A Victory of Sorts: Desegregation in a Southern Community

A Victory of Sorts: Desegregation in a Southern Community, by Winifred E. Pitts. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, Inc., 2003. 218 pp., $43.00, paperback.

Winifred E. Pitts in A Victory of Sorts: Desegregation in a Southern Community provides a substantive review of the educational segregation in a southern community and how the system was dismantled after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Pitts illuminates, through primary sources, how school desegregation began in Gainesville, Georgia only after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Pitts argues that without the Act, the power of implementation of the historic Brown decision was limited. The 1964 Civil Rights Act utilized economic power to dismantle de jure segregation in schools. Hence, progress was made in the implementation of the Brown decision in Gainesville-Hall County, Georgia. Yet, Pitts concludes through the voices of the respondents in the research that desegregation was a bittersweet endeavor for the Black community.

A major strength of this work is that Pitts's research continues a new genre of Black education history similar to Their Highest Potential (Walker, 1996) by examining a segregated school and its community. Pitts's analysis supports the general contention that Black schools were not as fiscally supported as their White counterparts. However, Pitts also departs from this assumption by actually addressing the intangible benefits of segregation that were lost when school desegregation was actually implemented in Black communities; a process controlled by local politics and policies. Consequently, Pitts, like Vivian Gunn Morris and Curtis L. Morris in The Price They Paid: Desegregation in an African American Community (2002), explores the actual political, social, and community aspects of Black schooling before and after desegregation.

Pitts explicates the processes of resistance that the school board used to thwart desegregation. The author argues that

improvement of African American schools so that they appeared to be equal to, or better than, White schools was a common strategy employed by southern school districts. The desired result of the strategy was that separate but equal would continue to be the norm in public schools. It was in this spirit that a first-class high school for Gainesville and Hall County African Americans, E. E. Butler High School, was built in the early 1960s, (p. xi)

Pitts details how the school became an important part of the community because of its principal, Ulysses Byas, who made improvements in curricular offerings. Even though the school was always overcrowded, and had other issues, such as a high drop out rate, it was still a significant part of the Black community. At the heart of its importance was the cultural milieu created within the institution through community support, teacher advocacy, and student commitment. The entire Black community, however, did not agree on desegregation.

Pitts chronicles the resistance by some members of the Black community to desegregation; a factor which eventually led to the closing of Butler High School. Pitts indicates that "the Gainesville African American community en masse never spoke out against segregation in its schools, and this lack of collective voice later came back to haunt them" (pp. 126-127). What Pitts uncovered in this book is the multiple voices within the African American community that have often been assumed to be monolithic. In doing so, Pitts provides a different view of what actually occurred in Gainesville. Pitts has uncovered the taken-for-granted assumptions of the benefits of desegregation. Rarely, do scholars critique desegregation. It is assumed that desegregation was good for everyone, and that everyone, particularly Blacks, supported it. This proved not to be the case in Gainesville, Georgia.

A Victory of Sorts provides the reader with an examination of the history of Gainesville City and Hall County Schools, and the education of Blacks within the district. The author, Pitts, argues that "the book is an attempt to present a balanced appraisal of the effects-both positive and negative-of desegregation on the Gainesville-Hall County African American community (p. xxi)." I would conclude that the author's goal was achieved. Using a plethora of primary and secondary sources to support the analysis and conclusions presented, the author provides the reader with a history of the policies and laws associated with segregated education in the South. Finally, the author causes the reader to understand the relationship between the Brown decision, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and how both policies impact on local communities, such as Gainesville. In fact, Gainesville only implemented the Brown decision after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which applied monetary consequences to desegregation achievement. Before then, Blacks and Whites in Gainesville were willing to continue with segregated facilities. Oftentimes, people think of the Brown decision as a person, but it was not a person, but a legal decision. How it played out in communities as a policy to be implemented is explicated in A Victory of Sorts.

Pitts employs historical research methodology to examine the sociological and political aspects of the Gainesville-Hall County area of Georgia. Whereas Pitts focus is on the 1950s to the early 1970s, the reader is provided with a view of history that preceded the historical period intended. Another significant aspect of this text is the voices of former students and principals of the schools in Gainesville which provides an insightful look at how desegregation was processed by Gainesville's residents. These voices enable the reader to acquire an insiders' view from those who lived and experienced the benefits and consequences of desegregation. Moreover, Pitts chronicles the demise of Black teachers and principals to show how desegregation impacted the declining number of Black teachers during and after desegregation. Hence, the reader ascertains a deeper understanding of the Black teacher and administrator shortage and how desegregation was a major policy that assisted in creating the shortage of Black teachers and administrators in Gainesville. A limitation of the book was that the author failed to make a connection between the policies employed by the Gainesville School Board and its relationship to the current Black teacher and administrator shortage in schools today. More importantly, the impact of the invisibility of Black teachers and administrators on Black students' view of teaching as a viable profession was also not connected to the decrease in Blacks in the teaching profession. Hence, desegregation may have brought more tangible benefits to formerly Black schools, but an unintended benefit of segregated schools, like seeing Blacks in position of authority and power, was also dismantled. Pitts could deepen the analysis of the data to possibly generalize about how the decline of Black teachers due to desegregation has impacted on Blacks in teaching today.

A Victory of Sorts strengthens our understanding of what actually happened in a community when desegregation was not viewed by all, especially Blacks, as the solution to better educational resources for Black children. One of its strengths was the inclusion of a myriad of voices in assisting the reader to understand the complexity of a legal decision, such as Brown's impact on a local desegregation project. The book chronicles the historical policies and practices used by Whites to hinder the educational development of Blacks, and addresses the lack of a collective voice by Blacks in the community for or against desegregation. At best, this book provides historians, teachers, community members, and the general public with an example of what happened in one southern community after the Brown decision and the 1964 Civil Rights Act. A Victory of Sorts should be must reading for educators, teachers, policymakers, lawyers, public policy administrators, and historians.

REFERENCES

Morris, V. G., & Morris, C. L, (2002). The price they paid: Desegregation in an African American community. New York: Teachers College Press.

Walker, V. S. (1996). Their highest potential: An African American school in the segregated South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. §

Reviewed by Adah Ward Randolph, Ohio University.

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