American Nightmare: the History of Jim Crow.

American Nightmare: The History of Jim Crow. By Jerrold M. Packard. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2002. Pp. xii, 291. Paper, $14.95, ISBN 0-312-30241-X; cloth, $24.95, ISBN 0-312-26122-5.)

In American Nightmare, Jerrold M. Packard attempts to inform the reader about the terrible past of Jim Crow in the U.S. Painting with a very broad brush and targeting his work at a popular audience, Packard presents a picture that is both appalling and fascinating as he traces the emergence, practice, and demise of Jim Crow. However, the book contributes little that is new to our understanding of segregation, black resistance, and the legacy of Jim Crow.

Packard begins his story with slavery and racism in the colonial period. He explains, accurately though with little detail, the evolution of racism and a codified system of race in the United States. Utilizing an engaging narrative style, perhaps the book's best quality, Packard continues his story through the development of Jim Crow as a codified legal system after the Civil War and up to its demise in the mid-1960s, concluding with the Voting Rights Act. In each chapter, Packard weaves personal stories and key events into his riveting analysis of Jim Crow law, practice, and even policy (such as the segregation of Washington, D.C.). The best chapter in the book explicates how white America rationalized Jim Crow, and Packard's analysis of the etiquette of Jim Crow is spot on. At times Packard eloquently castigates those who perpetuated or advanced Jim Crow; for example, he is particularly scathing (and rightly so) of the armed services and the federal government for their treatment of African Americans during the World Wars.

Although American Nightmare is provocative and extremely critical in parts, there are several weaknesses. The book is more a discussion of how southern whites felt about blacks and how they justified Jim Crow than an analysis of the complex forces behind the emergence of de jure segregation. Throughout much of the book, African Americans seem voiceless, almost passive entities who endured Jim Crow. There is no mention at all of black opposition to Jim Crow in the 1890s (save a brief mention of Ida B. Wells); the black washerwomen's strike in Atlanta and the boycotts of streetcars are not included. In addition, Packard makes no mention of the Niagara movement, Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the Harlem Renaissance, Henry McNeal Turner, Mary Church Terrell, Mary McLeod Bethune, Walter White, and many other key players in the struggle to end Jim Crow. There is little subtle analysis of the differences within the black community on how best to overcome Jim Crow. The book also ends abruptly in 1965. As a result, Packard fails to examine racial attitudes in recent times and the existence of more subtle forms of Jim Crow. Perhaps a part of the problem is that Packard bases his work solely on secondary sources and relies too heavily on others' conclusions. The lack of footnotes illustrates this problem.

These are serious weaknesses for the book as an academic text, but this does not mean that it has no use. Scholars of African American history and race relations will find the comments Packard makes both engaging and stimulating, and the book may interest the public at large in the topic of Jim Crow. Packard hopes the book will shine "light on this dark corner of [the nation's] past" (p. viii). It will.

JAMES M. BEEBY

West Virginia Wesleyan College