The Color of the Law: Race, Violence, and Justice in the Post-World War II South. (Book Reviews).

The Color of the Law: Race, Violence, and Justice in the Post-World War II South. By Gail Williams O'Brien. The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 1999. Pp. [xvi], 334. Paper, $18.95, ISBN 0-8078-4802-6; cloth, $45.00, ISBN 0-8078-2475-5.)

Gall Williams O'Brien has written a deeply textured book about the so-called race riot provoked by a white mob's attempt to lynch a young black World War II veteran in Columbia, Tennessee, on February 25, 1946, and its aftermath. We have long needed such a study, since the incident opened one of the most significant postwar campaigns to gain protections for black rights within the law. It also demonstrated a new resolve in the African American community. Whites in Maury County, as throughout the South, had gotten away with lynchings in the past, but this time they found themselves under attack by well-armed, angry, and assertive working- and middle-class blacks. The "color of the law" had always been white and as such was used to victimize blacks and suppress their efforts at self-defense. But in Columbia, not only did black people defend themselves with arms to prevent lynching in the streets, they continued to fight to prevent legal lynching in the courts. The NAACP, the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, and elements of organized labor's left used the Columbia case to help beat back the racial terrorism that had always accompanied the Jim Crow legal system. In the process, they helped extend the protections of the law to black people in the South who had previously been only its victims.

O'Brien provides a wealth of detail on the incident and the response to it, which itself is a powerful and important story. But she goes far beyond that to provide fascinating insights into the social, economic, and community developments that were beginning to undermine the Jim Crow legal system. O'Brien's determined research into court and criminal justice records, FBI and Justice Department files, newspapers, the papers of civil rights organizations, and oral histories has resulted in a complex, multilayered story. Southern racial violence, the increasingly effective resistance to it within the postwar black community, the role of unions in supporting or opposing racial oppression, the significance of relations between middle-class shopkeepers and workers within the black community, and the incredibly biased nature of the courts and law enforcement system all are minutely scrutinized.

At times, however, her evenhanded analysis is applied almost too meticulously; less nuanced and more declarative statements might help us to better understand what it all meant. Regardless, this is a powerful work that will stimulate teaching and research at all levels, especially for students of race relations, the criminal justice system, African American and southern history, and the civil rights movement. As O'Brien reminds us, racial profiling, disparate sentencing, and other unequal and invidious results of the "color of the law" in our own era should underscore the significance of the struggle of the black defendants and their allies in Columbia half a century ago to attain equal protection of the laws.

MICHAEL HONEY
University of Washington, Tacoma