The career of Jim Crow becomes stranger, as C. Vann Woodward would say, when historians turn away from the loudly defiant massive resisters to the quiet moderates that guided the South's lasting legal responses to desegregation. In the well-researched and engaging The Ghost of Jim Crow, Anders Walker examines how powerful southern governors reshaped racial separation in reaction to the Supreme Court's desegregation directives. With an eye to the history of segregation's development after Reconstruction, these leaders implemented a strategic constitutionalism designed to maintain the southern system of racial inequality while complying formally with Brown. At the same time, these politicians hoped to convince the Court that major federal intervention, a Second Reconstruction, was unnecessary, and to that end fought for the political sympathies of the nation against the moral force of civil rights activists and the violence of white extremists.

J. P. Coleman, governor of Mississippi, went to Washington, D.C., in 1952 and 1953 to hear oral arguments in Brown. Even before that landmark decision came down, Coleman had become convinced of the Court's next move and the need for a measured response. Walker's intellectual history shows how Coleman, Luther Hodges of North Carolina, and LeRoy Collins of Florida approached the desegregation crisis—how these governors watched the Supreme Court and learned from each other, how they consolidated executive power and reformed state law enforcement and judicial systems. And as the 1950s turned into the 1960s, these men ascended into positions of power in the federal government, as President Lyndon Baines Johnson appointed Hodges as secretary of commerce, Collins to head the newly developed Community Relations Service, and Coleman to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Although LBJ is best known as the driving force behind major civil rights legislation, his choice of these southerners points to his prescient understanding of the role that region would play in the electoral politics of the 1970s.

By taking seriously these moderates' vision and commitment to segregation, Walker opens a window onto a largely neglected portion of southern resistance. Coleman, Collins, and Hodges viewed Brown not as a cultural watershed but rather as a legal text that could be interpreted and limited. With the help of experts, these men designed pupil-placement programs that transformed race-based assignment into a race neutral, standards-based system using attributes like poverty, poor academic performance, and illegitimacy to justify the maintenance of racial stratification. While overlooking the way that the Jim Crow system undercut opportunity and achievement, these governors undertook state law reforms in family law and welfare law that deepened poverty and increased the very statistics upon which they based this new inequality. Furthermore, the governors used this crisis as an opportunity to expand and modernize state power. Centralizing control over law enforcement and local magistrates allowed the leaders to contain dramatic resistance and negative publicity. Reorienting the Brown decision as the beginning of modernizing legal reforms in the South exposes the far-reaching influence of Supreme Court decisions on state law and the complexity of the southern response.

The governors hoped to convince the Supreme Court to limit its future holdings enforcing Brown. Early on, Coleman identified the importance of public opinion. He competed with Roy Wilkins of the NAACP over the image of Mississippi, knowing the Court would continue to press compliance only with national support. Similarly, through reliance on ostensibly race-neutral, group-based standards, these moderates reframed civil rights as something African Americans must earn once they had remedied the social problems of their communities. Walker asserts that the moderates' success would prompt movement leaders to provoke violent confrontations in a bid to recapture public sympathy. Shifting the national dialogue from the immorality of exclusion to the barriers to inclusion would be the most lasting political contribution of the moderates. This approach to civil rights ultimately brought the South and North back in line ideologically, as the Court withdrew and the entire nation turned to the right in the 1970s.

Walker's account provides an important counterpoint to previous studies of white extremists. Coleman, Collins, and Hodges truly believed segregation benefited blacks and whites. They assumed social conventions would simply continue Jim Crow despite token integration. The moderates' quiet, determined efforts to maintain the social fabric of segregation while complying with the letter of the law proved far more successful at dulling federal intervention than the massive resisters' calls for nullification and interposition. The Ghost of Jim Crow complicates the story of the fight against Brown and helps us understand how we arrived at the civil rights jurisprudence of today.