Fifty Years of Segregation: Black Higher Education in Kentucky, 1904–1954 by John A. Hardin (review)

sometimes exercised. He relies on the arguments of morality , cleanliness, health, and aesthetics that smoke activists left behind, and (understandably) agrees with them that smoke is bad. Yet his sympathy with the reformers' cause prevents his questioning their motives. While a vast literature conveys how women used refonn movements to expand their political authority over matters of home and family, in Stradling's story only engineers act from selfinterest . Expensive abatement procedures and laws beg questions about the activist role of business competition. Despite his missed opportunity to address broader questions about the nature of Progressive reform, Stradling's book is a welcome addition to the literature on the multitude of issues that Progressives addressed. His prose is pleasurable to read, his research broadens our grasp of the nation of cities, and the book provides a fascinating study of this neglected corner of urban Progressive reform. Smokestacks and Progressives contributes new understandings of the urban environment of the past and the changing roles of women and men, reformers and engineers, who tried to clean it up. Barbara Hahn University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill John A. Hardin. Fifty Yeats of Segregation: Black Higher Education in Kentucky, I904-I954. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, I 997. 200 pp. ISBN: 08I3I2024I (cloth). $29.95. The signs that greet out-of-state visitors to Kentucky label the Commonwealth a place "Where Education Pays." According to John A. Hardin's engaging book, black Kentuckians since the Civil War have known that "education pays" and have engaged in a long struggle to reap its benefits. Centering his story on historically African American colleges such as Kentucky State, Western Kentucky Vocational College, and the now-defunct Louisville Municipal College, Hardin details the fight against unequal education and segregation in higher education in Kentucky from 1904, when the Day Law (aimed at integrated and private Berea College) outlawed interracial education, to the watershed year of I954 and the Bl'Own decision. For Hardin, racism in Kentucky typically manifested itself as "polite" or "civil" racism that rarely erupted into open contentiousness but which enabled whites to ignore the deplorable state of black higher education. From I904 to I9IO white Kentuckians codified the Day Law as both a legal and social system while African American leaders often acquiesced in hopes of getting state support for educational facilities that would actually equal those provided for whites. Yet separate but unequal became the reality and vocational education preparing African American students for manual labor only became the norm. Even when shifting national educational trends in the I920S helped black educators obtain state support for liberal arts programs, primarily at Kentucky State, most African American colleges remained vocational and, especially with the onset of the Great Depression, underfunded. Still, some progress was made in the Depression years as legal strategies aimed at undermining segregation planted the seeds for change and gave birth to a general strategy of desegregation rather than simply attempting to gain equality within the "separate but equal" system. By the mid-I940s legal attacks on segregation , mostly NAACP-led, forced advocates of the Day Law into a choice between desegregation or spending large sums of money to make black colleges truly equal to their white counterparts. This strategy finally prevailed in 1949 when the branch president of the Louisville NAACP, Lyman Johnson, received a federal court ruling that Kentucky had denied him equal opportunity to a graduate education in History. Although the ruling did not overturn the Day Law, it forced the University of Kentucky's Board of Trustees to enroll African Americans rather than attempt to meet the legal standard of equality in education. Other Kentucky colleges and universities soon followed suit, meaning the decision "signaled the end of segregated higher education in Kentucky," even before the Brown decision (95). Throughout the book Hardin deftly handles the difficult task of addressing differences in African American leadership. Hardin avoids caricaturing leaders and activists as either "accommodationists" or "immediatists," but rather elucidates the difficult decisions African Americans faced between struggling merely to survive in an inherently unequal system or fighting to overturn it at the risk of losing all white support. This subtle understanding helps him see educational...