For most, the history of public school segregation terminates with the unanimous Supreme Court’s watershed ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Though segregation was no longer legally sanctioned, it would take decades of legal struggles and governmental reform to begin to alter the southern status quo. Jack Peltason’s Fifty-Eight Lonely Men: Southern Federal Judges and School Desegregation, first published seven years after the first Brown ruling, offer’s a contemporary point of view into the evolving legal conflict over integration. The opening spares no time delineating the foundations of this struggle. Outside of the eleven Southern States, school boards acquiesced to token integration in line with Brown. However, unrelenting segregationist sentiments overwhelmed Southern moderates. Peltason emphatically explains: “school boards, responsive primarily to white voters, have been unable or unwilling to act. The full burden of forcing compliance, …show more content…
Just under three hundred of them can be found in the nine primary chapters. Peltason makes extensive use of newspaper articles, interviews, and court records to substantiate his claims. A bibliographical essay after the conclusion also offers insight into the resources available to during the publication of the 1971 edition. There are some lapses in his citations however. In the opening of his fourth chapter Peltason attributes “one segregationist” as saying “As long as we can legislate we can segregate,” but provides no further citation. Issues such as this are few and far between, and certainly do not detract from the credibility of the work. Despite the tense emotions surrounding the desegregation proceedings, both in society and academia, when Fifty-Eight Lonely Men was published, Peltason manages to offer an objective tone throughout the work. John Kasper receives as fair treatment by Peltason as he received from Judge