In this dramatic reexamination of the Jim Crow South, Anders Walker demonstrates that racial segregation fostered not simply terror and violence, but also diversity, one of our most celebrated ideals. Walker shows how prominent southerners linked segregation to pluralism and complained that the Supreme Court’s celebrated ruling in Brown v. Board of Education threatened black culture, a point that emerged in the writings of literary figures like Robert Penn Warren, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, James Baldwin, Eudora Welty, Ralph Ellison, and Flannery O’Connor. He shows how Supreme Court Justice and Virginia native Lewis F. Powell, Jr. elevated southern ideas about diversity to the national level in 1978, transforming racial discourse in America and raising new questions about Jim Crow’s legacy in the United States. In a nuanced and detailed analysis of the works of prominent black and white writers with ties to the South, Walker finds common ground in unexpected places. The result is a startling reinterpretation of the history of civil rights and the American South.

Anders Walker grew up in Thomasville, Georgia and is the author of The Ghost of Jim Crow: How Southern Moderates used Brown v. Board of Education to Stall Civil Rights (Oxford University Press, 2009).  A graduate of Maclay School and Wesleyan University, he holds a JD/MA in History from Duke and a PhD in African Americans Studies and History from Yale. He currently teaches law and history at Saint Louis University in St. Louis, Missouri.