In The ghost of Jim Crow, Anders Walker offers a thoroughly researched and powerfully argued critique of the so-called ‘moderate’ response of white southern leaders to the Supreme Court's school desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). At the centre of the book are three southern governors: J. P. Coleman of Mississippi, Luther Hodges of North Carolina, and LeRoy Collins of Florida. Each attempted to carve out a middle way on civil rights in the years following Brown. They sought to forge a strategy that would avoid outright defiance to civil rights, accept certain limited reforms, and, most importantly, minimize the threat of federal intervention. Each earned the praise of white liberals who saw their approach as a constructive alternative to the defiant obstructionism that dominated the newspaper headlines in these years. Walker argues, however, that these men hardly deserved admiration at the time, and that they certainly do not merit praise today. The ‘moderate’ image carefully cultivated by these leaders was largely a façade. Their commitment to segregation was just as real as that of the white extremists, their differences more about tactics than principles. Walker makes the provocative argument that the moderate packaging of their strategies would ultimately prove far more effective barricades to racial equality than the bluster and violent tactics of the white extremists.

A significant contribution of this book is Walker's detailed account of the variety of policy reforms used by these southern moderates to protect segregation while avoiding the appearance of overt defiance. In response to Brown, a first order of business for the moderate governors was to cleanse state laws and policies of explicit racial classifications. The threat of federal interference would be lessened, they argued, when the South abandoned Jim Crow laws. Having adopted a posture of official racial neutrality, the governors then sought to create a new line of defence for segregation by shifting the terms of debate from the racial inferiority of African Americans to their cultural deficits. Walker locates an array of reforms in the area of marriage, adoption, and welfare law that, while appearing to have little to do with Jim Crow, were in fact designed to demonstrate that African Americans were not ready for integration. The governors also extended the jurisdiction of the state police and expanded government surveillance tactics (targeting both white extremists and civil rights activists), all in an effort to minimize the risk of racial confrontations and violence. Thus, although they fought against centralization on the national level, the governors eagerly pressed for centralization of government institutions on the state level. In this way, southern moderates were at once defenders of the old racial order and modernizers – an apparent paradox that Walker's book helps to explain.

Walker labels the moderate agenda an example of ‘strategic constitutionalism’, meaning that it was designed to influence judicial doctrine through cultural and political reform rather than litigation. Moderates sought to demonstrate to the nation that the South was not dominated by demagogues, and that there were reasonable explanations for why the white South might not want to embrace integration. If they were successful here, they assumed, Brown's reach through the federal courts would be limited. Although this concept of strategic constitutionalism is only loosely developed in Walker's book, it is a suggestive idea, usefully highlighting the multitude of pathways that contribute to the development of constitutional law.

Walker makes the counterintuitive claim that the moderate defence of Jim Crow was successful. The moderates, he notes, ultimately outlasted the defiant segregationists. By the late 1960s, with the extremists marginalized and the moderates in firm control of the South, civil rights activists had difficulty attracting the national attention and support that came from the dramatic confrontations in Birmingham and Selma. Individually, the moderate governors came out quite well, each rewarded with prominent federal government positions after they left state politics. Far more consequential was the durability of their resistance strategies. It is on this distinctly pessimistic note that Walker concludes his book. By replacing open defiance with ‘less controversial notions of standards, moral values, and local control over schools’, Walker finds that moderate ‘rhetoric outlasted the civil rights gains of the 1960s, arguably creating the foundation for a new era of racial inequality in the South and the nation’ (p. 157).