Brian J. Daugherity's Keep On Keeping On examines how the NAACP fought at the state level to implement the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Daugherity spotlights Virginia's NAACP because it “was the largest and most important civil rights organization in Virginia during this era” and its membership “surpassed that of every other southern state, and many states outside of the South” (p. 2). He also claims the statewide branch possessed a strong “commitment to racial equality” and “enjoyed the broad support of Virginia's African American population—even those who never formally joined the organization” (p. 2).
Although Virginia led the South's resistance to Brown, historians have yet to adequately address the state's leadership role in resisting school desegregation. Indeed, states such as Georgia, Mississippi, and North Carolina have received far greater attention. Recent scholarship has begun to reverse this trend. Jill Titus's Brown's Battleground (2011), Christopher Bonastia's Southern Stalemate (2011), Jeffrey Littlejohn and Charles Ford's Elusive Equality (2012), and, to a lesser extent, Nancy MacLean's Democracy in Chains (2017) have helped illuminate the contours of school desegregation in Virginia. With the notable exception of Littlejohn and Ford's book on Norfolk, the recent literature has not strayed far from Farmville and Prince Edward County, Virginia. This spotlight obscures other competing local and state narratives. Recognizing this limitation, Daugherity recasts the statewide narrative by zooming out. Consequently, he offers a more expansive account of school desegregation and, more broadly, civil rights struggles in Virginia. Overall, the book helps us view the more mundane yet similarly insidious parts of school desegregation campaigns previously de-emphasized in locales such as Charlottesville, Norfolk, Richmond, and Warren County, Virginia.
Daugherity stitches together the book's narrative using archival collections; local, state, and regional periodicals; secondary sources; and a handful of oral history interviews. The Virginia State NAACP papers undergird the book from start to finish. He also utilizes periodicals produced by both African American and white press members within and beyond the state. Daugherity draws upon the Southern School News and the Southern Education Report to highlight important statistics related to southern school desegregation. During the 1960s, the United States Commission on Civil Rights used these periodicals in their own reports. To supplement and corroborate the written sources, Daugherity relies on oral history interviews with such individuals as plaintiffs in the NAACP cases, a federal judge, and white Virginians. Based on a review of the book's footnotes, however, the oral history interviews constitute a relatively small portion of the book's source material.
Daugherity organizes the book chronologically. Chapter one examines the role local communities and individuals played in the fight to upend school segregation and inequality in Virginia from Reconstruction to Brown. The book's remaining chapters deal with the controversy over school desegregation. In chapter two, Daugherity highlights the reactions of the NAACP and white politicians to the Brown decision. After facing two years of intransigence from the state's white politicians, the NAACP's lawyers returned to court in hopes of forcing compliance. Chapter three zooms into various locales to reveal how the NAACP used litigation to force school desegregation. In chapter four, Daugherity describes the evolution of Massive Resistance strategies, culminating with school closures in Charlottesville, Norfolk, Prince Edward County, and Warren County. In the fall of 1959, with the exception of schools in Prince Edward County, schools reopened and started desegregating on a token basis. In chapter five, Daugherity focuses on the transition from litigation to direct action in the battle against tokenism. The NAACP's shift in approach led to more school desegregation. At the same time, though, white politicians adjusted their resistance strategies, which lengthened the path toward full-scale desegregation. In chapter six, Daugherity reveals how state and local districts deployed “freedom of choice” plans to comply with school desegregation orders. In 1968, the Supreme Court's unanimous decision in Green v. County School Board of New Kent County made these plans unconstitutional.
The book ends on a positive note, as Daugherity's afterword asserts, “In the early 1970s, school integration occurred in localities across Virginia” (p. 147). He credits the state's commitment to public education as the reason for “successful” school integration. To bolster his claim, he observes:
However, by the 1970s private school enrollment in Virginia had stagnated, while attendance at the state's public schools continued to grow—in 1974 the State Department of Education reported nearly 1.1 million public school students in Virginia compared to 69,000 pupils enrolled in nonpublic schools. As a result, the vast majority of Virginia's student population attended integrated public schools by the mid-1970s. (p. 148)
This conclusion illuminates the book's primary shortcoming—the failure to differentiate between integration and desegregation. Throughout the book, Daugherity treats the two terms as synonymous. They are not. School desegregation merely meant that some African American and white students attended the same school. And, while it is possible that Virginia may have been the only southern state to truly integrate students, Daugherity does not provide ample evidence to support such a bold claim. To do so, he would have needed to show that African American and white students were in the same classrooms or received equitable—or even equal—treatment within desegregated schools.
Despite this shortcoming, the book is a necessary addition to the historiography of the civil rights movement and education. Daugherity reveals the role a statewide NAACP played in fighting educational inequality through the courts and direct action. He also unveils the resistance tactics that white local and state politicians in Virginia employed. Future research should probe how and the extent to which Virginia provided a model for white politicians in states throughout the South and the United States. Once overtly racist resistance tactics became less politically palatable in the Deep South, did politicians look to Virginia for a more genteel, but still racist, means for maintaining segregation and educational inequality? Similarly, did politicians in northern or western states also look to Virginia as a model for undermining efforts to create equitable educational opportunities for students of color? Daugherity's book serves as a strong starting point for such comparisons.
