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

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

Liva Baker. HarperCollins Publishers, $32 (564pp) ISBN 978-0-06-016808-7

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)