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

Liva Baker sets one major goal for herself in this book, and accomplishes it admirably. That goal is to craft a reassessment, which conveys to the reader that the desegregation of New Orleans public schools in the early 1960s was just as politically charged and fraught with controversy as any of the busing crises that came to the fore in the 1970s. Prior to Baker's reappraisal, the prevailing notion was that New Orleans public schools had been integrated in a reasonably peaceful fashion. In reality, the situation was far tenser, more complicated and explosive that many might have believed. Through evocative and engaging sketches of the major figures of New Orleans school desegregation, such as Creole lawyer A.P. Tureaud and courageous 5th Circuit Federal Judge J. Skelley Wright, Baker shows that, but for the actions of a few dedicated figures, New Orleans would have remained under the spell of Jim Crow. While Baker's portraits of Tureaud and Wright are wonderfully readable, her portrait of Judge Leander Perez, the race-baiting delta boss of Plaquemines Parish, is equally engrossing. The bold and conscientious actions of Tureaud and Wright are counterposed with the racist antics of Perez, who invested tremendous amounts of money in a public relations to enflame passions about desegregation. In sum, Baker has offered an accurate and insightful book that is a must for anyone interested in the regional history of America's civil rights movement.