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 wasa 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 Crowera, 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. The reformers' commitment to a system that was less unequal-albeit not truly equal-and more like the North led to significant policy changes over time. 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. Reforming Jim Crow rectifies that. INDICE: Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1.: The Problem of the South and the Beginning of Reform; 2.: Lynching, Legitimacy and Order; 3.: The Southern Reform and the New Deal; 4.: Democratization for the White South; 5.: The Natural Way: Education in the Jim Crow Order; 6.: Higher Education for Blacks inthe South: Pragmatism and Principle?; 7.: Building the Jim Crow University System; 8.: Jim Crow Reform and the Rebirth of Black Political Citizenship; 9.: The End of Jim Crow Reform; Coda; Bibliography; Notes; Index

• ISBN: 978-0-19-538742-1
• Editorial: Oxford University
• Encuadernacion: Cartoné
• Páginas: 336
• Fecha Publicación: 03/06/2010
• Nº Volúmenes: 1
• Idioma: Inglés