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With All Deliberate Speed: Implementing Brown v. Board of Education. Edited by Brian J. Daugherity and Charles C. Bolton. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2008. Pp. xvi, 339. Paper, $27.50, ISBN 978-1-55728-8691; cloth, $64.95, ISBN 978-1-55728-868-4.)
Brown v. Board of Education ( 1 954) may well be the greatest and most morally inspiring decision issued by the U.S. Supreme Court in its history. But it is also a decision wherein, preeminently, die devil lies in the details - in the story of how Brown was implemented and of how the decision shaped botii education and society in states where schools had formerly been segregated by law. Therefore, this volume of thorough and excellent essays, edited by Brian J. Daugherity and Charles C. Bolton, is especially valuable. The essays get down on the ground, as it were, and probe die political maneuverings, turmoil, and individual sacrifices involved in making the noble words of Chief Justice Earl Warren a reality.
The volume recounts the travails of desegregation in seven former Confederate states (excepting Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Texas). It also deals with the border states of Missouri and Delaware; with Indiana, which had not totally abolished state-mandated segregation by 1954; and with the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and the state of Nevada, places that, from 1954 on, coped with de facto segregation. Unfortunately, no book review can do justice to each of these fine essays.
In broad outline the stories of the southern states are similar: token desegregation at best in the 1950s and early 1960s, combined with outright defiance; then stepped-up compliance after the Civil Rights Act...