The Politics of White Rights: Race, Justice, and Integrating Alabama’s Schools by Joseph Bagley

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Politics of White Rights: Race, Justice, and Integrating Alabama’s Schools by Joseph Bagley Michael T. Bertrand The Politics of White Rights: Race, Justice, and Integrating Alabama’s Schools. By Joseph Bagley. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018. 304 pp. $34.95. ISBN 978-0-8203-5483-5. Joseph Bagley has written a thought-provoking, exhaustive, and depressing history of public school desegregation in the state of Alabama. Beginning with the promise of 1954’s Brown v. Board case and continuing through a litany of lesser-known yet significant Supreme Court decisions that concludes nearly twenty years later, the author tells a story that is tragic rather than uplifting. The cast of characters in his journey include governors James “Big Jim” Folsom, John Patterson, George Wallace, Lurleen Wallace, Albert Brewer, and a George Wallace reprise. Also featured are civil rights attorneys, federal court judges, and segregationist leaders of both state and local variety. The lawyers and jurists play leading roles, but it is the white supremacists who steal the show, for the lesson learned in this bittersweet tale is that Massive Resistance to racial integration never died; it simply adapted in ways that made it more effective. Perhaps a paradox that only a southerner can appreciate, it integrated itself into the legal system. But it did so only by observing the letter and not the spirit of court orders. As Bagley notes throughout the book, the goal of various governors, school board officials, and other lesser notables was to satisfy the bare minimum of requirements and never to go “beyond the law” (181). This double entendre of sorts is meaningful. It put the emphasis on “law and order,” a phrase not to be confused with Richard Nixon’s later campaign slogan that brought to mind negative images of [End Page 267] urban unrest (8). This usage was somewhat distinctive to Alabama, and the underlying message was never surrender, just retreat to a winnable position. Narrating the early history of the state’s segregationist response to civil rights activism, Bagley enumerates the activities of diehards such as “Dynamite” Bob Chambliss, Asa “Ace” Carter, and other nameless individuals responsible, respectively, for the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, the Nat “King” Cole assault, the mob incitement over Autherine Lucy, the beating of Fred Shuttlesworth, the castration of J. Edward “Judge” Aaron, and the attacks on the Freedom Riders. “Respectable” segregationist leaders understood that such violence was self-defeating. The days of Eugene “Bull” Connor and Jim Clark were past. The new strategy of defiance required mastering all possible legal means toward obstruction. Bagley has compiled and combed through a massive and impressive amount of primary materials to reconstruct the Heart of Dixie’s later and lasting reiteration of Massive Resistance. His reliance on manuscript collections, trial records and case files, government documents, commission reports, organization and personal papers, memoirs, oral histories, state archives, and newspaper files allows him to provide detailed accounts of the machinations that took place both inside and outside of courtrooms and classrooms. It is a narrative that makes sense of legal briefs and court directives, with each chapter examining a particular two-to-three year period (save for chapter one, which goes from 1954 to 1960, and the epilogue, which serves as a postmortem, putting the period from 1973 to 2017 into the historical context that he has provided). Generally devoid of legalese, Bagley provides access to the meetings, trials, legislative halls, school-board offices, and judicial chambers so instrumental to the era’s desegregation decisions. The story is one that traces white uncertainty about Brown to a certain empty phrase open to interpretation and delay—“with all deliberate speed.” Segregationist academies emerged at the same time that the state board of education employed tokenism, and governors Patterson, Wallace, Wallace, Brewer, and Wallace (again) predicted that any moves more extensive would lead to white flight. [End Page 268] White Alabamians would never accept attending schools where large numbers of their Black counterparts would be their classmates. By the end of the 1960s, impatient federal judges finally called Alabama’s deliberate deliberateness and ordered compulsory compliance. As the state’s politicians had predicted (encouraged?), white flight soared...