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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 37.2 (2006) 312-313


Reviewed by
Jonathan Scott Holloway
Yale University
From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality. By Michael J. Klarman (New York, Oxford University Press, 2004) 655 pp. $35.00 cloth $19.95 paper

In our public culture, the civil-rights movement (really an interlocking set of many different movements happening in different places and in different ways) has become embodied in the triumphant moment when Martin Luther King, Jr., stepped to the microphone in August 1963 and told the country that he had a dream of a glorious future in which character mattered more than color. The actual history of resistant local, state, and federal governments has turned into a story of American [End Page 312] exceptionalism: "America" recognized, without complication or caveat, the eloquence and truth of King's dream and passed a series of laws that changed the way the country operated and preserved the United States' place as a beacon of hope to all disfranchised people around the world. But mythologizing the events of the civil-rights movement into a national narrative that ignored the extremely complicated and contested nature of the movement was also an act of denying meaning to all of those citizens who could not enjoy their full rights and even today still struggle for their full realization.

Klarman's From Jim Crow to Civil Rights does not participate in this myth-making endeavor; it makes an important contribution to the body of work that looks at the civil-rights movement with an exacting gaze. Scholars are well beyond the hagiographies of the great movement leaders and have learned much from the social histories of places like Mississippi in the 1960s. Now, many scholars are moving back in time to the 1930s or earlier in their efforts to understand the civil-rights movement. Klarman makes his most valuable contribution in this context. His work examines the legal, political, and sociocultural histories of race and America from Plessy v. Ferguson (and other, less well-known cases) in 1896 through Brown v. Board of Education in Topeka in 1954 (with an extended chapter on the effects of Brown on the rising civil-rights movement). Some might consider all but the final chapter a pre-history of the civil-rights movement, but it is more accurate to consider it a legal history of the underpinnings of the movement—one that became coherent as a movement at least as early as 1941.

Klarman is a legal historian and it shows. He pays less attention to presenting a unifying narrative than to presenting his arguments in a highly disciplined and well-organized fashion. Each chapter contains a core thesis about the most important race/civil rights cases of the respective era and an explanation of the various judges' decisions and how and why they either tended to the literal interpretation of constitutional law or wrote decisions that reflected a sensitivity to the shifting cultural and social zeitgeist.

There are no easy answers, but Klarman does a fine job of demonstrating why legal fights over peonage, housing discrimination, and school desegregation evolved as they did. What may be of most value to American historians is that Klarman casts a wide net in his study but resists the temptation to gloss over complications. His history is sweeping yet detailed, argumentative but not self-righteous. Klarman has a tendency—as he admits in the book's introduction—to deploy technical legal jargon, and he relies upon a counterfactual mode of engagement from time to time that is less effective outside the context of a law school lecture hall. But these are not so much defects as they are a reflection of his attempt to talk to two sets of disciplines in a language that both will understand. Overwhelmingly he succeeds.

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