From the Grassroots to the Supreme Court: Brown v. Board of Education and American Democracy.

From the Grassroots to the Supreme Court: Brown v. Board of Education and American Democracy. Edited by Peter F. Lau. Constitutional Conflicts. (Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, c. 2004. Pp. x, 406. Paper, $25.95, ISBN 0-8223-3449-6; cloth, $94.95, ISBN 0-8223-3475-5.)

A quarter century after Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Justice Thurgood Marshall dejectedly looked back on the landmark ruling. "I've finally figured out what 'all deliberate speed' means," he told his clerks. "It means 'slow'" (Cass R. Sustein, "Did Brown Matter?" New Yorker, May 3, 2004, p. 103). Now, a half century after Brown, the progress of desegregation seems even more limited and the ruling's legacy in doubt. Even a casual scan of recent scholarly titles, packed with phrases like "hollow hope," "unfulfilled hopes," "broken promise," "troubled legacy," and "quiet reversal," gives a strong sense of the rising pessimism about the impact--or lack thereof--that Brown had on segregation in the United States.

With its recent fiftieth anniversary, scholars have had ample reason to return their attention to Brown and reassess its meaning. From the Grassroots to the Supreme Court: Brown v. Board of Education and American Democracy represents one of the earliest efforts, drawn from a conference convened at the University of South Carolina in 2002. In the words of Peter F. Lau, the editor, this collection "reinforces long-held views of the decision's seminal importance and revolutionary nature" (p. 13). While the sixteen contributors, scholars of law and history, largely support that claim, their findings are not a simplistic restatement that Brown launched the civil rights movement. Instead, a more nuanced picture emerges, one that covers a broad span of time, combines bottom-up and top-down methodologies, contextualizes the integrationist campaign within larger themes of grassroots activism and constitutional change, and still accounts for variables of race, class, and region.

Although the collection is kaleidoscopic, its essays essentially operate along two perspectives. The first draws connections between long-standing traditions of grassroots activism and the traditional narrative of Brown. As studies by Raymond Gavins, Kara Miles Turner, and Peter Lau make clear, before Brown local activists sought legal remedies as part of a larger, comprehensive fight for equality. Alongside celebrated battles in the courtrooms, they pressed other campaigns for voting rights and economic justice. Enriching our understanding of grassroots mobilization, other essays demonstrate that activists had to contend not simply with external obstacles but also with internal divisions of race, class, gender, language, and culture. In an astute study of New Orleans in the Plessy v. Ferguson era, for instance, Blair L. M. Kelley chronicles the diverging goals of freeborn Afro-Creole elites and African American freedpeople.

Similarly, Tomiko Brown-Nagin skillfully explores intraracial tensions over the handling of post-Brown litigation in Atlanta. Christina Greene focuses on the often-overlooked role of women's activism in her sharp study of Durham, North Carolina, while Laurie B. Green addresses the dynamics of urban-rural relationships by employing a much-needed metropolitan approach to her exploration of Memphis and the surrounding Mississippi Delta. Other essays complicate the traditional narrative further, moving beyond the bounds of black-white relations to address experiences of other communities of color, especially outside the South. In a sweeping essay, Vicki L. Ruiz examines the meaning of segregated education for Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans in the West. Madeleine Lopez likewise offers a focused study of Puerto Rican experiences with desegregation in New York City, where campaigns for bilingual education complicated the integrationist struggle.

These detailed grassroots studies are complemented by a second set of essays focused on institutional and ideological changes. Patricia Sullivan explores the formative decades of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), showing how its initial concern for discriminatory practices nationwide profitably narrowed to a concentration on southern schools. Meanwhile, Larissa M. Smith analyzes the contributions made to NAACP legal strategies by independent-minded lawyers in Virginia. Just as the approach of these civil rights advocates evolved, so too did the outlook of judges overseeing their cases. Christopher W. Schmidt explores the liberalization of J. Waties Waring, a federal judge, while Michael J. Klarman provides behind-the-scenes sketches of the Supreme Court's movement from division to unanimity in the Brown deliberations. Mark Tushnet impressively tracks the Court's oscillations across later decades, as justices interpreted Brown alternately as a straightforward ban on state-sponsored racial discrimination and a bolder mandate to extirpate the tangled roots of racial subordination. Davison M. Douglas addresses the impact of Brown on black America, arguing that the decision significantly improved black education but could not overcome deep-seated problems of economic inequality. Waldo E. Martin Jr., meanwhile, tracks Brown's influence on black thought and activism across the civil rights and Black Power eras, demonstrating how these movements were linked by common threads of civil disobedience inspired by Brown, the Emmett Till lynching, and the Montgomery bus boycott.

Taken together, the essays embrace Brown yet assert that the case represented but one component of the larger civil rights revolution. Indeed, as the collection suggests, during the twentieth century the struggle for integration and the struggle for equality diverged as often as they merged. As Lau notes, "Seldom does significant change occur from any single source or emanate from any single direction" (p. 14). Not every issue can be covered in one volume, of course, and readers may wish other topics--segregationist resistance, federal enforcement, further regional and racial variations--were also addressed. But as it stands, this collection convincingly challenges any easy assumption that the civil rights story progressed in a straight line, or even a single line. Chronicling the campaign for school desegregation alongside the movements of racial minorities for economic justice and full citizenship and the intellectual growth of leading jurists and activists, From the Grassroots to the Supreme Court offers a picture of the civil rights revolution that is appropriately diverse and complex. Advanced undergraduate and graduate students will appreciate its complications of the familiar narrative, while even specialists will discover something new.

KEVIN M. KRUSE

Princeton University