Jim Crow describes the period of US history from the failure of Reconstruction following the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s. Following the emancipation of African Americans, southern states took advantage of the federal government’s lassiez-faire approach to enforcing equality by codifying discriminatory laws that made it difficult, often impossible, for African Americans to vote, obtain employment, buy homes and live without constantly fearing being arrested or lynched for manufactured charges. This state of “separate but equal” – which was always more of the former than the latter – has continued to affect and inform the lives of African Americans into the twenty-first century.
This work is the second team-up of editors Drs Nikki L.M. Brown and Barry M. Stentiford. They previously worked on The Jim Crow Encyclopedia, a two-volume set also published by Greenwood (Brown and Stentiford, 2008) (RR 2009/159). This new resource is less a second edition than a reimagining, however, as it finds its page count reduced from 952 pages to a 471-page single volume. Additionally, the new subtitle A Historical Encyclopedia of the American Mosaic suggests its new role is to support Greenwood’s new four volume offering The Great American Mosaic, an exploration of race in the USA that heavily features primary sources. The publisher’s website states that the goal of this work is to document and provide context for Jim Crow laws by being a “one-stop source of information for students researching [this] period of American history” (ABC-Clio, 2015).
As this is a review for the e-book version, it would be remiss not to briefly discuss the ABC-Clio e-book interface before examining the content. Resources are split into two frames. The left frame is used to navigate, display bibliographic information, and provides a search field. The right frame displays the text and provides a host of tools: printing, email, citation, dictionary, persistent linking and font size. This interface readily shows both the pros and cons of e-books. It is both quickly searchable and navigable; however, the text frame seems fairly small – approximately 800 × 800 pixels – which makes it feel that there is a lot of underutilized space on larger monitors, especially given the amount of whitespace. The e-book also provides the same pagination as the physical book, and there are options to bookmark and add notations, which gives added value. On mobile devices, the format is the same which makes reading difficult.
The organization of material is similar to the editors’ earlier work. Included are: table of contents, alphabetical list of entries, list of primary documents, a guide to related topics, an introduction, a chronology and the entries themselves. There is also a section with primary documents, a selected bibliography and an index. The related topics guide is the only section which requires explanation. This section separates the entries into individual topics with titles acting as links to get to their corresponding entries. Topics include the usual suspects such as Culture, Politics and Protest and Resistance. Aside from the number of pages, examining the related topics section gives the best representation of what has changed since 2008. For example, the entries in Education were reduced from ten to two in 2014; however, not all entries were eliminated. Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) moved from education to institutions and organization, which may or may not be more accurate. The entry for Healthcare was also moved from Health to Policy. With the elimination of Folk Medicine, the only entry left in Health is the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment.
For the entries that survived, the weeding little has changed. Entries for HBCUs, Jim Crow, FBI and Healthcare appear identical to their 2008 forbears aside from the addition of a photo or a new entry in the Further Reading section at the end of entries. Any bibliographic entries added, aside from the Websites section of the Selected Bibliography at the end of the work, all predate 2009. This is interesting because some good scholarship has been done in the last five years by Kimberley Johnson (2010), Brian Norman (2010) and Karen Krause Thomas (2011) among others. This is not a criticism of the material presented which is informative, well written and accurate; however, a reference resource is often a great place to introduce readers so some of the newer thinking on a subject.
It has been mentioned several times that this new resource is a more condensed, perhaps focused, resource that is still similar to the editors’ earlier The Jim Crow Encyclopedia (2008). For this reason, it seems appropriate to revisit an assessment that appeared previously in this journal. John Kendall felt that The Jim Crow Encyclopedia did an unbalanced job of presenting its many topics, specifically noting that “the family, health, housing, and employment [were] rather neglected” (Kendall, 2009). He was also confused at entries about ethnic groups who were mainly unaffected by Jim Crow: these were removed. Kendall did feel that culture was covered very well, but entries on literature, music and popular culture are now pruned to the point of non-existence. At the same time, there is no real addition to the topical areas that Kendall found wanting.
Jim Crow: A Historical Encyclopedia of the American Mosaic is a good resource with good information that seems to be struggling to find direction. The decision was made to cut content that made the work shine six years earlier without adding much to areas that clearly needed more treatment. By going bigger, as opposed to smaller, the publisher may have been able to deliver the “one-stop source of information” they hoped for. Libraries that own the two-volume set – or access to its e-book edition – will find no reason to update; however, it may prove a lower-cost alternative for high schools or colleges that have limited coverage for this topic or need a good accompanying volume to accentuate the physical and electronic resources already available to their readers.
