Customer Reviews

Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia (Gender and American Culture)

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1 star:		(2)

 

 

In Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia, Jane Dailey argues that the Jim Crow South was a direct result of "white southerners' specific and concrete encounters with black social, economic and political power" (2). Dailey utilizes congressional records, correspondence, newspapers and periodicals, court dockets, contemporary prose, minefields of secondary sources, and the personal papers of William Mahone. In her attempt to explain the instability of social categories - political, gender and racial - and their interrelationship of identification, Dailey shows how Virginia formed ideas about race and how these functioned politically within a specific context. White and black southerners dissatisfied with local national parties, found commonality in class status, civil rights and downplayed race in the interracial political coalition of Readjusters. Before Jim Crow presents the legacy of the Readjuster movement thematically through the topics of honor, liberalism, deference, and identity.
Dailey argues against those who believe African American votes were meaningless in post Reconstruction South; it was the success of black men in politics led to their eventual exclusion from public authority. Dailey aims to further the C. Van Woodward thesis about the fluidity of southern race relations generally focused on electoral politics. She argues against historians who suggest the Woodward thesis applies only to politics by demonstrating that politics cannot be divorced from other social domains. By examining southern politics, through a focus on agency and context, Dailey shows the fluidity of racial identity and that white dominance was continuously re-created rather than a product that was simply perpetuated.
While Dailey deftly examines the intertwined social categories of identity, the focus of her book is male identity, the female gender identity and its social constructs are included as an object of men's honors as opposed to women's identity outright. In categorizing the denial of blacks civic rights through legal bans on interracial marriage, she ignores the civic rights of the whites involved in these same marriages. Dailey excels at infusing the study of this time period with a sense of fluidity, hope, and despair. This study in gender and American culture examines a moment of history often portrayed as failure but displayed here as foundation for future success for interracial politics in Virginia and the nation.

A little-known but significant episode in Reconstuction politics occurred in Virginia between 1879 and 1883. Republicans, conservative Democrats and African Americans allied briefly to form the Readjuster Party. The Readjusters wanted to reduce, or readjust, Virginia's pre-Civil War debt payments, thereby lowering taxes and diverting a portion of the payment to fund public schools for both black and white children. Jane Dailey, associate professor of history at The Johns Hopkins University, presents the story of the Readjusters in Before Jim Crow: the Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia. Dailey's work, an expansion of her doctoral dissertation, brings to light the fact that not all Reconstruction ended in 1877, and that even in stubbornly white supremacist Virginia a minority of civic-minded people tried to subsume racial prejudice to create a higher good.
Unfortunately, this college history student's enthusiasm at discovering a new facet of Reconstruction soon diminishes with the discovery that the book is boring, speckled with pretentious words ("quotidian" for "everyday?"), and poorly arranged. Dailey states that, ". . . chronology has not proved the most useful organization principle," and so she presents her work thematically. However, her choice renders chapter one, the basic history of the Readjusters, daunting for even the graduate-level reader to assimilate.
The story of the struggle to forge a black-white alliance in Virginia needs to be told, and Jane Dailey certainly has researched the subject deeply enough to present it to both academia and general readership. However, struggling through her book wastes the student's time, and I do not recommend it as a college text. If Dailey truly has the interests of history students at heart, she will re-write chapter one chronologically, abstain from overuse of the thesaurus, and delete extraneous material that is irrelevant to the narrative.

Dr. Dailey tells us that this book was her doctoral dissertation, before she made changes and published it as a book. That detail helps to explain the depth of research involved in this 169 page book. Pages 170 through 280 support the narrative in the book. I give the book five stars for the information that it contains, but the readability rating makes it a three star book. It still reads too much like a dissertation, instead of a book that is easy to follow.

This information is probably not available anywhere else, without going back to the multiple, original sources that Dr. Dailey used. It has tremendous detail about Virginia's Readjuster Party, including information about bi-racial cooperation in Reconstruction Virginia. The fact that this party survived until 1883 is remarkable in itself.

I recommend this book to anyone who is interesting in remarkable exceptions to the norm in southern states during Reconstruction. It is not an easy read, but the information is worth it, if you are a Civil War scholar or an aficionado.

While Jane Dailey's knowledge and research on race in politics and the Readjuster Party are not in question, her writing style is. To say the text is not informative is too harsh but it presents the reader with awkward and wordy language. To her credit, Dailey examines race and the implications of a prejudice postwar south in politics in totality, however it is possible to write a good book in an uncomplicated and straightforward manner. College students have enough work in reading without unnecessarily having to work at analyzing wordy texts. I would not recommend use of Before Jim Crow in the college classroom.