| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

From the Grassroots to the Supreme Court: Brown v. Board of Education and American Democracy. Ed. by Peter F. Lau. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. x, 406 pp. Cloth, $94.95, ISBN 0-8223-3475-5. Paper, $25.95, ISBN 0-8223-3449-6.)
Brown v. Board of Education was the product of a long and complex history. It was in part a legal history involving a litigation strategy largely developed by Charles Hamilton Houston and executed by Thurgood Marshall and his associates. It was also in part a social history of the grass-roots movements against Jim Crow. To tell this complex and important story, Peter F. Lau has gathered together an able group of historians and legal scholars, each of whom contributes a short essay providing a patch of that history. Taken together these patches provide new and important ways for us to see Brown both as a legal case and as the product of a set of local social movements.	1
Blair Kelley leads off with a valuable discussion of the role of Louisiana's francophonic mixed-race population (gens de couleur) in challenging the emerging regime of racial restrictions in late nineteenth-century Louisiana. Their challenges would, of course, ultimately lead to the Supreme Court's 1896 separate but equal decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. Kelley's essay is important for its overview of the distinctive history of the gens de couleur and how their separate space in the Louisiana social structure added an important dimension to the struggle against segregation.	. . .

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