Before Jim Crow: the Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia.

By Jane Dailey. Gender and American Culture. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2000. Pp. [xii], 278. Paper, $17.95, ISBN 0-8078-4901-4; cloth, $39.95, ISBN 0-8078-2587-5.)

The period between Reconstruction and Jim Crow may be the most neglected era in southern history. Despite contributions from some of the discipline's most gifted historians, there has been little sustained interest in the period. As a result, we still know very little about the experiences of specific groups and specific regions within the South. Jane Dailey's impressive Before Jim Crow helps rectify this situation.

For Dailey, the most significant political development in post-Reconstruction Virginia was the emergence of the Readjuster movement, a coalition of lower-class whites and blacks, frustrated Republicans, and urban professionals that came together in the late 1870s to protest Conservative rule. The Readjusters experienced a meteoric rise and fall in Virginia politics, occupying power in Virginia's state government for only a few years from about 1879 to 1883.

Dailey does not try to chart a comprehensive history of the Readjuster movement; rather she uses the Readjusters to suggest "how Virginians formed ideas about race and how these ideas functioned politically within a specific context" (p. 5). Dailey takes to task those historians who place too much emphasis upon the explanatory power of white racism. To Dailey, the Readjuster Party's very existence demonstrates that both black and white southerners were able to develop alternative understandings of racial identities as they forged an effective interracial coalition. Dailey suggests that they were able to do so because social categories like race, gender, and class are neither rigid nor predetermined--rather, they are dynamic and interrelated. One of Dailey's primary tasks in Before Jim Crow is to "mark the points" at which one category influences the conceptualization of another (p. 8).

This is a sophisticated and complex analysis. In five chapters and an epilogue, Dailey sorts through the various contingencies that made it possible for some whites and African Americans to defy racial conventions. Chapters are arranged chronologically and thematically. Early chapters explain how the political and social environment made the Readjuster movement possible. In the late 1870s conservative Democrats determined that it was high time to pay off the state's antebellum debt, which they proposed to do in part by cutting support for the state's nascent public schools. In 1877 common whites and blacks demonstrated their opposition to this move by supporting an unlikely insurgent within the Democratic Party for governor, former Confederate general William Mahone. Mahone has always been something of an enigma in southern political history; as Dailey notes, it is difficult to assess his motives for taking up the cause of common whites and African Americans (pp. 37-41). Whatever his reasons, Mahone worked quickly to establish his power base once in office. In 1879 he established a separate party, the Readjusters, and welcomed black Republicans into the fold. To shore up power at the national level, he and his lieutenants brokered a deal with the national GOP so that the Readjusters, not the state Republican Party, would control federal patronage. This patronage, along with liberal tax, voting, and school reforms, enabled Readjusters to strengthen their hold on common white and African American voters.

Eventually, the Readjusters became victims of their own success, as southern whites became alarmed at what they perceived to be the "mongrelizing" tendencies of Readjuster policies and practices (pp. 140-41). But this did not happen immediately. Dailey argues that one indication of the fluidity of racial identity in the post-emancipation South was the Readjusters' staying power. Southern whites did not reject the Readjusters' biracial coalition in a simple knee-jerk reaction. Conservatives tried and failed to use the politics of race to break the Readjusters in state elections of 1881 and 1882, but they finally regained control of the state in 1883 only after a hard-fought and sometimes bloody campaign. In a provocative final chapter, Dailey shows how they did this by exploiting common whites' understanding that race was defined as much by behavior as biology.

Before Jim Crow helps us to understand the dynamics of race relations in post-emancipation Virginia and the nature of racial ideologies more generally. As Dailey concludes, race is not transcendent; instead, it is "always in flux, always connected with the articulation of other social categories" (p. 155). Unfortunately, in making her case Dailey sometimes sells short the contributions of those who came before her. Dailey seems to believe that she is among the first southern historians to recognize that whites' understanding about race changed over time according to social, political, and economic factors. In fact, historians have operated from this perspective for years. Dailey brings greater clarity and precision to the discussion, but the differences between Dailey and her predecessors are of degree, not of kind.

Even so, Dailey's Before Jim Crow is a provocative and important work, one that should influence the study of race for years to come.

STEVE TRIPP
Grand Valley State University