| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Peter F. Lau. Democracy Rising: South Carolina and the Fight for Black Equality since 1865. (Civil Rights and the Struggle for Black Equality in the Twentieth Century.) Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. 2006. Pp. xiii, 334. $40.00.

This book is an important contribution to the historiography on the African American fight for civil rights and equality. First of all, a synthesis of the black struggle in South Carolina fills a large gap and ties in neatly with the growing body of scholarship that in recent years has probed the history of the civil rights movement at the state level. A study of South Carolina has been overdue, and Peter F. Lau provides us with a highly readable account that traces the struggle of black South Carolinians from the end of the Civil War to the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision (1954) and its aftermath. The book is based on impressive research in archival and oral history collections and makes good use of the vast secondary literature. Lau's vivid narrative brings to life his protagonists and the places where they fought for racial justice, but he also integrates his story with a critical perspective on what he calls a "tragic history [of the civil rights movement] constructed around the search for lost opportunities" for sweeping social change (p. 11) that were destroyed by the anticommunist hysteria of the early Cold War and eventually replaced by a supposedly narrow agenda of desegregation, voting rights, and legal equality. Lau deliberately challenges this new master narrative and persuasively demonstrates that it has little to do with the perspective of black activists in South Carolina who "rarely made sharp distinctions between civil rights gains and economic justice, between legal-legislative victories and democratic transformation" (p. 231).

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