The Second Battle of New Orleans: The Hundred-Year Struggle to Integrate the Schools »

On the surface, this is a book about law and politics in New Orleans, one of America's most fascinating cities. But primarily, it's a book about courage and the lack of it during a century of sometimes violent disputes over New Orleans's schools, climaxing in the desegregation crisis of the late 1950s and early 1960s. It's about the courage of the outspoken 19th-century black Creole newspaper editor Paul Trevigne, who ignored threats on his life and even launched a suit to integrate the city's schools, foreshadowing the suits that persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court to declare segregated schools unconstitutional a century later. It's about the courage of Ruby Bridges, a six-year-old African-American girl who in 1960, along with three other black first graders, every day ran the gamut of shrieking, spitting women trying to block their way to school. It's about the courage of J. Skelly Wright, who grew up "just another southern 'boy'" in New Orleans but as a federal district judge trashed southern tradition and wholeheartedly supported the Supreme Court's school desegregation ruling. It's about the courage of local black Creole lawyer A. P. Tureaud, who doggedly took his civil rights cases to the hostile, lily-white courts year after year, and it's about the courage of other black lawyers throughout the South, including Thurgood Marshall, who, deploring the confrontational tactics of a later generation, used the law and the courts to achieve their goals. The Second Battle of New Orleans is a powerful and moving book that illustrates in the idiom of human events and personal narrative the difficulties in effecting social change in a tradition-encrusted society.

Publishers Weekly

Baker, biographer of Oliver Wendell Holmes (The Justice from Beacon Hill) has produced a thorough but sprawling account of desegregation in New Orleans. She explains that the book began with a focus on federal district judge J. Skelly Wright, who developed into a civil rights activist; the story then broadened. Still, her best passages concern Wright, whose epiphany came in 1945 when, back in his hometown after WWII, he saw blind white and black New Orleanians led to separate parties at the Lighthouse for the Blind. Baker also unearths the story of A.P. Tureaud, a black Creole lawyer who quietly but insistently fought for civil rights in Louisiana, and whose son integrated Louisiana State University. The author weaves in a large cast of characters, including New Orleans civic leaders and Louisiana political bosses, as well as the story surrounding Brown v. Board of Education. Though Baker writes well, even elegantly, the book seems overstuffed. Nevertheless, her prodigious effort has restored a complex history, and her contemporary update shows New Orleans to be a city where incremental racial progress has brought neither significant school desegregation nor racial harmony. Photos not seen by PW. (May)