Before Brown: Civil Rights and White Backlash in the Modern South.

Before Brown: Civil Rights and White Backlash in the Modern South. Edited by Glenn Feldman. The Modern South. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, c. 2004. Pp. xvi, 430. Paper, $27.95, ISBN 0-8173-5134-5; cloth, $60.00, ISBN 0-8173-1431-8.)

Anthology editors may exercise a light touch on the compilations they produce, or they may exert a more pervasive influence. In this fine but uneven volume of new essays, Glenn Feldman has done the latter. In fact, the essays deserve one review, while the editorial contributions from Feldman--a prologue and an epilogue that compose, with their prodigious notes, nearly one quarter of the volume's total pages--deserve another.

All nine essays that form the body of this collection continue a project that has produced a flowering of scholarship in southern civil rights history since the 1990s: the re-periodization, or "backing up," as Feldman calls it (p. 2), of what we understand as the civil rights movement to highlight the years of gestation prior to the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision in 1954. This direction in civil fights scholarship was launched at a 1988 conference at the University of Virginia, the proceedings of which were later published. The most poignant call for an examination of the movement's origins prior to the Brown decision and the Montgomery bus boycot was issued by Patricia Sullivan, who argued for a more thorough exploration of the movement's New Deal origins. Sullivan wrote the foreword for this anthology.

Sullivan's call has been taken up and reprised by many voices in the interim, with the result that these nine essayists break little truly new ground for scholars of the civil rights movement. Yet these efforts yield a solid and wide-ranging body of scholarship that adds nuance and detail to the equally sound but less accessible studies of this period of southern history pioneered earlier by historians. A contribution from Adam Fairclough, revisiting and expanding some of the material introduced in his Race and Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915-1972 (Athens, Ga., 1995), provides some of the most interesting reflections on the volume's theme of continuity/ discontinuity and the movement's origins. Fairclough, like the other contributors, sees tremendous import in southern racial dynamics of the World War II era, yet even he cautions that Montgomery (not Brown) should be "rightly regarded as a major turning point ... when a civil rights struggle became a civil rights movement" (p. 161).

Those struggles in many southern communities were nothing short of heroic, as this volume makes clear in its portrayals of both individuals and organizations whose contributions to breaking down segregation have long deserved full treatment. These include, for example, Nelle Morton, a white Tennessee churchwoman who pushed regional mores by experimenting with interracial student work camps, and T. R. M. Howard, an African American doctor in Mississippi who combined entrepeneurship and political shrewdness to build a base of support for school desegregation in the years leading up to Brown.

A certain unevenness punctuates this book, some of it due to organization, some to redundancy, and there is an occasional inaccuracy (the Cold War did not begin in the early fifties, as Feldman claims on p. 8). Although many contributors make the point that white southern support for the emerging movement in the 1940s was "a distinctly minority enterprise," one cannot help wondering why we need two essays on Dorothy Tilly, the prim Georgia Methodist who organized women against lynching and later served on President Harry S. Truman's Committee on Civil Rights (p. 10).

Some of this volume's bumps may stem from its editor's second theme, which pairs civil rights activism with white backlash. Such twinning seems straightforward enough, especially since twentieth-century southern reform so frequently triggered reaction. But Feldman is arguing for something more basic to understanding the civil rights movement: what he calls a "two-sided coin" of civil rights action/white reaction--without which "it is difficult ... to understand either side fully" (p. 2). This dialectical relationship carries a distant resonance with the dialectic Eugene Genovese argued for long ago regarding blacks and whites in the Old South. The breakdown here, however, is not simply black-white, and therein lies the real problem with this volume: the essays do not uniformly reflect on this theme, and the coin analogy, explored mostly by Feldman himself, does not succeed fully.

Ultimately, the focus on reaction works best when it anchors what Feldman likes to call "the politics of emotion" to specific struggles in specific historical moments, as in Sarah Hart Brown's essay on the demise of the leftist Civil Rights Congress amid Cold War hysteria. Unfortunately, Feldman chose to conclude the anthology with a rambling epilogue that probes reaction in the South since 1964 as if the past four-plus decades were cut from a single cloth. The result, while intriguing and informative, is also rather transhistorical, offering an inadequate and oversimplified explanation of how lingering anticommunism--the basis for much of the reaction his contributors detail in the postwar era--morphed into today's "'Neo-Kluxism' ... a focus redux on racial, cultural, ethnic, moral, religious, and even gender-relations homogeneity" (p. 272). The book's concluding diatribe contains insights that might be more fruitfully expressed in a different venue. Here, it strays far enough from a project entitled Before Brown: Civil Rights and White Backlash in the Modern South to threaten to overwhelm an otherwise valuable collection.

CATHERINE FOSL 

University of Louisville