Writing about the history of civil rights in the United States is challenging, requiring the author to define the scope of civil rights, decide whether to treat the subject at a macro or micro level, choose the relative weights to give to legal and social history, and choose the time period to be covered. These two books take different approaches to all these questions. With All Deliberate Speed addresses only race discrimination in education; examines the subject in twelve states; tends to emphasize social history; and primarily covers the period after 1954, while We Shall Overcome addresses race, sex, national origin, and religious discrimination; attempts to do so at a macro level; avers in its subtitle to focus on law; and covers some three hundred years of history. The topic also challenges the author to compete in a very crowded field, which the editors of With All Deliberate Speed characterize as “an increasingly vast literature on the history of the civil rights movement in the United States” (vii). And the volume of source material – cases, congressional debates, letters, oral histories, news articles, state and federal archives, and so on – is truly daunting. As Alexander Tsesis points out in We Shall Overcome, during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson “so many landmark laws were enacted … that a work of this scope can hope to capture only a panoramic sense of the achievements” (245).

With All Deliberate Speed is a collection of chapters by thirteen contributors to provide a “bottom-up” picture of how Brown v. Board of Education Footnote ¹ was implemented in twelve states, South and North. Special attention is paid to the work of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the NAACP Legal and Educational Defense Fund, “an integral, but essentially unknown, aspect of NAACP history” (ix).Footnote ² The detail of the chapters varies, as does the time period discussed (some chapters beginning with the 1954 Brown decision and others beginning much earlier; some ending in the 1970s and others in the 1990s). Given space constraints, none of the chapters can provide a truly in-depth picture of all the twists and turns of the desegregation process or trace the experiences of individual students, parents or teachers. The book nonetheless offers excellent overviews, at a state or school district level.

The overall picture that emerges from these chapters is one of complete segregation in the South and partial segregation in the North before the 1954 decision in Brown, followed by early implementation of Brown in some school districts. However, the next phase featured massive resistance, accompanied by a failure of the Supreme Court to provide guidance on the substance of the desegregation mandate. A variety of evasive techniques, such as pupil placement laws and free-choice plans, led to only token desegregation. Not until 1968 did the Supreme Court hold that desegregation meant dismantling the dual school system and replacing it with a unitary school system. In many school districts the transformation to a unitary system was accompanied by new forms of discrimination, such as in-class segregation, dismissal or demotion of black faculty and staff, and exclusion from extracurricular activities. These all engendered litigation. The other common phenomenon was white flight, either by moving to the suburbs, by transferring out of desegregated schools, or by attending newly formed white private schools. The book performs a valuable service in detailing the different ways in which communities dealt with these issues.

For example, the chapter on South Carolina, by Vernon Burton and Lewie Reece, perceptively links the right to vote and school desegregation: “desegregation was never possible unless the political and legal order was reformed at the same time” (60). The attitude of the dominant white politicians is shockingly revealed in Governor Cole Blease's 1911 inaugural address: “when the people of this country began to try to educate the Negro they made a serious and grave mistake” (62). The chapter therefore traces the disfranchisement and subsequent enfranchisement of African Americans in South Carolina as crucial to the school desegregation issue. It also places school desegregation in the context of the civil rights protest movements and the work of the NAACP. After Brown was decided, the state followed advice from the Columbia school superintendent to evade rather than openly defy compliance. This strategy preserved segregation “for the next fifteen years” (76). “In 1971 most South Carolina school districts were finally desegregated, although racial inequalities in the quality of education would linger for years to come” (88). Today the issues have shifted to ones of financial equality and white flight to private schools.

Missouri provides both contrast and similarity. Peter William Moran points out that, unlike most other states that required school segregation, Missouri took seriously the “equal” requirement of the separate but equal doctrine. Its per-pupil expenditures, teacher qualifications, and curricula were the same in white and black schools. Rather than adopt massive resistance to school desegregation, Missouri quickly opted to comply with Brown by either drawing unitary school attendance zones or by providing freedom of choice, except in the rural southeastern part of the state. As happened later in the deep South, desegregation was accompanied in some districts by black teachers losing their jobs and by other “second-generation” types of discrimination. In St. Louis and Kansas City, where the greatest number of African Americans were enrolled, the adoption of neighborhood school assignments led to many schools remaining one-race, because of residential segregation patterns. Transfer policies further entrenched racial separation, as did white flight to the suburbs. “Benign neglect” led to the two districts failing to keep pace with changing Supreme Court requirements for desegregation. In the 1970s, lawsuits sought to bring the desegregation of the city schools to suburban school districts. Rather than coercive bussing plans, the districts turned to magnet schools to achieve desegregation and to added funding of the inner-city schools that remained segregated. Ultimately, though, the Supreme Court ruled that unitary school districts should be relieved of federal court supervision, and “the return to neighborhood schools has generally resulted in a degree of racial mixing comparable to what was achieved across Missouri in 1955” (198).

