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The Hardest Deal of All: The Battle over School Integration in Mississippi, 1870-1980. By Charles C. Bolton. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. Pp. xxii, 278. $45.00, ISBN 1-57806-717-0.)
In The Hardest Deal of All: The Battle over School Integration in Mississippi, 1870-1980, Charles C. Bolton brings the history of Jim Crow education in Mississippi into sharp relief by weaving the story of the struggle of black Mississippians to secure quality education with a narrative of the efforts of white Mississippians to preserve segregated public schools. Arranged chronologically, this statewide study begins by tracing the evolution of the Magnolia State's dual education school system from Reconstruction to World War II. The core of the book, however, examines Mississippi's slow and painful transition to a unitary school system during the two decades after the 1954...