In Crossing the Line, Cherisse Jones-Branch sets out on an ambitious path to capture the moments in which black and white women in South Carolina engaged in interracial activism following World War II. By examining religious and secular organizations in the Palmetto State, Jones-Branch argues that black and white women who were largely middle-class and college-educated sometimes found common cause on issues like equal access to education and voting rights from the 1940s to the 1960s. Because instances of “crossing the line” were often limited and fraught with “fear and distrust,” a significant portion of Jones-Branch's work is dedicated to assessing the individual and collective activism of women within racially segregated organizations. In both arenas, Jones-Branch finds that black and white women's work “shaped the public sphere … at a time when the state government was unresponsive to the needs of its poor, dispossessed, and disfranchised citizens” (4). The author shows how South Carolina women, through their successes and failures, influenced and interpreted the changing social and political order in the early days of the civil rights movement.

Chapters 1 and 2, set during and after World War II, discuss black women's participation in lawsuits for voting rights and the equalization of teachers' salaries through the South Carolina Federation of Colored Women's Clubs and the NAACP. These early chapters also illuminate the limited role played by white women in these endeavors. White members of the United Council of Church Women (UCCW) petitioned the State Democratic Party to allow African Americans to vote in the primary but also to adopt a series of “educational and character qualifications” that would apply to all members (21). Likewise, white women in the Commission on Interracial Cooperation called for increased public resources to fund black schools but held fast to their belief in segregation. In the postwar era, some white women proved to be notable exceptions: for example, Elizabeth Waring, whose husband was a federal judge known for his liberal rulings on civil rights, spoke out against resistance to desegregation in Charleston in 1950.

Chapters 3 and 4 examine South Carolina women's reactions to the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board. Jones-Branch argues that some white women's organizations solidified their opposition to integration following the ruling and resisted pressure from their national headquarters to embrace a pro-civil rights agenda. Other organizations, such as the UCCW, took proactive steps to integrate their meetings and eventually their membership. As in previous chapters, women's interracial activism appears limited, but Jones-Branch points out the exceptions to this rule, such as the cooperative dialogue and mutual admiration that existed between the white director of the South Carolina Council on Human Relations, Alice Spearman Wright, and long-time black activist Modjeska Simkins.

Chapter 5 focusses on the 1960s and discusses black women's continuing voting rights activism and support of black candidates for state and local public offices. Although white allies like Spearman Wright worked to eliminate barriers to black voter registration, many more white women shied away from activism that was explicitly tied to civil rights for African Americans, choosing instead to work on issues of economic inequality. For example, white women in the UCCW focussed on providing aid in the form of food, clothing, and childcare to migrant workers in Charleston, many of whom were African American and Latino. Jones-Branch suggests that these women framed their efforts as improving living conditions for migrant workers rather than “threaten[ing] the status quo by calling for equality or full citizenship” (116). Ultimately, Jones-Branch concludes that, by the 1960s, “black and white women, with the exception of a few individual leaders, failed to achieve truly interracial activism” (123).

Jones-Branch aims to correct a “mostly androcentric version of South Carolina civil rights history” (4) by placing black and white women front and center, and in this goal she succeeds admirably. The work adds an organizational element to a handful of biographical studies on the integral role played by South Carolina women in the movement. Jones-Branch has carefully mined dozens of manuscript collections, including the personal papers of activists and the records of state and local chapters of the aforementioned organizations. She has skillfully brought to life meeting minutes and committee notes by making use of oral history interviews with women activists conducted in the 1970s and 1980s. The result is an easy-to-read narrative that describes the impediments posed by organizational inertia, which was especially pronounced in predominantly white women's organizations, while also capturing the individual personalities of women who pushed their groups toward reform and concrete action. Crossing the Line is a welcome contribution to the literature on women in the civil rights movement and women's political activism more broadly.