Scholarly literature on the Civil Rights movement, focusing on participants and their strategies, is abundant. Less abundant, but substantial, is the literature on those who opposed the movement. But the subjects of Kimberly Johnson's book are much less well known: the diverse white and black southern reformers who fought for incremental improvements under determinedly white leadership, from the 1920s to the mid-1950s. They were not fighting for an end to the Jim Crow system, which was far beyond possible in those years; instead, their goals were to modernize southern public institutions and make their operation less horrifically brutal and undemocratic. One had to start somewhere, and the reformers were the small minority who were willing to try.

The Jim Crow reformers acted through a succession of white-dominated and often foundation-aided groups: The Commission on Interracial Cooperation, The Southern Conference for Human Welfare, The Southern Policy Committee, The Southern Sociological Congress, the Rockefeller Foundation's Southern Education Board, the education-focused efforts funded by the Rosenwald Foundation, and the university-centered research groups and institutes at the University of North Carolina, the University of Alabama, and Fisk University. Women were involved in all of these groups to some extent, but particularly in church groups and the General Federation of Women's Clubs.

When the New Deal came along, the southern reformers eagerly embraced the new agencies, and many served in them, using their new administrative powers “to press for blacks to get a greater share of New Deal–funded jobs in the Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps, and for greater access to New Deal services” (p. 73). White reformer (and Methodist minister) Will Alexander promoted the institution of a radical new program (or so it was seen during its relatively short life) to help tenant farmers buy their own farms with long-term, low-interest loans and a lot of technical assistance. This agency, the Farm Security Administration, “employed more black [field] supervisors than any other New Deal Agency” (p. 73).

Johnson works to uncover the motives and strategies of the cautious pre-Brown southern reformers and describes their modest, gradual, but essential successes: a sharp drop in lynching; increasing public support for poll tax reform years before it was finally ended by constitutional amendment; thousands of schools built for black children in the era of segregated reform; halting progress in equalizing teachers' salaries; modest improvements in aid to black colleges; and administrative reforms in policing (creating state police agencies as a way to prevent lynching) and in educational institutions. Although she concludes that “Jim Crow reform politics created the strategic and institutional bases for the modern civil rights movement” (p. 213), Johnson does not inflate the importance of such reforms, or the altruism of the reformers' motives. It was largely black organizations that built a dynamic black civic culture at the southern grass roots and supported the organizations taking critical cases to the Supreme Court.

It is probably inevitable that early reformers will seem, at decades remove, far too timid, too limited in their imagination, too much a part of the system whose roughest edges they wanted to remove, without (we assume) fully understanding that once the sharp edges are gone the glue may pull loose in the entire structure. Students of social movements find it much easier to analyze the motives of the central participants—in this case, African Americans in the South—than the supporters on the margins, the early, tentative reformers, even the presidents and congressional leaders who played major roles in the success of the movement. We tend to assume that since they were not of the African American Civil Rights movement, they must have had other, more suspect motives: to further their political careers, or simply to maintain peace and stability in the face of growing discontent. The latter was, according to Johnson, a major motive of the reformers, a reason they insisted on controlling the pace of reform; and it is implied that few of the white reformers were able to overcome paternalism and racial prejudices (pp. 117–25, 145).

It is never easy to parse out the individual motives of those who make personal sacrifices to change the status quo (at minimum, sacrificing their time; at maximum, incurring the odium of the opponents of reform who control diverse resources for punishment). It is even harder to do so when there is little obvious selfish interest in rocking the boat. Rational choice scholars have prodded us to see nonmaterial rewards like reputation and solidarity as “rational” components of the calculus of collective action in movements like Civil Rights, but for the comfortable middle-class reformers who were white, it is less easy to comprehend such actions through a rational choice lens. Johnson, not unlike other scholars of the Civil Rights movement, assumes that the motives of white reformers were “to ensure a sane and safe path toward stable race relations, a world in which blacks and whites could live apart yet be equal” (p. 115).

At other points, there is an implication that the motive of white poll tax reformers was to expand white democracy (pp. 92–108). But how, a political scientist may wonder, could the reformers have been so naive as to assume that a full political democracy could be obtained for whites without also greatly expanding black democratic participation? And where could that end but in the dismantling of separate-but-equal altogether? Could well-educated white reformers have been ignorant of the pressure for new Civil Rights laws that was already being exerted on members of Congress and presidential candidates by enfranchised black voters in the North? And would they not remember (if only from their history books) that the panoply of voter restrictions like poll taxes and literacy tests were put in place after the 1880s precisely to get rid of large political coalitions of low-income whites and blacks? Were they innocent of such anticipations, or were they genuine liberals willing to accept the upheavals in class power that had caused nineteenth-century elites such nightmares?

It is possible that they were, indeed, naive but genteel people who simply wanted to keep the races separate and the whites on top without crude violence and distressing poverty. But it is also possible that some were sincere but shrewd reformers who, when they talked about getting rid of the poll tax, spoke mainly of the benefits to poor whites, and when they spoke of the evils of lynching, reminded listeners how badly the rest of the world perceived the South when these unpleasant and dishonorable things happened. After all, they were trying to persuade people who were not already on their side that the changes they supported could also benefit whites.

Social movement scholars may finish Reforming Jim Crow wishing they knew more about these people: more of their personal biographies, more about who took the initiative to start these reform groups, what they did and said at their meetings, and where they ended up politically in the 1960s. It would also be useful to have a more extensive analysis of the differences between men and women reformers in the segregated South, since tantalizing differences are alluded to by the author. When important claims about motive are made without footnotes, and there is no survey evidence of the relatively small groups of white reformers and their black allies, we have only the author's interpretation to go on. Historians may be more comfortable with such assumptions than political scientists.

The most valuable contributions of the book come in its attention to a critical group of reformers who seem to have been at the fulcrum of a budding movement, assuring at least some Southerners that reform was to be embraced rather than feared, that well-educated, respectable people welcomed it. Where there were fewer such people, as in Alabama and Mississippi, much blood would be shed on the way to political equality. Political change is a very complicated process, and we struggle to understand its linkages, wishing we could see it all displayed in a diagram with arrows. We know a lot about the incredible personal courage, the grassroots black institutions in which it could be safely fostered, and the masterful national strategies of the Civil Rights movement. Liberal whites and their chosen black allies in the early biracial reform groups are backstories. But they did a lot, Johnson tells us, to prod reform along in the movement space opening after World War II, to give change an aura of respectability to anxious southern whites (and to wealthy and powerful whites in the North whose resources were needed).

Were these people essential predecessors who launched a movement they could not comfortably be a part of after takeoff, or did at least some of them cherish the thought that one day they would be shouldered aside as the central contenders moved onto the chessboard?

There are probably people like this at the modest beginnings of all great movements. These are people surely worth knowing about, these middle- and upper-middle-class, middle-aged men and women who look earnestly out at us, faces radiating both sincerity and determination, from the cover of Johnson's pathbreaking book.