The chapters complement each other and provide additional insight when read together. By illustrating how rhetorical strategies created, sustained, challenged, and, ultimately, reversed educational segregation in the United States, the collection demonstrates the real value of the rhetorical perspective.
Race Relations Abstracts, November 2007
Predating the filing of the litigation constituting the seminal and precedental lawsuits leading to Brown v. Board of Education were decades of restless and uncompromising agitation for change. This agitation emanated from platforms and pulpits; newspaper editorials and journals—on behalf of the rights of blacks. Targeted were the precepts of white superiority and black inferiority that the Supreme Court, through its decisions, had embedded in America's institutions. Brown v. Board of Education was the ultimate triumph that placed the rights of blacks before the law, on equal footing with whites. The 'Rhetorical Perspectives' provided by this powerful collection of essays describe the pathway that led to the transforming decision of Brown.
Nathaniel R. Jones, Blank Rome LLP