This passage from Florida: A Guide to the Southernmost State mentions the existence of both black and white jooks. Though jooks definitively evolved as black social institutions, there is evidence that white equivalents were flourishing as early as the early 1930s. Katrina Hazzard-Gordon, in Jookin': The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African-American Culture, establishes that the term "jook or juke has entered the vocabulary of white dialects of Georgia and northern Florida. Whites use it as a verb- to go "jucking," or go partying" (80). (See also Will McGuire's work on white usage of the term "jook.") The FWP guide argues that with the end of prohibition, when distinctions between mainstream establishments and clubs that ran illegal operations were no longer as socially useful, jooks ceased to be considered quite as marginal and white (the implication is mainstream) gathering places starting being called jooks; "To the Florida Negro is attributed the coinage of the word 'jook,' now in general use among Florida white people. First applied to Negro dance halls around turpentine camps, the term was expanded with the repeal of prohibition to include roadside dine-dance places, and now to go 'jooking' means to attend any night club" (133). The fact that the guide mentions white and black jooks as separate institutions makes perfect sense for a context like Florida in the 1930s, when Jim Crow law ruled. It seems unlikely that the two races would mix in after-hours establishments when the racial situation in Florida was quite bleak; as Michael Gannon explains in Florida: A Short History,
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