South of the South: Jewish Activists and the Civil Rights Movement in Miami, 1945-1960.

South of the South: Jewish Activists and the Civil Rights Movement in Miami, 1945-1960. By Raymond A. Mohl with Matilda "Bobbi" Graft and Shirley M. Zoloth. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, c. 2004. Pp. xii, 263. $39.95, ISBN 0-8130-2693-8.)

Only half a century ago black customers were forbidden to sit down for coffee in a department store or a five-and-ten in downtown Miami. South Florida was still the South when it came to assailing the basic dignity and rights of black citizens. This book serves its purpose in confirming that historical change depends upon the willingness of nonconformists to work toward and pay the price for social justice. But South of the South: Jewish Activists and the Civil Rights Movement in Miami, 1945-1960 is even more valuable for historians, thanks to Raymond A. Mohl's deft introduction to the documents that make up two-thirds of the text. Published for the first time are the recollections of Matilda "Bobbi" Graff, a postwar paladin for the Civil Rights Congress (CRC), and the reports given by Shirley M. Zoloth to the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) concerning local sit-ins and other forms of protest. Mohl injects absorbing detail into the saga of grassroots southern activism on behalf of racial equality. But he also establishes context for these documents that lifts this volume out of the gopher hole of local history.

Graff and Zoloth never met one another, but they had much in common. Both were northern, Jewish women who moved to Miami with their families. Their efforts at desegregation therefore cannot be categorized as indigenous. Both Graft, who was a Communist, and Zoloth, who was simply a progressive, brought to Miami the same political ideals that had gained greater traction in the North. The voluntary activism depicted in this volume will reinforce the proclivity of women's historians to de-emphasize the domesticity to which Americans so commonly ascribed to the 1950s. As Jews--whose involvement in interracial movements for equality was vastly out of proportion to their number in the overall population--Graft and Zoloth inevitably attracted the notice of bigots.

Why racists and anti-Semites were eventually defeated in Miami is perhaps the most intriguing question that South of the South raises. What made the city a bastion of white supremacy yet more vulnerable to CRC and CORE campaigns than other cities in the region? On the one hand, Dade County could not defy the state laws passed by a vehemently segregationist legislature in Tallahassee, nor was the police force completely distinguishable from the Ku Klux Klan. On the other hand, Miami was no Meridian, and the centrality of tourism served as a catalyst for enlightening racial attitudes. Signs in Miami bus stations that read "Men--Reservados Para Hombres Blancos" showed that an incipient multiculturalism was already complicating Jim Crow and making it anachronistic (p. 140). And even in the 1950s, waitresses at Woolworth's felt obliged to serve coffee to dark-skinned persons as long as the customers spoke Spanish.

STEPHEN J. WHITFIELD

Brandeis University