Jumpin' Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights [Book Review]

Abstract

In their acknowledgments at the beginning of these essays, which trumpet the arrival of a new southern political history, Jane Dailey, Glenda Gilmore, and Bryant Simon give special thanks to their defenders at "the raucous 'New Directions in Southern Political History' session at the Southern Historical Meeting in Atlanta in 1998" (p. xiii). Along with the late and very much missed Howard Rabinowitz, I was a commentator (and not a defender) at that session. Although I was aware that the panel had instantly attained an almost mythical status, as embellished and, in some instances, considerably distorted accounts of the session circulated among historians, I had not previously realized that the myth-making went as far as changing the date of the convention, which actually took place a year earlier, in 1997. It is characteristic of the authors' attitudes toward what one contributor refers to in quotation marks as "facts" (p. 133) that they begin their book by mistaking the date of what they seem to consider a pivotal and traumatic event.