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The Hardest Deal of All: The Battle Over School Integration in Mississippi, 1870 - 1980. By Charles C. Bolton. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. 288 pp. Cloth $45.00, ISBN 1-57806-717-0).
The civil rights movement was all about equalizing opportunity for minorities, and the public schools were at the center ofthat conflict. This is made strikingly clear in Charles C. Bolton's study of school integration in Mississippi. Bolton persuasively argues that the fight to integrate the Mississippi public schools went to the heart of what white Mississippians were trying to prevent: social equality among all citizens of the state, regardless of their race. Ending the dual system of education that existed in Mississippi was the hardest deal of all because it meant the end of racial separation, far more than any of the other rights blacks fought for and gained during the civil rights struggle.
This book is rich in detail about Mississippi's efforts to maintain a segregated school system. It covers the political decisions that created and maintained the system, the constmction of a rationale to justify an inferior education for black students, and how that system was eventually dismantled. It shows what blacks gained from ending racially segregated schools, but also what they lost. That these gains were not clear-cut illuminates the enduring legacy of a commitment to white supremacy and the ability of whites to remain firmly in control of the public schools and pursue policies that made school integration palatable to whites. The book is well researched and engagingly written. It is organized chronically, beginning in the 1870s with the establishment of a dual system of education and ending with the resegregation of the public schools that occurred in the 1970s and 1980s.
Chapter one covers how the state developed and rationalized a dual system of education, and how, once established,...