The Politics of Race and Schooling: Public Education in Georgia, 1900-1961.

The Politics of Race and Schooling: Public Education in Georgia, 1900-1961. By Thomas V. O'Brien. (Lanham, Md., and other cities: Lexington Books, c. 1999. Pp. xviii, 229. $45.00, ISBN 0-7391-0060-2.)

Among the characteristics of modernity in twentieth-century America was the recognition that public funding was necessary to attain the social policy goals associated with education. Yet as studies by William Link, Elna Green, and James Anderson have detailed, the South was wedded to localism and hierarchical beliefs, and southerners had deep reservations regarding publicly funded schooling. Reformers' battles focused on questions of who should be educated, how they should be educated, and what they should be taught. Thomas V. O'Brien's study, The Politics of Race and Schooling: Public Education in Georgia, 1900-1961, demonstrates how volatile this debate became and adds to historians' understanding of why the struggle for control of public education epitomized the fight between localism and modernity.

O'Brien's narrative describes the growth of universal education in Georgia from the turn of the century through 1961. The push for public education came from African American reformers whose demands for black schooling forced white Georgians to support public education. Except for a brief chapter on the origins of Georgia's public education system, the author focuses on the conflicts between African American leaders and white politicians over the framework of public education in the decades after World War II. O'Brien skillfully incorporates numerous newspaper accounts and legislative debates that underscore his point about the centrality of racism. Race was the most important factor in the debates about public education that exploded in Georgia's political culture from the 1940s through 1961. O'Brien's argument deemphasizes the tensions that emerged from the interplay of class, gender, culture, and politics in Georgia's transition from localism to a modern social welfare system. He argues that the tenacious efforts of African Americans, notably in Atlanta, broke through racist boundaries and led to an equitable public education system.

No one could possibly question that racism defined and limited Georgia's public policy; nonetheless, O'Brien's perspective neglects equally important factors in choices Georgians made about education. A fact that Georgia's working class never forgot was that, from the beginning, white children in towns and cities received the best education in the state. As historians Bryant Simon and Patricia Sullivan contend, working-class whites rejected New Deal liberalism in the post-World War II era because it accomplished little for them and their children. By accentuating disputes between politicians and reformers, O'Brien misses the fact that some working-class whites believed school desegregation ignored their children's needs. Moreover, O'Brien's brief narrative of the origins of Georgia's public school policies slights the extraordinary determination of the African American teachers who educated the generation that rejected Jim Crow.

ANN SHORT CHIRHART Indiana State University