From the Grassroots to the Supreme Court: Brown v. Board of Education and American Democracy [Book Review]

Abstract

Only a reviewer will read more than a few of these sixteen, too short, too uncoordinated essays. They cover too many topics, focus on too many scattered and unrepresentative places, and employ too many diverse approaches and too many different styles of argument. From narrow legal history to hero and heroine-worshiping local history divorced from larger contexts, from studies of African American factionalism to an attempt to effect a retrospective merger of rural and urban movements for civil rights, from a biographical analysis of a white judge to a riff on the images of Brown, Emmett Till's murder, and the Montgomery bus boycott in black cultural memory, the essays touch, much too lightly, on a wide variety of themes in minority history. Notably, but not surprisingly these days, the chapters virtually ignore nonjudicial politics, especially the politics of white resistance, creating a world in which African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans valiantly shadow box, without much long-term success, against unseen opponents.