In recent years, scholars have examined the various forces – black mobilization, segregationist backlash, Democratic fracture, Republican insurgency, and “color-blind” Sunbelt conservatism – that shaped southern politics in the post-civil rights era. Most of these historians have focussed on one or two of these phenomena at the expense of a broader synthesis. In this welcome and ambitious case study, Chris Danielson examines how various political forces – black and white, left to right – remade Mississippi politics in the post-Jim Crow era. More important than any single constituency or movement, Danielson contends, is the dynamic yet ever-present influence of race in Mississippi politics.

In the first half of his study, Danielson portrays the highly contingent period of political adjustment that followed in the wake of the civil rights movement. After a disappointingly brief contextual chapter on black politics and civil rights activism before 1965, Danielson shows how African American mobilization after the Voting Rights Act relied on a top-down, NAACP-led legal strategy that gave black Mississippians their “first real political access” since Reconstruction (19). This pragmatic, biracial approach incorporated black and white moderates into a nationally recognized state party organization – the Loyal Democrats – and sapped momentum from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party's grassroots organizing campaign. While civil rights activism and independent political movements persisted, black influence in mainstream state politics surged throughout the 1970s. With the fusion of the all-white Regulars and the integrated Loyalists in 1976, the Mississippi Democratic Party attempted to consolidate their African American base even as some Republicans wooed skeptical black voters.

By the dawn of the 1980s, fifteen years of structural change and political experimentation gave way to racially polarized partisan alignment. Legislative redistricting and aggressive campaigning resulted in a dramatic increase in black Democratic officeholders – the “class of 1979” – even as the state Republican Party veered right and largely abandoned appeals to African Americans. Even as black Mississippians enjoyed greater political success in the 1980s, they continued to battle the last vestiges of voter dilution and resistance from “lily white and hard right” Republicans (128). While Danielson does not diminish the significance of the decade's milestones, particularly the 1982 extension of the Voting Rights Act, his appraisal of black political gains in the 1980s is decidedly ambivalent. The 1983 reestablishment of a black-majority district in the Mississippi Delta, which led to the 1986 election of a black Congressman, seems less momentous when measured against the racially polarized political environment that birthed it. Ultimately, Danielson concludes, Mississippi's post-Jim Crow politics once again offered a path to Washington, DC for a pragmatic black politician. Yet that same system circumscribed black candidates’ political options and power to address racially loaded questions of poverty and social justice on Capitol Hill.

By ending his study in the 1980s, Danielson misses an opportunity to trace Mississippi's racially polarized politics to the present. The insightful yet terse conclusion begs elaboration. Indeed, given that more than 85 percent of white Mississippi voters backed John McCain in 2008, as opposed to the 95 percent of black voters who supported Barack Obama, Danielson might well get to work on a sequel (1986–present). In these recent decades, Mississippi has finally experienced some of the supposedly moderating influences – suburbanization, in-migration, and hi-tech investment – of Sunbelt-style development. If Danielson could explain why these trends have failed to undermine “the continuance of a racially divided electorate,” he could more effectively refute the supposed color-blindness of Sunbelt conservatism (223).

By bringing together Mississippi's diverse cast of political actors in one compelling narrative, Danielson has performed a valuable service. He is less successful at weaving Mississippi's adjustment to the post-Jim Crow era into a larger regional and national picture. Danielson contends that the state's recent political history provides a corrective to those who would apply the suburban Sunbelt thesis to the South writ large. Such an important and timely intervention requires more attention to political economy, demographic change, and national developments. When Danielson concludes that “the United States, and even Mississippi,” had adjusted to the world the civil rights movement made, he highlights contradictory and unresolved questions of symbiosis and disconnection (222). The end result is an important study of Mississippi politics that reinforces, whether intentionally or inadvertently, the state's hard-earned but imprecise reputation as an exceptionally “race haunted” and singularly isolated American place.