| 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

Blue Laws and Black Codes: Conflict, Courts, and Change in Twentieth-Century Virginia. By Peter Wallenstein. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004. xiv, 270 pp. Cloth, $49.50, ISBN 0-8139-2260-7. Paper, $19.50, ISBN 0-8139-2261-5.)

Peter Wallenstein has written a deft, graceful account of legal changes that transformed the Commonwealth of Virginia in significant respects from 1890 to 1970. His collection of eight well-written essays covers a range of topics: the lawsuit that ended Virginia's reliance on corvée, or mandatory citizen service, to maintain local roads in rural areas; the gradual legal erosion of Sunday closing laws; the struggle over efforts of women and African Americans to become attorneys at the Virginia bar; the decades-long campaign led by Oliver Hill, Samuel Tucker, Henry Marsh, and other African American attorneys against Jim Crow discrimination in public school teacher salaries, facilities, curricula, and bus transportation; the well-organized sit-in demonstrations that eventually ended segregation at Richmond's lunch counters and movie houses; an impulsive decision by a young black man that led to the United States Supreme Court's ban on courtroom segregation by race; the Loving v. Virginia (1967) litigation that brought an end to miscegenation statutes in Virginia and throughout the South; and repeated challenges to Virginia's poll taxes and the state's districting statutes that for many decades kept black citizens and urban dwellers from equal political participation.

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