How should we evaluate the effectiveness of the Brown decision? J. Michael McElreath contributes a thoughtful analysis of the implementation of Brown in the Triangle region of North Carolina. McElreath concludes that desegregation was relatively successful, but that “integration” was less successful. He describes various second-generation problems that accompanied desegregation, such as demotion of black school officials, loss of traditions, tension over student activities. He points out some factors that seemed to influence the level of success: leadership, size of district, racial composition of district. McElreath repeats one mistaken assertion that has wide circulation in the United States: “most African Americans attend schools that are largely segregated by race”. That assertion is made in a study that treats as segregated any school in which the majority of the students are not white.Footnote ³ In fact, many more African Americans attend racially diverse schools than one-race schools, while 100 percent of African Americans in the seventeen southern and border states attended all-black schools before the decision in Brown.Footnote ⁴

Alexander Tsesis, in We Shall Overcome, devotes eight pages to Brown and its aftermath. He necessarily paints in broad strokes, pointing out that after Congress and the executive branch became active in enforcing the desegregation requirement and the Court defined its content, the percentage of black students in the South attending school with white students jumped from 1·2 percent in 1964 to 91·3 percent in 1972 (259).

Tsesis attempts to place his broad and ambitious historical analysis of civil rights within the context of several themes: “the convergence of liberty and equality” (1), “the birth pangs of civil rights” (2), and the obligation of “the federal government to protect individual liberties in a way that is beneficial to general welfare” (2). He also points out the clash between the stated values of the Declaration of Independence and the way in which the United States treated blacks and women and other disfavored groups. Race discrimination dominates the book, just as it has dominated US history. Civil rights, of course, include more than the freedom from race discrimination, and Tsesis does present fairly brief interpolations regarding discrimination against women, gays and lesbians, Asians and Jews along the way. Advances for these groups came about in part as a natural outgrowth of changes in the legal and social treatment of African Americans, but it is hardly possible in two or three pages to describe the developments regarding, for example, discrimination based on sexual orientation. For example, Tsesis says nothing about state court decisions regarding the right of same-sex marriage.

A reader of We Shall Overcome will gain understanding that American history is replete with missed opportunities that stemmed from white unwillingness to upset the system of black chattel slavery and, later, to upset the racial caste system the South adopted after the end of slavery. As Tsesis points out, “the willingness to overlook a large segment of the population's interest in life and liberty rested, in no small part, on the revolutionaries' fixation on the right to property” (19). Toleration of African American slavery led inevitably to a complex system of legal regulation, treating people as property, subordinate to the dominant whites, subject to arbitrary treatment. Slaves had no right to normal family life. Racial stereotyping became the norm. Slavery wreaked havoc on the US political system, as the admission of new states became entwined with the question whether they would be free or slave states; the Fugitive Slave Act trampled on normal principles of federalism; and the Supreme Court “could not be a neutral arbiter,” but “was infused with politics,” in deciding cases such as Dred Scott v. Sandford (77).Footnote ⁵

Reconstruction brought the possibility of inclusion of African Americans as full members of US society. Tsesis describes the initial flood of constitutional amendments, statutes, and executive actions designed to achieve equality for the newly freed slaves. However, as Tsesis explains, a series of Supreme Court decisions, the rise of southern white resistance, and the retreat of the executive branch transformed law into an instrument “for locking blacks out of politics” (133). By the early twentieth century President Wilson believed that segregation was in the “interest of the colored people” (164). The civil rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s did much to destroy the racial caste system. Tsesis describes the revolution, which he believes brought the United States closer to its stated ideals. As to the mystery of why the revolution happened when it did, and who were the prime movers, the reader is left to reach her or his own conclusions.

Both books contain extensive notes, but neither contains a bibliography. While both include helpful indexes, Tsesis's index does not cover the notes, where most of the cases are cited. While Tsesis is generally accurate, he does make some surprising mistakes. For example, he says that the Montgomery, Alabama bus desegregation case “rejected the argument that private organizations can refuse to serve patrons on account of their race” (261). The case, however, was a challenge to laws that required bus segregation. Not until much later did the court hold that private organizations may not discriminate. Similarly, he says that in the Bakke case, “Justice Powell agreed with four other justices that the [affirmative action] program was unconstitutional” (290). However, Justice Powell was the only justice to say the program was unconstitutional; four others thought it violated a federal statute and therefore did not reach the constitutional question.

With All Deliberate Speed provides valuable and interesting case studies of school desegregation and helps us understand the relations among civil rights organizations such as the NAACP, white local leadership, the courts, and the national government. We Shall Overcome celebrates the progress the United States has made toward fulfilling the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and helps us understand the obstacles yet to be overcome.