Undaunted by the Fight: Spelman College and the Civil Rights Movement, 1957-1967.

Undaunted by the Fight: Spelman College and the Civil Rights Movement, 1957-1967. By Harry G. Lefever. (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2005. Pp. [xviii], 286. Paper, $25.00, ISBN 0-86554-938-9; cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-86554-976-1.)

Think civil rights nearly a half-century ago. Whose names come to mind most readily? Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, Julian Bond, Stokely Carmichael, Robert Moses? Perhaps some women too? Rosa Parks, Diane Nash, Ella Baker, Daisy Bates? What about Ruby Doris Smith (Robinson), Hershelle Sullivan, Marian Wright, Gwendolyn Robinson, Bernice Johnson, and Gwendolyn Iles? All of the latter women were students at Atlanta's Spelman College in the 1950s and 1960s.

Harry G. Lefever, a retired Spelman faculty member in sociology, has provided a fine account of the cadre of Spelman students who played pivotal roles in the often painful struggle that transformed the South so dramatically. Spelman women in cooperation with students from nearby Morehouse College, Morris Brown College, Clark College, and Atlanta University, helped draft appeals, met with Atlanta city and community leaders, marched and marched, sat-in and sat-in, and went to jail again and again.

Very few Spelman women actually took part in civil rights activities. Lefever estimates that a mere I percent of the student body were directly involved, and an additional 3 to 4 percent were casual participants. Thus, 95 percent of Spehnan students shunned the movement. They were more concerned with their studies, boyfriends, and careers than they were with promoting social change. Furthermore, parents, faculty, and administrators repeatedly warned students to avoid protests and demonstrations. School officials threatened them with the loss of scholarships, suspension, and expulsion.

Gwendolyn Robinson became deeply committed to the movement but only after she disobeyed admonitions that she not take part. When Robinson spent three days in an Atlanta jail for a protest at a Krystal restaurant, Spelman's president, Albert E. Manley, expelled her only to have students rally successfully for her reinstatement. In 1964 Robinson decided to go to Mississippi with four other Spelman students in direct defiance of her grandmother's worried warnings.

None of the Spelman students was more important to the movement than the remarkable Ruby Doris Smith. If anyone was close to indispensable--not to mention inspirational--it was Ruby Doris Smith. Arrested dozens of times across the South, she rose to become the executive secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, where she served as a meticulous manager, fine administrator, and a driving force in the efforts to abolish segregation and secure voting rights.

The book's most perplexing figure is Spelman's longtime president, Albert E. Manley. Lefever could have done more to explain this enigmatic black leader who presided over Spelman from 1953 until 1976. Manley offered cautious support for civil rights, but at the same time he warned students (and their parents) to avoid participation. His chief concern seems to have been to maintain control over Spelman students and faculty. The two faculty members who were the most openly supportive of student activism were historians Howard Zinn and Staughton Lynd. For their efforts, Manley forced each of them out. There needs to be more here on Manley's background, leadership, and ideology. To what extent was he beholden to the college board of trustees? What role did the board play in these matters?

Altogether, however, this is an excellent book that fits nicely into the growing literature of the civil rights movement by describing the large role that a small contingent of women from a historically black college played in one of the great struggles of the twentieth century.

WILLIAM C. HINE

South Carolina State University