Jumpin' Jim Crow is an intriguing anthology of essays about the ways in which whites and African Americans struggled to redefine southern politics and society in the century following the Civil War. Taken together, these essays assert that for both white and Black southerners, politics has long been the institutionalization of intersecting race, gender and class conventions. The introduction states, "Jim Crow was at bottom a social relationship" (4). Rather than depict politics as a purely rational, transparently strategic, objective process, these authors argue that politics is a highly subjective, varied expression of social beliefs and values; it is the way in which people's reactions to changing social conventions give rise to and become embedded within formal structures of power.

Jumpin' Jim Crow successfully unites the social and the political, in part because all of the authors embrace gender as a central analytical category for studying the late nineteenth and twentieth-century South. They suggest that after the Civil War, southern African Americans faced a power structure forced to retool in order to entrench white men's dominance in a society that no longer distinguished people as either slaves or free, and in which - at least for a short period of time - electoral politics was no longer solely white men's domain. In this context, white male dominance was not merely a matter of formal political rights. It was also fundamentally social, as white men's supremacy was linked inextricably to such issues as their guardianship of white womanhood and their self-proclaimed role as masters of southern civilization. This remained the case into the twentieth century. Formal politics and personal, identity politics were thus two sides of the same coin, in that formal politics institutionalized the subjectivities - the social aspirations, insecurities, and locations - of its constituents.

The authors in Jumpin' Jim Crow highlight the links between the personal, social, and political most compellingly in their discussions of African American resistance to Jim Crow. They suggest that African Americans confronted racism and challenged segregation in diverse ways, employing techniques that most would agree were traditionally political as well as some that might at first seem to fall outside the political sphere. For instance, Kari Frederickson notes that the African American Progressive Democratic Party challenged segregated politics and was one of the factors that provoked the formation of the States' Rights Democratic Party, or Dixiecrats, when it sent delegations to the Democratic National Conventions in 1944 and 1948. Grace Elizabeth Hale argues that African Americans who chose to shop via mail-order catalogues also challenged white power by thwarting general storekeepers‚ attempts to control their behaviour and their economic status.

Taken in its own context, the first instance seems almost indisputably political, but what of the second? In her discussion of the segregation of consumption, Hale states:

This kind of broad focus, which is in play throughout this anthology, seems particularly important in terms of the trajectory of southern historiography. While many of the essays are blatantly critical of white supremacy and white men (and justifiably so) this book is not about condemnation. The point is not to indict particular people for the failure or deficiency of the South. In the introduction, the editors establish their framework with the following statement:

If southern history is all about failure, insofar as we would consider segregation to be a failure of American aspirations to democracy and poverty a failure of the liberal economic tradition, that could mean that the only agents of any consequence were the white men at the forefront of formal politics and business. Everyone else merely received the poor results of troubled political decisions and economic realities. But the authors in Jumpin' Jim Crow propose a rather different argument for a more widespread view of human agency. Whites did not have completely free reign over Blacks in spite of their dominant position, and subordination did not mean that African Americans, or white women, were passive. Even as they faced victimization, the oppressed were still agents of history. Their relative oppression did not limit their attempted or actual social impact. In their many failed efforts to cast ballots, as well as their successful bids for access to social space and, in the case of African Americans, for equal buying power, they defined their own lives, constructed institutions of their own - institutions that Elsa Barkley Brown suggests were rife with their own contradictions and complexities - and actively pushed those with more power to react and to change.

Furthermore, individual situations, seen through different eyes, could be both backward‚ and progressive‚ at the same time. In the case of William Northen's antilynching campaign in Georgia, David Godshalk writes, "Whereas Northen sought to recover the lost antebellum world of his youth, [William Jefferson] White and other elite Black males hoped to create a new racial order - one that would nurture their goals of self-determination and full equality" (157). Although Northen's "vision for Georgia's future never transcended his memories of its past" (157), and although his antilynching efforts were not successful, there were people who seized on Northen's campaign as an opportunity and saw in it a glimmer of hope. In this sense, the history of the Jim Crow South is neither the disparaging story of stasis or regression, nor the romantic one of New South progressivism, but a narrative of choices and activity, and ongoing, simultaneous contestation and consensus.