The Brown Decision, Jim Crow, and Southern Identity.

The Brown Decision, Jim Crow, and Southern Identity. By James C. Cobb. Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lectures. (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, c. 2005. Pp. xii, 93. $22.95, ISBN 0-8203-2498-1.)

James C. Cobb uses his Lamar Memorial Lectures to challenge the Brown-decision critics who "have overstated the extent of racial change in the South before Brown and understated the decision's role in inspiring and legitimizing the protests that actually played the key role in taking Jim Crow down" (p. 5).

Cobb's first essay traces the emergence of Jim Crow and how historians have chronicled it. Most important, he effectively demonstrates that Jim Crow's segregation and hierarchy developed in conjunction with New South capitalism, effectively countering those who insist that "racial discrimination [was] at odds with economic modernization" (p. 5). Instead, Cobb argues that in the early twentieth century "segregation promised to ease tensions not just between southern blacks and southern whites but between southern whites and northern whites as well" (p. 28).

In his second essay, Cobb tackles the "naysaying liberal revisionist[s]" who insist that Brown's most important legacy was "angering the southern whites" who subsequently engaged in massive, violent resistance to the civil rights movement (p. 31). As a white southerner who graduated from still-segregated public schools in 1965, Cobb is "sensitive to the danger of sounding either self-congratulatory or South-congratulatory," and this is evident in his emphasis; he takes on the Brown critics for their counterfactual, overly optimistic assertions that the South was, for economic reasons, on its way to reforming itself (p. 5). Offering instructive specifics, like the repressive response to the 1944 Smith v. Allwright decision that outlawed the white primary, Cobb makes it clear that even southern white liberals were doing little or nothing to end segregation and the southern backlash could as easily (and perhaps more appropriately) be connected to black activism, not the Court's decision. Cobb acknowledges the overwhelming evidence of Brown's limitations but suggests that it "is really a reflection of a larger national malaise on issues of race" (p. 53).

After demonstrating the clear connections between race, economics, and power in his first two essays, Cobb's concluding piece, "Brown and Belonging: African Americans and the Recovery of Southern Black Identity," emphasizes that with the demise of Jim Crow, African Americans are migrating back to the South and refusing to cede southernness to whites. While interesting, to some extent this focus ignores the continuing interconnectedness of white supremacy and economic inequality and how those are ultimately tied to the continuing national problem of largely separate and unequal schools. Cobb describes "continuing conflict about the Confederate flag and other historical symbols, monuments, and memorials" and argues that "leaders of both races" should work on "constructing not just a new southern identity but a new southern reality, where everyone would be visible and no one's belonging would be denied" (pp. 5, 75). This is undoubtedly true. However, as Cobb's essays make clear, this will require tar-reaching national changes in access to economic and political power.

EMILYE CROSBY

State University of New York, Genesoe