Robert Cassanello's To Render Invisible offers a new interpretation of the political culture of the Jim Crow South rooted in Jürgen Habermas's theory of the public sphere. Though Cassanello's text is primarily a study of race relations in a single southern city – Jacksonville, Florida – the author advances a theoretical and historical agenda that is applicable beyond the Sunshine State. “The history of the color line,” Cassanello claims in his introduction, “is as much a history of the geography of race relations as it is a history of blacks in the public sphere” (3). For Cassanello, segregation was not simply a matter of racializing public space. As late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century white supremacists denied African Americans the right to move freely through the physical spaces of the South, they simultaneously silenced black contributions to the region's political discourse. African Americans vigorously protested their physical and discursive exclusion. They organized boycotts, cultivated political alliances, and laid claim to streets, buildings, and workplaces in an attempt to remain a visible part of Jacksonville's public sphere.

Cassanello is at his best when discussing real people contesting the real public spaces of the South. The book's treatment of struggles over segregation in churches, schools, and public transportation is excellent. Cassanello's judicious use of critical theory in these moments forces readers to rethink the nature of race relations during the nadir of African American history. He reminds us that it was never simply space that was being contested, but also discursive control. The right to speak and to be heard within Jacksonville's public sphere was directly related to control of the city's physical geography. Cassanello's close readings of these events help to reframe familiar debates over race, segregation, and political access in the post-Civil War South.

The book's larger change-over-time argument is somewhat less satisfying. Cassanello recapitulates a familiar declension narrative in which the racial democracy of Reconstruction gives way to the political and social “invisibility” of Jim Crow. The tumult of the Civil War and the arrival of new populations (notably northern migrants) allowed emancipated African Americans to renegotiate their place in the social and political life of Reconstruction-era Jacksonville. Elite whites insisted that black involvement in the public sphere was by definition illegitimate, and relied on a campaign of violence and fraud to reassert control over physical space and popular discourse in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Cassanello argues, however, that resistance was constant. To this end, his final chapters detail the development of a number of distinct counterpublics – made up of African Americans, workers, and women – that worked to contest the dominance of elite white men. None of this is particularly surprising or controversial. The book's larger narrative arc, in fact, is quite similar to the one put forward in Paul Ortiz's Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 (2005). Though Cassanello offers a new theoretical perspective and a closer engagement with the city of Jacksonville, readers interested in race relations in postwar Florida are likely to continue to reach for Ortiz first.

Cassanello's prose can be uneven. Despite its deep grounding in critical theory, the book largely avoids jargon. Even so, the author's overuse of several key terms and phrases – public sphere, public space, counterpublic – can make comprehension difficult. The last sentence of the book's first chapter provides an example. Cassanello writes that “spaces – both public and private – were a middle ground where the meaning of space and racial equality could be negotiated as part of a broader discourse of the place where blacks fit into the public sphere” (22). The odd repetition of “space” robs the sentence of analytical clarity, detracting from a potentially significant historical point. Unfortunately, such constructions appear with some frequency. The University Press of Florida did Cassanello no favors here; typographical errors and editorial mistakes are distressingly common throughout the volume.

To Render Invisible makes a useful contribution to the literature on race relations in the US South during the formative years of Jim Crow. Cassanello tells Jacksonville's story without being confined by it, while his use of Habermas makes the book a welcome addition to a historiography that seldom engages with critical theory. Stylistic and editorial quibbles aside, the volume stands as an important compliment to the works of Paul Ortiz, Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Tera W. Hunter, and others.