In "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Martin Luther King, Jr. asserted
that "the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward
freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux
Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order'
than to justice." To date, our understanding of the Civil Rights
era has been largely defined by high-profile public events such as
the crisis at Little Rock high school, bus boycotts, and
sit-ins-incidents that were met with massive resistance and
brutality. The resistance of Southern moderates to racial
integration was much less public and highly insidious, with
far-reaching effects. The Ghost of Jim Crow draws long-overdue
attention to the moderate tactics that stalled the progress of
racial equality in the South.
Anders Walker explores how three moderate Southern governors
formulated masked resistance in the wake of Brown v. Board of
Education. J. P. Coleman in Mississippi, Luther Hodges in North
Carolina, and LeRoy Collins in Florida each developed workable,
lasting strategies to neutralize black political activists and
control white extremists. Believing it possible to reinterpret
Brown on their own terms, these governors drew on creative legal
solutions that allowed them to perpetuate segregation without
overtly defying the federal government. Hodges, Collins, and
Coleman instituted seemingly neutral criteria--academic, economic,
and moral--in place of racial classifications, thereby laying the
foundations for a new way of rationalizing racial inequality.
Rather than focus on legal repression, they endorsed cultural
pluralism and uplift, claiming that black culture was unique and
should be preserved, free from white interference. Meanwhile, they
invalidated common law marriages and cut state benefits to unwed
mothers, then judged black families for having low moral standards.
They expanded the jurisdiction of state police and established
agencies like the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission to control
unrest. They hired black informants, bribed black leaders, and
dramatically expanded the reach of the state into private life.
Through these tactics, they hoped to avoid violent Civil Rights
protests that would draw negative attention to their states and
confirm national opinions of the South as backward. By crafting
positive images of their states as tranquil and free of racial
unrest, they hoped to attract investment and expand southern
economic development. In reward for their work, John F. Kennedy and
Lyndon Johnson appointed them to positions in the federal
government, defying notions that Republicans were the only party to
absorb southern segregationists and stall civil rights.
An eye-opening approach to law and politics in the Civil Rights
era, The Ghost of Jim Crow looks beyond extremism to highlight some
of the subversive tactics that prolonged racial inequality.
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