Between North and South, Brett Gadsden's study of school desegregation in Delaware, takes on several venerable assumptions about the civil rights movement. Gadsden's primary revisionist project challenges the North–South dichotomy that has often framed the movement in both scholarship and popular memory. This dichotomy is based on the assumption that the movement was predominantly a southern affair and that the struggle for racial equality in the North raised fundamentally different issues from those contested in the Jim Crow South. Delaware, which Gadsden describes as a “provincial hybrid, one in which ostensibly southern and northern modes of U.S. race relations operated” (7), provides a fascinating case study for exploring the limitations of this assumption.

At the heart of the “myth of American sectionalism” was the idea that racial segregation had two distinct forms: de jure – segregation directly mandated by law, which was the rule throughout the South prior to Brown v. Board of Education (1954); and de facto – segregation that exists without direct legal mandates. Gadsden joins a rich tradition of scholars who have questioned the viability of the distinction and condemned its tendency to undermine efforts to uproot the most entrenched forms of racial inequality. There was some irony, then, as Gadsden astutely notes, in the fact that among the most influential purveyors of the distinction were pioneering civil rights activists of the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s. Efforts to demonize de jure segregation as an aberrant practice of the backward Jim Crow South were critical to the battle against segregation laws, yet they had the unintended effect of legitimating the practices and laws that led to de facto segregation. Those fighting to desegregate America's schools were thus forced to adjust strategy. From the late 1960s onward, they increasingly dismissed the very idea of a de facto–de jure distinction as illusory. Their opponents now embraced the distinction. It allowed them to condemn segregation laws while portraying de facto segregation “as innocent or innocuous forms of racial separatism and therefore beyond the responsibility of officials to remedy” (249).

Gadsden also challenges the narrow focus on the 1950s and 1960s as the critical period of the civil rights movement. In line with much other recent scholarship, Between North and South adopts the framework of a “long civil rights movement” – one that pre-dates Brown and continues well beyond the 1960s. Gadsden locates the beginning of Delaware's school desegregation efforts in the late 1930s and concludes the book with a fascinating chapter on the early political career of Joe Biden, who, as a newly elected US Senator from Delaware in the 1970s, struggled to locate a politically viable position on busing and school desegregation.

Another of Gadsden's revisionist projects involves taking issue with those scholars who criticize the protagonists of his book – the “civil rights liberals” who led the fight for school desegregation – on the grounds that they were too tied to advancing middle-class interests, overly reliant on litigation, and unwilling to challenge the structural and economic factors that sustained racial inequality. Such critiques do not reflect the Delaware experience, Gadsden argues, where those most committed to school desegregation in fact “possessed a sophisticated understanding of the discursive and structural bases of racial inequality in U.S. society and forwarded a dynamic, powerful, and efficacious challenge to those foundations” (4).

The strength of this book is in the details. Gadsden's research is impressive. His account of the decades of school desegregation struggles in Delaware is clear and powerful. This book is unquestionably an important contribution to civil rights movement scholarship. If there is a weakness, it is in some of Gadsden's efforts to use his material to advance broader theoretical claims. The introduction tries to do too much, offering too many arguments, some of which are overly complex or vague. The rich material in the book sometimes strains to support the arguments that Gadsden attaches to it. His refutation of flattening critiques of civil rights liberals risks overcorrecting and flattening his subjects with approval. The central argument about the power of sectionalism serves its purpose in the first half of the book, but ultimately claims too much. Indeed, for this reader at least, one of the lessons of the Delaware case study is how thin the “myth” of southern villainy and northern innocence proved in the context of school segregation. In the debates over busing in the 1970s, the focus of the book's closing chapters, one finds a great deal of discussion about choice, responsibility, rights, and local control, but it is hard to find a dichotomous “sectional imaginary” doing much work here.

In the end, perhaps Gadsden's most compelling and significant argument is the simplest one: that Delaware was important. This state, he notes, has often been thought “too small and insignificant, too far north to demand the attention of southern historians, too far south for scholars of the North, or too marginal in the grand scheme of national politics” (6). As this book makes clear, Delaware was hardly marginal to the national struggle for racial equality, and careful attention to its history illuminates the complexities and ironies of the civil rights struggle.