Before Brown: Heman Marion Sweatt, Thurgood Marshall, and the Long Road to Justice (review)

Gary M. Lavergne's Before Brown: Heman Marion Sweatt, Thurgood Marshall, and the Long Road to Justice traces the development of integration case law in higher education. With incredible attention to detail, Lavergne maps out the case and its contextualizing factors—including the background of legal superman Thurgood Marshall and the inner workings of the Houston chapter of the NAACP—in an effort to humanize one of the most important Supreme Court cases of the twentieth century—Sweatt v. Painter (1950).

Tracing the case back to the fight against the white primary in Texas, Lavergne tracks the development of the NAACP legal team's strategy over the decades leading up to decisions like Sweatt and the later Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Within the Sweatt case itself, the developing arguments against segregation in higher education are situated against the debates of Black activists, roadblocks—both expected and unexpected—from racist leaders, and the fluctuating opinions of different portions of the Texas population, regarding both Heman Sweatt and integration itself. Lavergne shows how Sweatt was pivotal in reinventing the NAACP's legal argument against racial segregation—from one based around physical and financial inequalities to a more sociological based perspective that focused on "intangibles," culturally assigned values, and the social ramifications of segregation for both Blacks and whites.

Lavergne in particular focuses his attention on the inner workings of the NAACP: the efforts of the Houston branch to mobilize its resources as effectively as possible while creating networks with other Black activists, and the fractious relationship between the national office and the Houston branch. Concentrating on the top-down force exerted by the NAACP that all at once directed, hindered, and encouraged local activists allows the author to expand the rather narrow focus of the book to include portions of other cases, such as Sipuel (1948) and McLaurin (1950), that were integral to the NAACP's legal strategy for the desegregation of higher education. Because he focuses on situating the Sweatt case within the NAACP's legal strategy, Lavergne's narrative explicitly portrays Sweatt himself as a "tool" of the NAACP without meaningful historical agency.

Clearly, Lavergne recognizes the connection between changes in NAACP national strategy and localized dissent, documenting that one outgrowth of the failed Grovey v. Townsend (1935) case was the use of Black lawyers to litigate civil rights cases. A major reason cited for the departure of Texas activists from the national NAACP strategy "was a failure to develop a white primary case using Black attorneys" (Lavergne 52). However, this same understanding is not applied to the overall development of the legal strategy, where according to Before Brown, it would seem the national NAACP was solely responsible for deciding to take on Jim Crow segregation.

The same narrow focus that allows for such detail also presents Before Brown's primary limitation. The legal strategy of the NAACP does not feel fully developed—despite the inclusion of other cases that were integral to the Sweatt decision—largely because Lavergne's treatment of alternate strategies and competing conceptions about what would be best for African Americans is reductive and dismissive. He portrays all Black activists opposed to integration as Booker T. Washington-style "accommodationists." He draws no distinction between Black people refusing to confront state-enforced segregation and those pursuing voluntary self-segregation as a road to increasing the power of the Black community. One such case is in Lavergne's analysis of Carter Wesley—an analysis that focuses on uncontextualized personal rifts rather than an examination of the fluid intersections and divergences of Wesley's politics with that of Marshall and the NAACP. In fact, the farthest Lavergne goes in exploring the nature of the often-fractious relationship is to end an anecdote with the sentence, "Carter Wesley was a complicated man." (Chapters 11 and 14 both end with this sentence.)

This approach is detrimental to the work as a whole because it fails to...