In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Integration Now: Alexander v. Holmes and the End of Jim Crow Education by William P. Hustwit
  • Alexander D. Hyres
Integration Now: Alexander v. Holmes and the End of Jim Crow Education. By William P. Hustwit. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. xvi, 266. $39.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-4855-2.)

During the past thirty years, historians have revealed the contours of school desegregation in the South. The United States Supreme Court’s decisions in Brown v. Board of Education (1954 and 1955) have played a prominent role in these accounts. Integration Now: Alexander v. Holmes and the End of Jim Crow Education recasts the narrative by spotlighting another Supreme Court case: Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education (1969). Of the case’s broader significance, William P. Hustwit asserts, “More than fifteen years after Brown and more than fourteen years after Brown II, integration now, not deliberate speed, was undeniably the order of the day. Alexander v. Holmes marked the apogee of the Court’s impatience with southern loitering on school desegregation” (p. 138). Although Hustwit views the Alexander case as a legal success, he also highlights the case’s complicated legacy.

Integration Now combines legal and social history. To trace the dynamics of change in the Alexander case, it traces the collaboration between grassroots activists in Holmes County, Mississippi, and the lawyers from the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund, including Marian Elizabeth Wright and James Jacob “Jack” Greenberg. Hustwit relies on oral history interviews to reveal the experiences of the activists; he uses legal documents, archival collections, and newspapers to illuminate the work of the lawyers and judges. [End Page 229] Throughout seven chapters, though, the grassroots activism fades, and the book gives precedence to the story of the lawyers and judges who ultimately decided the fate of Alexander v. Holmes.

The first two chapters examine the extrajudicial violence imposed by white people on black people in Mississippi and how black Mississippians resisted white supremacy’s many machinations. Despite tracing the fall of Jim Crow education, Hustwit does not spend much time describing segregated schooling in Holmes County. Instead, he uses interviews, statistics, and a dissertation to show how segregated schooling shaped the life outcomes for black people in the county and state. These sources provide insight into the world of segregated schooling in Holmes County. However, it would have been helpful to situate Holmes County’s schools within the broader history of public schooling in the South by drawing more on James D. Anderson’s The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill, 1988) and Christopher M. Span’s From Cotton Field to Schoolhouse: African American Education in Mississippi, 1862–1875 (Chapel Hill, 2009).

After revealing the origins and evolution of the local black freedom struggle, the book—just as the court case did—wends its way from Holmes County to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and, eventually, the Supreme Court. President Richard M. Nixon and his administration also play a prominent role in the book. Nixon and the career civil servants at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) stood at odds over southern intransigence. On the one hand, Nixon wanted to satisfy the so-called silent majority in the South by aiding and abetting resistance tactics. On the other hand, Robert H. Finch and other officials at HEW wanted to enforce the Supreme Court’s ruling in Green v. County School Board of New Kent County (1968). The Green case struck down freedom-of-choice plans and pulled another brick from the wall of segregated schooling. However, it was the high court’s decision in Alexander that ultimately knocked down the wall of Jim Crow education, according to Hustwit.

Although Alexander represented a decisive legal victory, the implementation of the decision has a more complicated history. Hustwit does acknowledge the implementation challenges, though not at great length. White people in Holmes County, as well as others in locales throughout the South, found new ways to segregate. They opted out of public schools and into segregated private academies, created segregation within schools, and gerrymandered district boundaries. Many of these strategies continue to be employed...

pdf

Share