[Review of] Vernon Williams, Jr., Rethinking Race: Franz Boas and His Contemporaries

The term Jim Crow II is frequently used by African Americans to describe contemporary American race relations, by which they mean that just as legal segregation, lynching and voting restrictions followed emancipation, so has a period of racist reaction followed the successes of the Civil Rights movement. Williams sees parallels between the two periods: I have attempted to describe and analyze the ideas of persons who provided, in a time comparable to our own, the bases of sophisticated discussion of race and race relations. Williams is too good a historian to settle for merely demonstrating parallels; he also traces the continuing conflict between American social science which, with some notable exceptions, has been aggressively anti-racist since the 1930s, and America\u27s deeply ingrained racism