Despite the flourishing scholarship on the civil rights movement, including numerous local studies, we still know little of the inner workings of local branches of national organizations, especially in the border South. In Borders of Equality, Lee Sartain addresses this gap by chronicling the long history of the Baltimore branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Sartain's goals are threefold. First, he highlights Baltimore as a “legal laboratory” (7) for the rest of the South and explains how the civil rights movement in this border city shaped the movement's agenda elsewhere. Second, Sartain emphasizes the role of the NAACP in the movement by detailing the Baltimore branch's extensive civil rights campaigns from the New Deal era through the advent of Black Power. Finally, Sartain demonstrates that the NAACP, at least in Baltimore, had strong female leadership, as exemplified through the long tenure of Lillie Jackson, who served as president from 1935 to 1970. In each of these goals, the author succeeds admirably, and his work will appeal to students and scholars of the movement, particularly those interested in local studies, women's leadership, and regional distinctions.

Borders of Equality is organized both chronologically and thematically around themes of gender, class, generation, and leadership. Early chapters introduce readers to the Baltimore branch, which was chartered in 1914 by members of the city's black middle class. Sartain discusses the branch's involvement in legal battles against segregation in housing and education and campaigns against lynching and police brutality. A significant portion of the work is devoted to a biographical sketch of branch president Lillie Jackson, who at once reinforced the traditional gender norms of black respectability and challenged the notion that the public figureheads of civil rights organizations were exclusively male. Jackson, who could be seen around town donning her finest furs and hats, believed that property ownership marked African Americans as fully fledged citizens and publicly condemned members of her race who frequented taverns and nightclubs. Jackson managed the Baltimore branch through unilateral decision-making and resented attempts by the national NAACP to control her efforts. Ella Baker's visit to the city in 1941 cast Jackson's leadership style in sharp relief. Whereas Baker aimed to grow the NAACP's membership broadly and organize leadership democratically, Jackson remained wedded to a centralized model in which she held onto the reins of power and selectively recruited members from her inner circle. Ultimately, Sartain concludes that the Baltimore branch did not have an “explicit feminist agenda” (74) in repeatedly electing Jackson president. By keeping Jackson at the helm for several decades, however, the branch recognized that women played a fundamental role in the leadership of civil rights organizations. More than an “invisible activist” (105–7), a label that Sartain affixes to the many unsung heroines of the black freedom struggle, Lillie Jackson was out front and acknowledged as an official leader.

Later chapters explore youth activism within the Baltimore NAACP, especially the City-Wide Young People's Forum, a group founded by Lillie Jackson's daughter, Juanita. Student activists eventually migrated to civil rights organizations that spearheaded direct-action protest. Although the Baltimore NAACP appeared more conservative than the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Sartain contends that the organization remained relevant because of its comparatively deep roots in the city and access to legal expertise and financial resources. In a final chapter, Sartain tackles the period from 1954 to 1968, beginning with the Baltimore branch's school desegregation campaign in the wake of Brown and ending with Governor Spiro Agnew's turn against the civil rights movement. Ambitious in scope but lacking in depth and analysis, this chapter is the book's weak point. Borders of Equality concludes with the retirement of Lillie Jackson, at a moment when the Baltimore branch and the city as a whole were suffering decline. Dwindling membership and financial support in the 1970s ensured that the NAACP would not be the major player it once was in Baltimore. Meanwhile, white flight shrank the city's tax base, and black residents watched as urban renewal destroyed their neighborhoods.

Sartain has written the first in what will likely be a long line of studies complementing Patricia Sullivan's synthesis of the NAACP, Lift Every Voice (2009). Through its narration of Lillie Jackson's tenure and the Baltimore branch's history of robust organizing, Borders of Equality also offers proof of a long civil rights struggle that preceded the Brown decision and the Civil Rights Act – popular markers of the movement's origins.