African American education remains an underappreciated area of late nineteenth-century Southern history. However, Jay Winston Driskell, Jr. reminds readers that the schoolhouse became a battleground for issues of race, class, gender, and politics in Schooling Jim Crow. This new Jim Crow threat to black citizenship, emergence of a new black politics, and the eventual establishment of Booker T. Washington High School occurred against the backdrop of the modernization of Atlanta and its rapid growth as an urban center. Political strategies honed since emancipation and black leadership centered on middle-class professional men proved inadequate to deal with the new realities and challenges to black education, identity, and politics. The Jim Crow era required new identities; new solutions; and ultimately, a new politics. “Through these identities,” Driskell argues, black Atlantans “were able to make rights claims not mediated by their relationships with influential white elites. It was atop these new cultural terms of black solidarity that the struggle for black public education by fighting the grassroots of the early NAACP gave birth to a new black protest politics” (4).

Over five chapters and an epilogue, Driskell chronicles the process in which black Atlantans abandoned biracial cooperation essential to post-emancipation politics, modified the middle-class dominated politics of respectability for intraracial solidarity, and embraced women as well as working-class individuals as both political actors and leaders. Throughout, Driskell provides new insights on more familiar topics by centering the narrative on the city of Atlanta. Disenfranchisement, the failure of black male leadership, racial violence, and the Atlanta Riot of 1906 are contributing factors. Driskell depicts the Du Bois and Washington debate over race relations as being less straightforward and quite messy in practice for resolving the period's upheavals in the city. Moreover, Driskell demonstrates how entrenched notions of respectability transformed from a divisive protest strategy in terms of race, gender, and class to a bridge discourse that encouraged solidarity as a political strategy necessary for promoting real change.

Driskell's two-chapter discussion of the role of black women and the Neighborhood Union are the most compelling. Black women's ingenuity and activism facilitated the redefinition of black politics through their uplift work in a new organization. They brought the struggle for access to public services and civil rights in a new direction even while still operating within the framework of respectability. Black women, irrespective of class, rooted their activism, civic engagement, and notions of citizenship in the defense of their homes and neighborhoods rather than in the ballot, white patronage, and other older protest strategies. Excluded from city services, the Neighborhood Union organized black women to provide for one another, socially, educationally, and materially. As Driskell astutely concludes, black women had the capacity to “look beyond the limits of a politics constrained by the realities of Jim Crow” (126). Hence, black women had a significant role in the creation of a new black protest politics in Atlanta.

Both the New Negro Movement and the NAACP applied the Neighborhood Union's mobilization tactics, initiatives, and inclusive rhetoric, as evidenced in the campaign to improve school conditions and expand the curriculum to include a high school. Not only did its school survey form the basis of the later school reform efforts, the NAACP, in particular, heavily borrowed the language of the Neighborhood Union for making their demands and even used Neighborhood Union members as foot soldiers in its poll tax and voter registration efforts. Yet, change remained slow. World War I, the Great Migration, and municipal neglect of black neighborhoods slowly unified black Atlantans to block several bond referendums designed to increase the city budget. They demanded inclusion in the body politic and a future for their children. Culminating with the defeat of the 1919 municipal bond, black Atlantans successfully received a $1.5 million dollar commitment to black education and the city's first public high school for African American children.

Overall, Driskell successfully demonstrates the long process to change black politics that resulted in a major educational victory. A brief history of what black Atlantans had achieved with the older protest strategies would have been useful. For readers not acquainted with the scholarship, it can be daunting for understanding the contours of the process carefully laid out by Driskell and the ultimate focus on black education as the vehicle for black political protest. Notwithstanding, Schooling Jim Crow is an important text for graduate students and scholars interested in African American education, politics, and protest in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century urban South.