We often think of Jim Crow in the Deep South in terms of sharp divisions: black and white, powerful and powerless. The daily reality of living under the Jim Crow system, however, involved more nuances, more space for black success, and less absolute power of white southern officials to accomplish their racial goals than the sharp divisions would suggest. William Sturkey's new work, Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White, compellingly traces these complexities and contradictions along with their origins in his close examination of Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Sturkey traces Hattiesburg's development from its founding as a New South railroad and lumber town until its time as a leading center of the civil rights movement, analyzing the city's growth over these decades in alternating chapters focussed on both the white and black communities. This format enables him to examine the ways in which the actions and decisions of one side of the Hattiesburg racial divide impacted the other, a perspective overlooked in many traditional analyses of Jim Crow. His meticulous research and careful attention to local interactions build his argument that the system of Jim Crow, despite its characteristic oppression, in fact created opportunities for African Americans to undermine the system itself. Separation, in many ways, enabled African Americans to materially better their situations over the course of generations, providing space for community formation and economic success, and building the foundation for the later civil rights movement.

Sturkey explains that Jim Crow opened windows for black success in two major ways. First, the forced segregation of Jim Crow facilitated the creation of independent, vibrant, economically thriving black communities such as the Mobile Street District of Hattiesburg; these communities then developed institutions, leaders, and traditions that undermined Jim Crow and laid the groundwork for the civil rights movement. The heart of Sturkey's argument, however, centers on the role that the industrialization and urbanization of the New South played in undermining Jim Crow. Wage labor and urban life provided black southerners with the resources, little as they may have been, to fight and undermine oppression. In particular, black southerners exercised this power through flight, leaving the South for better opportunities in the North during the Great Migration and then World War II. Flight or the threat thereof, combined with wages that allowed greater independence, mobility, and economic growth, enabled African Americans in Hattiesburg to leverage a degree of economic pressure that forced white leaders to at least somewhat ameliorate the conditions of Jim Crow. Sturkey also convincingly highlights other ways in which African Americans, even facing oppression, violence, and daily limitations, continually worked to create better opportunities and daily realities for themselves and their families, and they ways in which they succeeded, especially in raising their educational levels and standards of living.

In addition to allowing African Americans greater resources that they used to leverage better conditions, Sturkey argues that the changes and ideals of the New South also laid the groundwork to undermine Jim Crow through creating white southern desire, and even desperation, for outside investment. In Hattiesburg's early decades, this capital came from northern investors, but by the Great Depression, white leaders in Hattiesburg increasingly turned to the federal government for support, especially through New Deal programs that white leaders administered to the benefit of the local white, not black, community. The mobilization of Camp Shelby spurred a stunning World War II-era economic boom in Hattiesburg, but also deepened white leaders’ reliance on federal support. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the federal government began to show more interest in pushing for greater equality, white leaders had been courting and relying on federal funds for almost two decades. Their reliance on and eagerness for northern and federal support and resources thus inadvertently opened the door for the federal government to continue expanding its influence, now by supporting African Americans in overturning Jim Crow. Sturkey explains that even this shift in the federal government's focus and policies was only possible because of the growing political power of those African Americans who had moved to the North from places like Hattiesburg. Having taken advantage of greater resources and mobility provided by New South industrialization, by the mid-twentieth century these African Americans living in the North were able to put political pressure on politicians to protect black people's rights.

In analyzing the evolution of Hattiesburg from burgeoning New South town to civil rights hub, Sturkey continually situates Hattiesburg in larger national trends, demonstrating how this one city reveals larger regional and national trends. At times, however, his attention to detail regarding the local workings of Hattiesburg can become repetitive from decade to decade, as similar churches, businesses, organizations, and names reappear. These examples could be better used to draw out and extend his arguments, in addition to tracing local community development.

Sturkey's arguments about the complexity of the inner workings of Jim Crow are compelling and well supported by evidence, while also introducing new avenues for future research into the nuances and intricacies of the Jim Crow system. Hattiesburg provides an important, accessible history for anyone looking for a deeper understanding of how Jim Crow actually functioned, and how in many ways Jim Crow led directly into its own demise in the civil rights movement.