Long Is the Way and Hard is a suitable volume of essays with which to celebrate the centennial of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Within a fairly narrow framework, it provides a mix of historiography, studies of national leaders and policies, and local case studies in particular cities and states. Adam Fairclough writes in the foreword, “the record of the NAACP is so long and varied that no general history of the organization can hope to do it justice,” though Patricia Sullivan's 2009 volume did just that, up to 1960 (xiv). The essays here are the work primarily of a generation of British scholars who have mined the limitless reels of microfilm of the NAACP papers. Some of the essays about the national level are very interesting, especially George Lewis's account of the public relations department and Jenny Woodley's overview of the NAACP's cultural interventions. There are essays on both Walter White and Roy Wilkins that work hard to portray them as heroic. A handful of essays focussing on cities are rather mixed. Andrew M. Fearnley makes an interesting point about the Cleveland branch and its expansive conception of what “local” meant. The essay on Detroit is a good account of local branch politics and their relations with New York, but the Chicago essay feels like a condensed version of a longer work. Some of the state overviews are useful, especially Jonathan Watson's account of the NAACP in California, where it faced conditions rather different than in the South or the earlier destinations of southern black migrants. Other essays cover Louisiana, Alabama, and Arkansas, though it might have been helpful to have an explanation of why these states and cities were included rather than others. A few of the essays go up to the 1960s, but despite the promise of “One Hundred Years of the NAACP” in the subtitle, there is nothing on the last forty years.

Although full of informative material about the NAACP and its internal dynamics, this volume stands apart from the main currents of scholarship on the civil rights movement in the last fifteen years that include the NAACP, but consider it as one element amongst many. Case studies that mostly pass over these broader contexts may provide additional detail about the NAACP itself, but do not necessarily tell us anything new about the movement as a whole. There are significant bodies of literature that simply do not appear here: the work that considers Jim Crow as a system of racial capitalism and insists that analysis of class cannot be separated from analysis of race, the work of Mary L. Dudziak and others that integrates the Cold War into the analysis of the civil rights movement. The timeline included at the end of the volume is handy, but should be used with caution: there was no legal case decided in 1935 called “Gaines v. University of Maryland” (a conflation of two different cases listed in the wrong year).