This is a detailed case study of the racial politics of school desegregation in Mobile, Alabama. Rather than focusing merely on policy, Richard Pride emphasizes the language associated with the desegregation struggle and its relationship with political and cultural change. The author argues that “stories affect our perceptions of the world and that these alterations in turn affect our individual and collective behaviors” (pp. 1–2).

Pride's account of the events of desegregation in Mobile is thorough. He chronicles the struggle that began shortly after the Supreme Court's Brown decision in 1954 and continued through the middle 1960s. During this period, numerous methods were employed to prevent whites from attending school with African Americans. Led by Alabama Governor George Wallace, white resistance to court-ordered desegregation was intense, with radicals calling for direct action to preserve the southern hierarchy, and conservatives advocating legal and political actions to stop desegregation. Wallace sought to “construct a story of illegitimate federal hegemony” (p. 45), to which many whites responded favorably. Rather than emphasize the inferiority of African Americans, Wallace and other opponents of desegregation reiterated the theme of “freedom of choice,” which maintained that parents should be able to send their children to the school of their choosing, and therefore not be coerced by government to send their children to schools in other neighborhoods. From the beginning, it was clear that school desegregation would not be accomplished smoothly, and the narrative of freedom of choice, with its implicit emphasis on individualism, lent support to desegregation opponents.

The next critical phase began after the U.S. Supreme Court approved busing as a method of desegregation in Swan v. Charlotte-Mecklenberg (1971). Adopted after the Swan decision, Mobile's desegregation plan, which included busing, left more than a quarter of the county's schools over 90% segregated, however, which further revealed the slow pace of desegregation and implicitly illustrated the unpopularity of busing. Opposition to busing played a role in the presidential election of 1972, in which Richard Nixon carried Mobile County by a large margin over George McGovern. The threats of many whites to hold Democrats accountable at the polls were coming to fruition.

Pride also describes how the concept of community schools gained increasing popularity among many whites and African Americans during the 1970s. Community schools within a metropolitan area that is largely segregated by race necessarily means the perpetuation of segregated schools. The growing popularity of community schools within certain segments of the African American community was directly at odds with the integration strategy of the NAACP and the Justice Department, however, which further complicated the politics of desegregation.

The book's most insightful chapter is Chapter 10, “Redefining the Problem of Racial Inequality.” It contains a substantial amount of original analysis of census data, school performance indicators, and public opinion in Mobile throughout the period of desegregation. During this period, inequalities between the races decreased somewhat, but substantial differences remained. Over time, most local whites came to interpret the world in a different manner, which assumed that racial inequality resulted not from innate racial differences but, rather, from insufficient effort on the part of many African Americans to improve their circumstances. This chapter provides the best evidence of the author's link between stories and cultural change, a link that could have been given more attention in the previous chapters.

A shortcoming of the book is Pride's application of the concept of the third face of power, as articulated in John Gaventa's (1982) classic work, Power and Powerlessness. The first face of power involves an examination of behavior and decision making; the second face involves looking at the political agenda and the non–decision-making process; and the third face of power involves an analysis of how the perceptions, values, and beliefs of the powerless are shaped by those in power. This type of analysis involves analysis of the use of communication, symbols, language, and so forth, and how these methods are used to maintain the current power relationships.

Considering the events in Mobile that Pride describes in detail, it is not clear how the third face of power is relevant to the analysis, and the author does not make the link between the third face of power and the events of desegregation explicit. While there were factions within the civil rights movement, clearly the vast majority of African Americans believed that discrimination was widespread and that steps needed to be taken to address this problem. The successful legal challenges to segregation gave the civil rights movement momentum, unlike the miners in Gaventa's work, whose intermittent protests were successfully thwarted to maintain the status quo.

Nonetheless, The Political Use of Racial Narratives is a valuable contribution to the literature on desegregation, and helps to bridge the gap between the more theoretical work on language in the tradition of Murray Edelman and the empirical research on desegregation. Pride argues forcefully that during the period of desegregation, the South was transformed from a hierarchical culture to one of individualism. This book effectively illustrates how the context of this new culture ultimately helped lay the groundwork for the national movement against racial policies beginning in the early 1980s, and also sheds light on how the issue of desegregation contributed to the transformation of the South into a Republican stronghold.