A Different Day: African American Struggles for Justice in Rural Louisiana, 1900-1970.

A Different Day: African American Struggles for Justice in Rural Louisiana, 1900-1970. By Greta de Jong. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2002. Pp. xviii, 316. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-80785379-8; cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8078-2711-8.)

Greta de Jong has rendered a provocative analysis of the civil rights struggle in Louisiana between 1900 and 1970. Significantly, she has drawn on a small but growing body of literature that reaches beyond treatments of the urban civil rights movement commonly focusing on the 1950s and 1960s. Traditional studies typically take as their benchmark the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision in 1954, but de Jong dates the origins of the movement much earlier. In other words, de Jong has expanded the parameters of the civil rights struggle in two directions: longitudinally and geographically. For de Jong the movement started long before the 1950s, and it started not in Birmingham or any other town or city. It began in rural areas in the early twentieth century with the everyday struggles of ordinary African Americans.

Focusing on the way in which rural African Americans responded to the class oppression that was their lot on the plantations and farms of southeastern and northern Louisiana, de Jong draws on the scholarship of political scientist James Scott and historians Eugene Genovese, Herbert Aptheker, and E. P. Thompson. As she suggests, in order to understand the way in which oppressed people resist the forces arrayed against them, one must expand the notion of political. She adopts Scott's term "infrapolitics," which she defines as meaning the "subtle or unorganized forms of resistance such as creating their own cultural worlds and value systems, working slowly or poorly, stealing from their employers, destroying property, running away or quitting work, and occasionally engaging in violent attacks against their oppressors" (p. 6). Acknowledging the problems inherent in reading too much "resistance" into the activities of African Americans and questioning the validity of including rap singers, for example, as political activists, de Jong argues that in her study "'resistance' and 'infrapolitics' refer to those actions short of organized, open protest that suggest an awareness of the sources of oppression and were aimed at circumventing white supremacists' attempts to keep African Americans powerless and poor" (p. 7).

There are many things to admire in this sympathetic and sophisticated analysis. For example, de Jong selected southeastern and northern Louisiana because these were the areas targeted by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in the 1960s, and thus she is able to demonstrate how these largely urban activists had to cope with a rural people long familiar with the struggle on a more intimate level and resistant to the nonviolent policies advocated by CORE. For one thing, rural Louisiana's African American population understood all too well that whites on the local level would make nonviolence problematic. As whites burned and bombed, the natural instinct of many African Americans was to respond in kind. De Jong writes, "The most common response of African Americans to the numerous drive-by shootings and bombings carried out by white supremacists in black neighborhoods was to reach for their firearms" (p. 189). In fact, de Jong suggests that this instinct "to fight back ... was crucial to the" success of the movement in rural Louisiana (p. 193). Thus she argues, in the final analysis, that CORE had as much to learn from those who had engaged in the long struggle there as rural Louisianians had to learn from CORE.

JEANNIE WHAYNE

University of Arkansas