From Brown to Meredith: The Long Struggle for School Desegregation in Louisville, Kentucky, 1954–2007 by Tracy E. K’Meyer (review)

From Brown to Meredith is a microhistory of the long civil rights movement that uses the voices and experiences of individuals and grassroots activists in Jefferson County and Louisville, Kentucky, to shed light on the larger legacy of desegregation in primary and secondary education. The goal of Tracy K’Meyer’s work is to complicate the traditional narrative of school integration, a narrative that emphasizes the ways in which Kentucky slid back into segregation despite two waves of school desegregation efforts in the state (the first fight for education equality was in the 1950s and early 1960s, the second following in the late 1960s). In addition to telling this story, an underlying theme of From Brown to Meredith is the tension in oral history between the roles of remembering and forgetting; K’Meyer draws on the work of Michael Frisch, Alessandro Portelli, and others to “provoke consideration of why some stories are forgotten, and how their absence affects public dialogue about the schools” (5).

While it is a short book, From Brown to Meredith also serves as an important case study in history and oral history because of its extensive use of interviews; K’Meyer pulls material from oral histories conducted over a roughly thirty-five year period (from 1973 to 2011) that are now housed in the University Archives at the University of Louisville and the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While many of these interviews come from projects not related directly to research for this book, they nonetheless capture the experiences of community members (such as women) otherwise absent from the traditional master narrative about integration in the state. In doing so, K’Meyer widens the lens on these community members, providing rich detail about the women and men from across the color line who worked to ensure equality for all children in the state regardless of racial identity. Each oral history excerpt is prefaced with a short paragraph of information about the interviewee, and at the end of each chapter, K’Meyer offers an interpretation of and context for the oral histories that often run counter to the popular memory of continuing integration efforts. The chapters stitch together experiences of school desegregation chronologically from 1954 through 2007.

Because the Louisville and Jefferson County public school systems were originally separate, the book begins with a focus on Louisville and its compliance with the Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate all public schools. K’Meyer weaves together the celebratory memories of white city residents and the contrasting experiences of black children who were tasked with being integrated into white schools. Rather than facing a city that welcomed them as students equal to white pupils, these African Americans found a promise unfulfilled: angry and resistant teachers and administrators greeted these students and undercut them at every opportunity; instead of being met with open arms, they were met with clenched fists. But even within this racial divide, as K’Meyer makes clear, Louisville presented an acceptance of racial equality not typical of a southern city: although in Jim Crow’s grip, Louisville’s prominent and vocal Jewish and Catholic populations kept the city sympathetic to the freedom struggle and worked to undermine institutionalized discrimination.

As Louisville schools looked to incorporate more African American students into their system, the city turned to busing children into schools from outside the city limits and its predominantly white suburbs. Jefferson County thus enters the story as the source of black children from which these white city schools drew to achieve, at least superficially, integration. At this point in From Brown to Meredith, K’Meyer turns her attention to the ways in which the public memory of this historical period focuses on the story of angry segregationists confronting buses, holding rallies, and staging riots, but also...