Higher Education and the Civil Rights Movement

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.