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

In 1993, African-American psychologist Kenneth B. Clark, reflecting on Brown vs. Board of Education (1954) and his involvement with the Supreme Court’s landmark decision, lamented, “I am forced to recognize that my life has, in fact, been a series of glorious defeats.”¹ Echoing the disappointment expressed by many civil-rights activists, including Derrick Bell and Charles Ogletree, Clark’s commentary exposed a generational frustration with court-ordered desegregation. With this disillusionment in mind, Thuesen explores African-American educational activism during the decades before Brown reified integration. Understanding black struggles for school equalization in the Jim Crow South, she contends, can help policymakers navigate the thorny relationship between racially separate institutions and civic inclusion.

In her decision to concentrate on the period between 1919 and 1965, Thuesen joins a rich and growing literature that embraces the idea of a “Long Civil Rights Movement.” She argues that struggles over equalization “represent much more than a brief detour on the road to Brown” (2). To the contrary, whereas Brown suggested that equivalent resources could never alleviate the damage that segregation inflicted on black children, the school equalization and integration movements did not always compete. Between World War I and court-ordered desegregation, African Americans advanced a range of strategies to promote educational opportunity and civic inclusion. While legal activists working under the auspices of the naacp’s Legal Defense Fund targeted segregated schools in an effort to dismantle the separate-but-equal logic of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), black parents, administrators, teachers, and children experimented with multiple approaches to strengthen black institutions and to eradicate Jim Crow segregation.

To explore the intricacies of this history, Thuesen utilizes a case study of North Carolina, paying particular attention to debates about teacher salaries, school curricula, higher education, and school facilities. She grounds her analysis in traditional social-history sources, including newspapers, archival records, and oral histories. She finds that while white southerners often invested in black education to delay desegregation, local blacks nonetheless resisted pressure from national civil-rights organizations to abandon separate institutions. The result is a sensitive and expansive account of black educational activism that takes seriously material realities and political aspirations.

In decentering the legal battle about desegregation in exchange for a more nuanced, localized account of black educational activism, Thuesen demonstrates how and why some African Americans came to see equalization as a fight for increased opportunity and integration. Lest one think that Thuesen romanticizes Jim Crow, it is worth noting that she reveals both “the remarkable achievements of equalization” and the “inherent limitations of any fight for equality in a deeply segregated society” (2). Although she appreciates the challenges that have led Bell and others to question whether African Americans erred by placing so much faith in integration, she acknowledges that the battle for educational equalization, no matter how successful, could not dismantle the many layers of inequality embedded in state-sanctioned segregation.