Greater Than Equal: African American Struggles for Schools and Citizenship in North Carolina, 1919–1965 by Sarah Caroline Thuesen (review)

In the 1990s and 2000s, many school districts stopped busing programs that maintained school integration under Brown v. Board of Education. The result was a backslide into, or total acceptance of, self-segregated public education. Watching this process unfold, Sarah Caroline Thuesen contemplated the history of school integration. She wondered if her generation of pupils from the 1970s and 1980s was an anomaly rather than the beginning of a new school system. This question spurred her to write Greater Than Equal to try to reflect upon the issue of public education in North Carolina from World War I (WWI) to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Thuesen embraces Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s concept of the long civil rights movement by looking beyond Brown v. Board to WWI as the beginning of an organized struggle for equal education. In doing so, she relies on oral histories in addition to newspapers and state records; the majority of these oral histories are from the Southern Oral History Program, and the rest are her own interviews and a few narratives from smaller repositories. Deploying her chronological structure in this way allows Thuesen to take the analysis of the fight for education away from white men who passed legislation in 1954 and back to local community actions of an earlier time. Even within this construct, however, Greater Than Equal largely neglects the effects of African Americans enjoying, at least temporarily, the full freedoms of citizenship during Reconstruction, which had an impact on their collective movement for education under Jim Crow; nor does Thuesen discuss the implications of the civil rights movement at all beyond 1965.

In Greater Than Equal, Thuesen uses the past to grapple with reemerging questions of whether separate can be equal and whether diversity is really an integral part of public education. By turning to early twentieth century activism, the author analyzes and reinforces what many saw as the link between receiving equal education and obtaining first-class citizenship. She highlights the competing opinions within African American communities about how best to achieve this first-class citizenship through education: some prominent African Americans argued that complete integration in public schools was the answer while others advocated for creating their own all-black schools equal in all measures to their white counterparts. Thuesen focuses on North Carolina because it provides a unique window into these controversies while being one of the few progressive Southern states that could not loosen itself from the clutches of Jim Crow.

The book begins with a discussion of the ways in which African Americans in North Carolina showed their loyalty to the United States through their strong support for the war efforts during WWI. She points out that such acts of patriotism also underscored the racial discrimination of the time, as black North Carolinians could finance and die for their country’s involvement in armed conflicts but could not exercise the full rights of citizenship, including equal education. In response, many African Americans in North Carolina joined civil rights organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in larger numbers, demanding that the North Carolina government provide them with equal, albeit still separate, educational opportunities and resources. While their actions during WWI assured the federal government of black loyalty, the local North Carolina government reacted more negatively, assuming that African Americans were swiftly headed towards becoming agitated and disruptive regardless of the war in order to insure that whites met their educational demands. In response, the state adopted a paternalistic position of taking care of its black citizens, including improving public education, along with the idea that black communities had to help themselves—all in an attempt to placate the new activists and quell any interest in creating social disorder. This allowed the white government to maintain slightly better but still inferior black public schools under...