University Press of Florida To Render Invisible: Jim Crow and Public Life in New South Jacksonville

Review "Interestingly applies theories of urban public space from scholars like Jürgen Habermas to Jacksonville and offers a new interpretation of its New South racial experience."--Historian"A motherlode of local history references."--Florida Times-Union"A timely reminder that blacks in the South were by no means passive bystanders during Reconstruction."--Florida Courier"A valuable, competently researched study of an important and oft-neglected southern community at a key time in its development." --Journal of American History"An important contribution to our understanding of the development of legal segregation and the black public sphere."--Journal of African American History"Creatively combines an analysis of the public sphere with an exploration of the Jim Crow South."--Journal of Southern History "Offers a valuable look at the shift from postwar access to Jim Crow exclusion in public life in a fairly typical southern city. It reveals how segregation was not the immediate result of slavery, nor an inevitable outcome."--H-Net"Offers tantalizing glimpses of the segregation process at work."--Florida Historical Quarterly "Cassanello interprets an extensive array of traditional archival sources such as newspapers, court records, manuscript collections, census data, as well as municipal, state, and federal documents. And he positions his sophisticated argument historiographically within the long civil rights movement."--American Historical Review Product Description What defines a city’s public space? Who designates such areas, who determines their uses, and who gets to use them? Today’s “Occupy” movement has brought widespread attention to these issues, but Robert Cassanello demonstrates that such questions have been part of urban life for more than a century.<br><br>Rough-and-tumble nineteenth-century Jacksonville serves as a springboard to his exploration of social transformation in Florida and the South. When free black men in the city first began to vote, conservative lawmakers pushed blacks from white public spaces in order to make blacks voiceless—invisible—in the public square and thus making the public sphere a white domain. The response was a black counter public that at times flourished clandestinely and at other times challenged racism in the public sphere. <br><br>Fortified by the theories of Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, and Jürgen Habermas, this is the first book to focus on the tumultuous emergence of the African American working class in Jacksonville between Reconstruction and the 1920s. Cassanello brings to light many of the reasons Jacksonville, like Birmingham, Alabama, and other cities throughout the South, continues to struggle with its contentious racial past. From the Back Cover "Covering a compelling local history, deeply imbricated with state and national events, "To Render Invisible" brings together dramatic stories of continuity and change, of gender and race, and of respectability and resistance in a brisk narrative lucidly informed by social theory."--David Roediger, author of "The Wages of Whiteness" "Carefully develops an original argument drawing from several theoretical perspectives to make the claim that African Americans in Jacksonville were able to continue to struggle for justice and 'public space' even after a wave of white supremacy engulfed the city as well as the state."--Paul Ortiz, author of "Emancipation Betrayed" "Well written, clearly and logically organized, and built upon a foundation of deep research in primary sources, including newspapers, Freemen's bureau records, official documents and personal papers."--Louis Kyriakoudes, author of "The Social Origins of the Urban South" What defines a city's public space? Who designates such areas, who determines their uses, and who gets to use them? Robert Cassanello uses rough-and-tumble nineteenth-century Jacksonville as both backdrop and springboard to explore social transformation in