This short book consists of a series of case studies on the continuing civil rights struggles of African Americans in the South during the two decades following the major legislative victories of the mid-1960s. As his title suggests, Timothy Minchin stresses a shift in emphasis from securing political and legal rights to improving economic status and opportunity in southern labor markets, particularly in two key southern manufacturing industries: textiles and paper. In these industries, lawsuits brought under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act were a key tactic in the effort to attain equal employment opportunity, but the resulting legal victories were limited in their practical significance for southern black workers, as employment in textile and paper mills stagnated or declined in the 1980s.

Drawing on archival research, court documents, and interviews with some surviving participants, Minchin's largely descriptive narratives complement the work of James Heckman, Gavin Wright, and other economists on the importance of changes in the legal and political climate during the 1960s for the employment breakthroughs of southern blacks. But the book's scope is limited by its focus on just two traditional manufacturing industries. Furthermore, Minchin's emphasis on organized struggle, whether by civil rights advocates or the white rank-and-file unionists who often opposed them, leaves the reader wondering about the relative importance of these forces as compared with other social and economic trends that surely also affected the progress of southern black workers: education, migration, changing opportunities in other sectors of the southern economy, and the like.

Perhaps the most interesting contribution of the book is to offer a southern take on the “bad timing” story of black economic progress during the post—war period, as laid out for the urban industrial centers of the North in the work of Thomas Sugrue and William Julius Wilson. According to this narrative, just as working-class African Americans were beginning to compete successfully with whites for the better blue-collar jobs (thanks to migration and civil rights laws and litigation), job growth in the urban industrial centers stagnated and the new opportunities dried up. Minchin tells a similar story for the paper and textile industries of the South. Typical was the case of an equal employment lawsuit brought against J. P. Stevens in 1970. By 1978, when the judge's 1975 decision ordering racial quotas and other remedies was upheld against Stevens's appeal, the firm was on the decline with the rest of the southern textile sector—employment at Stevens would fall by half over the following decade. The paper industry fared somewhat better, but employment growth slowed there as well. Again, however, one is left to wonder whether this story generalizes, and whether racial progress extended to the growth industries of the American South over the same period.

The racial tensions between white and black workers that flared as blacks exerted their new legal rights are a recurring theme, as are the tensions within the white-dominated union movement between a more racially progressive national leadership and a traditionalist local rank-and-file. There are few surprises here: students of U.S. labor history and equal employment law will be familiar with the persistence of the color line in some branches of southern employment and the institutional and organizational factors that supported it, such as seniority rules governing job promotion ladders and the like. In the unionized paper industry, these arrangements were often reinforced by union rules under a system of segregated locals. Shortly after the Gilman Paper Company's mill opened in 1941 St. Marys, Georgia, for example, “The arrival of the union clearly helped codify segregation in the mill” (p. 103). But the example of textiles demonstrates that unions were not a necessary condition for the enforcement of a rigid color line in employment.

While most of the book deals with labor issues, one rather idiosyncratic chapter recounts the saga of the civil rights activist Floyd McKissick's attempt to establish the planned interracial community of Soul City, North Carolina. A uniquely American blend of entrepreneurship, utopianism, and black self-help, Soul City began its life dependent on government largesse, in the form of a $14 million loan guarantee in 1972 from HUD's New Communities Program. But in 1979 HUD pulled the plug on its support, and the community would never come close to fulfilling McKissick's ambitions.

The Soul City project had suffered from ongoing accusations of misuse of government funds, although reviews by the GAO and state legislature were largely exonerative. Bad press and hostility from Jesse Helms notwithstanding, “(t)he failure to attract industry was ultimately decisive” (p. 72) in Soul City's loss of federal funding and disappointing results. This failure Minchin in turn attributes to corporate employers' general concerns about the largely black labor force and to the opposition of local white residents. But the extent to which race played a significant role in Soul City's problems is subject to question. Indeed, the fact that HUD had shut down or initiated foreclosure on about half of its New Community projects by 1979 suggests that this approach to federally sponsored town building may have been intrinsically problematic. This is one of several places in the book where Minchin's argument would have been strengthened by a more careful and critical engagement with alternative causal accounts for his well-researched narratives.