system allowed reformers to lay some of the groundwork that would lead to the system's eventual collapse.