Mark Newman has written dozens of articles on Catholicism and desegregation in specific parts of the South; this work is in some respects a compendium of those studies—a wide-ranging history spanning decades and covering the entire region. It is an ambitious undertaking, thorough and carefully organized, not simply chronologically but thematically. Newman begins with an introduction summarizing hundreds of years of interactions between African-Americans and the Catholic Church, he focuses on desegregation during the period 1945–1971, and he concludes with an overview of the period 1971–1992 (his reason for choosing this ending point is not clear). Along the way he also offers chapters highlighting the contributions of the sociology of religion and comparing Catholic responses to desegregation to those of various Protestant denominations. Newman's approach means that there is a fair amount of repetition in the book, but that is not necessarily a bad thing in such a sprawling work, and many readers will no doubt be grateful for the periodic reminders of key themes and conclusions.

There are many perspectives to consider in such a study—clergy and laity, whites and African-Americans, segregationists and progressives—and Newman ably gives voice to each, drawing on an enormous range and variety of sources. He also recognizes that it is impossible to consider the Church's response to desegregation in isolation from countless other issues and forces. He notes, for example, that while he focuses on the issue of desegregation, ordinary parish priests had to worry about myriad other matters as well (debates over the morality of segregation could move down the agenda when a church roof needed replacing), that desegregation met with opposition from some African-Americans when it entailed the closing of black schools and churches, that the deep South and peripheral South were often very different, and that a great deal changed in the Church and the nation during the decades in question. It is to Newman's great credit that he not only acknowledges each of these perspectives and complexities, but he manages to incorporate them into a single, complicated but still coherent story.

If there is a single dominant theme in this story it the tension between the segregationist status quo in which the southern Church operated and the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ, which challenged it. Given the centrality of this doctrine, a more detailed discussion of its meaning and origins would have been helpful, but Newman makes clear its essence—that all people are equal because of our creation in God's image and that the Church, as Christ's universal body on earth, should therefore be equally open to all. The story of Catholicism and desegregation is ultimately the story of believers striving to make real this ideal in the face of social pressure, pragmatic concerns, the temptation to compromise, and, at times, their own deeply ingrained prejudices.

Newman's work is indeed a meticulous study of the role the Catholic Church played in desegregation in the American South. But it is much more than that—it is also a study of how religious organizations both shape and are shaped by their environments. The Catholic Church is a global body, and yet it, like all churches, always exists in specific contexts. When it is a minority institution, as in the South, the influences of its environment are felt especially strongly, in ways Newman explores in detail. Perhaps most interestingly, Newman's study explores how power functions in the Church. The pope is the supreme head of the Church, and twentieth-century popes spoke out strongly against racism and segregation, but they also tend to defer to the judgment of local bishops, often for very good reasons. Bishops ostensibly have authority over the priests in their dioceses, but priests had numerous ways to subvert the intentions of bishops who pushed desegregation too hard (or not hard enough). The Church taught lay people to defer to their priests, and most did, most of the time, but priests whose views were too far out of line with their congregants’ risked alienating them. Even in a hierarchical organization like the Catholic Church, power and authority take many forms and flow in many directions, as Newman fascinatingly demonstrates. Even readers who are not especially interesting in the specific subject of southern desegregation can therefore find great value in this work.

Although Newman deals with a subject half a century old, this is a timely work, given the current tendency of many people, including, sadly, many scholars, to take a Manichean view of history, especially the history of the South. At a time when vandalism of historical monuments has largely replaced a sincere effort to understand and learn from the past, Newman's approach is a useful reminder of what historical inquiry should be.