Before Jim Crow

Long before the Montgomery bus boycott ushered in the modern civil rights movement, black and white southerners struggled to forge interracial democracy in America. This innovative book examines the most successful interracial coalition in the nineteenth-century South, Virginia's Readjuster Party, and uncovers a surprising degree of fluidity in postemancipation southern politics.

Melding social, cultural, and political history, Jane Dailey chronicles the Readjusters' efforts to foster political cooperation across the color line. She demonstrates that the power of racial rhetoric, and the divisiveness of racial politics, derived from the everyday experiences of individual Virginians--from their local encounters on the sidewalk, before the magistrate's bench, in the schoolroom. In the process, she reveals the power of black and white southerners to both create and resist new systems of racial discrimination. The story of the Readjusters shows how hard white southerners had to work to establish racial domination after emancipation, and how passionately black southerners fought each and every infringement of their rights as Americans.

Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia
Jane Dailey, associate professor of history at The Johns Hopkins University, is coeditor of Jumpin' Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights.
"Before Jim Crow" is an elegant, often sardonic study of the Readjuster movement.

"Times Literary Supplement"
ÝA¨ fine book.

"Journal of American History"
Impressive. . . . A provocative and important work, one that should influence the study of race for years to come.

"Journal of Southern History"
""Before Jim Crow" is an elegant, often sardonic study of the Readjuster movement.

"Times Literary Supplement""
"Impressive. . . . A provocative and important work, one that should influence the study of race for years to come.

"Journal of Southern History""
[A] fine book.

"Journal of American History"
A nicely written and sharply observed study.

"Journal of American Studies"
An important addition to the growing literature about race in the late nineteenth-century South.

"American Historical Review"
In "Before Jim Crow, Jane Dailey brilliantly recreates the world of the Readjusters in late nineteenth-century Virginia. Emphasizing the fluidity of southern politics after the Civil War, Dailey makes clear that the emergence of segregation and disfranchisement was not preordained. (Peter Bardaglio, Goucher College)