These two books are complementary tomes both dealing with the central theme of the admission of nine African American students into Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas during 1957 by nine African American students. This seminal episode in the civil rights movement and its origins and aftermath is given thorough documentation in Lewis and Lewis's Race, Politics, and Memory, and exhaustively analyzed by Kirk in eight articles in Beyond Little Rock.

The primary documents presented in Race, Politics, and Memory cover an extensive period from 1900 to 2006 and it is boldly stated that the volume is “to help readers understand what a single historical moment reveals about how historians practice their art” (xxx). All manner of historical evidence is used, from interviews with key players to political cartoons – most are Arkansas-based but many are from the national and international arena. However, its main focus is on the lead-up to entry of the Little Rock Nine to the Central High School and its aftermath, particularly how the event was utilized as historical memory by those who experienced it, both black and white, and by politicians such as President Bill Clinton and Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee in 1997, the fortieth anniversary of the event. Lewis and Lewis remark that “commemorative events have largely replaced nuanced debate regarding the impact of the crisis and the long-term impact of desegregation in America,” a generality that could be expressed about the civil rights movement in popular historical imagination as a whole (xxix). Many of the documents are revealing and uncompromising about the nature of historical memory itself; as James Eison, a white student in 1957 who protested against the integration of the High School, stated forty years after the event, “The historian's business isn't sympathizing with those who feel sorry after the fact … but with setting down the truth as much as he knows it – history as he saw it, and not the more forgiving history that he finds distorted by memory, cowardice and political correctness” (137).

The book also contains a detailed timeline, a helpful annotated bibliography, a Web-based resources section, and even prepared seminar plans, which certainly gives it comprehensiveness for educators with an eye to teaching the more nuanced appreciation of the period that Lewis and Lewis aim for. There is, however, a curious lack of documents expressing Daisy Bates's voice in the volume (only one brief radio interview from 1964), although she is suitably praised by others throughout as “Arkansas's Matriarch of Integration” (198). There is plenty of documentary material on Bates, including her own autobiography, Long Shadow of Little Rock (1962), so it is a little odd that the woman credited for her civil rights work in the NAACP and for organizing and inspiring the integration campaign of 1957 is reduced to mainly secondhand accounts.

John Kirk's collection of “avowedly revisionist” (94) essays, two of which have not been published before, in Beyond Little Rock highlights many different aspects of segregation and civil rights protest in Arkansas, including an excellent piece about Daisy Bates and the role of gender in the movement. Kirk is probably the most knowledgeable academic on the topic of Little Rock and the school integration episode and this collection touches on the crisis in detail but also goes beyond this single event. Kirk examines the civil rights struggle in Little Rock in its various stages across the twentieth century, including the New Deal, black activism and leadership up to 1957, white opposition to black protest, city planning, and the Little Rock crisis in a fiftieth-anniversary retrospective. Kirk sees his overarching theme as being to “understand the events of the 1957 Little Rock crisis within the context of an unfolding struggle for African American freedom and equality … over the course of the twentieth century” (xi).

While all the papers are of value I found Kirk's thesis on minimum compliance with the US Supreme Court Brown decision of 1954, which technically desegregated schools, particularly compelling. Kirk contends that the idea of “gradualism and tokenism” played a greater role in the development of white southern resistance, although violence and mobs received the media attention (94). The Brown II decision of 1955 – the Supreme Court's assertion that desegregation should proceed with “all deliberate speed” (66) – in particular played a pivotal role in slowing down integration, in Kirk's view (95). As the superintendent of the Little Rock School District, Virgil T. Blossom, succinctly put it, minimum compliance was “the least amount of integration over the longest period” (98), which attempted to stall the integration of Little Rock schools indefinitely.

While Kirk's articles may be familiar to those who know the civil rights literature of the period it is a useful collection as it brings together research that tells a complete story. Beyond Little Rock sits well alongside Race, Politics, and Memory, and together they create a strong narrative of a city in the United States South which could have been known for its comparatively progressive racial politics, but instead became synonymous with bigotry and obstruction.