To be clear, Rabinowitz finds no evidence that blacks were content with Jim Crow. Some progress, though, was better than none, and a nominally separate but equal society offered more than the regime of exclusion that had defined slavery. “The professed policy of separate but equal,” Rabinowitz argues, “had the benefit of minimizing white hostility while still presenting the blacks with a significant improvement over their treatment at the hands of earlier administrations.” Segregation did not put blacks on equal footing with whites, but it did create spaces that bore less scrutiny. Black neighborhoods, for example, “brought together large numbers of negroes in areas that whites could not easily control.”
 
To be clear, Rabinowitz finds no evidence that blacks were content with Jim Crow. Some progress, though, was better than none, and a nominally separate but equal society offered more than the regime of exclusion that had defined slavery. “The professed policy of separate but equal,” Rabinowitz argues, “had the benefit of minimizing white hostility while still presenting the blacks with a significant improvement over their treatment at the hands of earlier administrations.” Segregation did not put blacks on equal footing with whites, but it did create spaces that bore less scrutiny. Black neighborhoods, for example, “brought together large numbers of negroes in areas that whites could not easily control.”