Book Review: To Render Invisible: Jim Crow and Public Life in New South Jacksonville

The tumult of the Civil War and the arrival of new populations (notably northern migrants) allowed emancipated African Americans to renegotiate their place in the social and political life of Reconstruction-era Jacksonville. Elite whites insisted that black involvement in the public sphere was by definition illegitimate, and relied on a campaign of violence and fraud to reassert control over physical space and popular discourse in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. To this end, his final chapters detail the development of a number of distinct counterpublics - made up of African Americans, workers, and women - that worked to contest the dominance of elite white men.