A Victory of Sorts: Desegregation in a Southern Community

A Victory of Sorts: Desegregation in a Southern Community, by the agency of Winifred E. Pitts. Lanham, MD: University Pres of America, Inc., 2003 218 pp $4300 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 by what mode the system was dismantled after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Pitts illuminates, from one side primary sources, how school desegregation began in Gainesville, Georgia alone 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 gymnasiums Hence, progress was made in the implementation of the Brown decision in Gainesville-Hall shire Georgia. Yet, Pitts concludes end the voices of the respondent in the research that desegregation was a bittersweet endeavor for the Black community.

A major puissance of this work is that Pitts's research continues a of recent origin genre of Black education history similar to Their Highest Potential (Walker, 1996) through examining a segregated school and its community. Pitts's analysis supports the general contention that Black gymnasiums were not as fiscally supported as their White counterparts. However, Pitts also departs from this assumption by the agency of actually addressing the intangible benefits of segregation that were missing when school desegregation was actually implemented in Black communities; a proces controll by the agency of 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 processe of resistance that the institute board used to thwart desegregation. The author argues that

improvement of African American seminarys so that they appeared to be equal to, or better than, White place of educations was a common strategy engrossed by southern school districts. The desired issue of the strategy was that separate on the other hand equal would continue to be the norm in public institutes It was in this spirit that a first-class high academy for Gainesville and Hall shire African Americans, E. E. Butler High seminary was built in the early 1960 (p xi)

Pitts details in what manner the school became an important part of the community because of its principal, Ulysse Byas, who made improvements in curricular offerings. plane though the school was always overcrowd and had other issues, like as a high drop without 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 [i]or[/i] part of to the other community support, teacher advocacy, and pupil commitment. The entire Black community, however, did not agree upon desegregation.

Pitts chronicles the resistance through some members of the Black community to desegregation; a factor which eventually l to the closing of Butler High seminary Pitts indicates that "the Gainesville African American community en masse at no time spoke out against segregation in its place of educations and this lack of collective voice later came back to haunt them" (pp 126-127) What Pitts divest of coveringed in this book is the multiple voices within the African American community that have repeatedly been assumed to be monolithic. In doing for a like reason Pitts provides a different view of what actually occurr in Gainesville. Pitts has lay opened the taken-for-granted assumptions of the benefits of desegregation. Rarely, do scholars critique desegregation. It is assumed that desegregation was beneficial for everyone, and that everyone particularly Blacks, supported it. This prov 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 shire Schools, and the education of Blacks within the district. The author, Pitts, argues that "the work is an attempt to near a balanced appraisal of the effects-both positive and negative-of desegregation upon the Gainesville-Hall County African American community (p xxi)." I would terminate that the author's goal was achieved. Using a plethora of primary and secondary sources to support the analysis and conclusions at handed the author provides the reader with a history of the policies and laws associated with segregated education in the southerly Finally, the author causes the reader to understand the relationship between the Brown decision, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and in what way both policies impact on local communities, of that kind as Gainesville. In fact, Gainesville single implemented the Brown decision after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which applied monetary issues to desegregation achievement. Before then, Blacks and Whites in Gainesville were willing to continue with segregated facilities. Oftentimes, tribe think of the Brown decision as a individual but it was not a someone but a legal decision. in what way it played out in communities as a policy to be implemented is explicated in A Victory of Sorts.