Advancing Democracy: African Americans and the Struggle for Access and Equity in Higher Education in Texas.

Advancing Democracy: African Americans and the Struggle for Access and Equity in Higher Education in Texas. By Amilcar Shabazz. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2004. Pp. xvi, 301. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-5505-7; cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8078-2833-5.)

Advancing Democracy: African Americans and the Struggle for Access and Equity in Higher Education in Texas examines the events, forces, and individuals who challenged racial inequities in Texas higher education for three decades, beginning in the late 1930s. Amilcar Shabazz goes beyond Sweatt v. Painter, the pivotal battle in a protracted offensive, to treat the larger struggle for the democratization of higher education. Equally significant is a campus-by-campus summary of how each of the state's colleges and universities opened its doors to African Americans.

Shabazz traces the forces that set in motion what became the Texas University Movement. He credits black intellectuals working through the Colored Teachers State Association of Texas with "plant[ing] the seeds of the modern civil rights movement" (p. 17). Surveys, reports, interracial committees, and conferences during the 1930s highlighted disparities in African American education and brought the problem into focus. Dallas physician Richard T. Hamilton led the drive for state-funded scholarships to be used outside Texas and advocated creating a separate university. By the time the state established Texas State University for Negroes, later Texas Southern University, it was too late. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had assumed leadership of the movement and abandoned demands for separate-but-equal facilities in favor of an attack on segregation itself.

Shabazz applies social philosophies identified by Howard University economist Abram Harris in the 1930s to African Americans who sought to improve higher education for minorities. W. R. Banks, principal of Prairie View Normal and Institutional College, epitomized "interracial conciliation" by cultivating the goodwill of the white establishment to secure resources. Thurgood Marshall and his NAACP allies followed the "civil libertarian" path of litigation, while black publisher Carter W. Wesley's "militant race consciousness" advocated equalizing African American institutions in addition to forcing access to white ones (p. 35).

A bitter public feud between Marshall and Wesley underscores the significant ideological differences within the black community then and now. The equalization approach, which gained support in the 1940s in part because desegregation seemed such a distant prospect, now finds favor among modern black separatists who see the victory as a hollow one. Shabazz's charged rhetoric enters the fray on Wesley's side, depicting the irascible publisher as one of "two warriors for democracy and against the hegemonic backwardness of the NAACP" (p. 65).

As Shabazz notes, these competing approaches struggled against a common enemy: segregation in higher education. Moreover, philosophical distinctions occasionally blurred as African Americans faced difficult day-to-day decisions. Marshall once felt compelled to remind U. Simpson Tate, his regional counsel, of the NAACP's official policy on segregated facilities, and W. R. Banks secretly passed information to the NAACP lawyers.

The reactions of white institutions to black demands varied in accordance with community sentiment and the white leadership. Texas Southmost College in Brownsville, Howard County Junior College in Big Spring, and Amarillo College desegregated with little fanfare, whereas resistance at Texarkana Junior College degenerated into mob violence. Instead of enforcing the law against such mobs, the state attorney general led an attack against the NAACP.

Courageous African American students and parents who endured threats and violence emerge from Advancing Democracy as the principal agents of change. From George L. Allen's application to the University of Texas in 1938 and Heman M. Sweatt's lawsuit in 1946 to the desegregation of East Texas State College in 1964, African Americans had to press for admission to almost every institution of higher education in the state. Their efforts were an essential part of the legal challenge, and they also dramatically personalized the impact of racial discrimination and inspired the black community. Their stories are important.

MICHAEL L. GILLETTE

Humanities Texas