| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Hardest Deal of All: The Battle over School Integration in Mississippi, 1870–1980. By Charles C. Bolton. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. xxii, 278 pp. $45.00, ISBN 1-57806-717-0.)

In 1954 William Faulkner despaired over the state of Mississippi's public schools, worrying in a letter to a Memphis newspaper that dunderheaded elected officials in his impoverished home state seemed intent on creating "two identical systems neither of which is good enough for anybody" (p. 60). The Hardest Deal of All chronicles the tortured history of race and public education in Mississippi, "the last southern state to resist even token desegregation" of its schools (p. 120). The book's chronological sweep is one of its greatest strengths. Charles C. Bolton's analysis extends from Reconstruction-era efforts to create the public schools, through the construction of the segregated system and an "equalization" program that vexed Faulkner in the 1950s and 1960s, and beyond, to forced desegregation and the development of "unitary" public school systems in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court's 1969 Alexander v. Holmes decision.

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