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With All Deliberate Speed: Implementing Brown v. Board of Education. Ed. by Brian J. Daughter ity and Charles C. Bolton. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2008. xvi, 339 pp. Cloth, $64.95, ISBN 978-1-55728-868-4. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-1-55728-869-1.)
Just over a half century ago, in the immediate aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education (1954), a volume of essays appeared under the title With All Deliberate Speed (1957). Produced by the Southern Education Reporting Service (whose great contribution to the events of the day - and to later generations of historians - was the publication of the Southern School News [1954-1965], a month-by-month account of school desegregation), it offered a snapshot of the precarious state of the school desegregation campaign. The essays not only captured the considerable achievements made in moving toward desegregation outside the Deep South, but they also made clear that much of the South was nowhere near accepting desegregation. Brown was largely up for grabs, its outcome to be explained by future historians.
The volume of essays under review seeks to do just this - to take account,...