Higher Education and the Civil Rights Movement : White Supremacy, Black Southerners, and College Campuses

"The first comprehensive study of the process of desegregation as it unfolded during the twentieth century at the flagship universities and white land-grant institutions of the south."--Amy Thompson McCandless, College of Charleston

"Broadens the discussion of the civil rights movement to include academic spaces as sites of struggle and contributes to southern history by providing unique accounts of black agency during the dismantling of the Jim Crow South."-- Stephanie Y. Evans, University of Florida

Nowhere else can one read about how Brown v. Board of Education transformed higher education on campus after campus, in state after state, across the South. And no other book details the continuing struggle to change each school in the years that followed the enrollment of the first African American students.

Institutions of higher education long functioned as bastions of white supremacy and black exclusion. Against the walls of Jim Crow and the powers of state laws, black southerners--prospective students, their parents and families, their lawyers and their communities--struggled to gain access and equity. Higher Education and the Civil Rights Movement examines an understudied aspect of racial history, revealing desegregation to be a process, not an event.

Peter Wallenstein is professor of history at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.