438 Law and History Review, Summer 2007 Peter F. Lau, editor, From the Grass Roots to the Supreme Court: Brown v. Board of Education and American Democracy, Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Pp. 432. $94.95 cloth (ISBN 0-8223-3475-5); $25.95 paper (ISBN 0-8223-3449-6). The fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s historic decision in Brown v. Board of Education prompted a renewed interest in the case. A number of new books and scholarly articles have been published. From the Grass Roots to the Supreme Court: Brown v. Board of Education and American Democracy is one of them. The book consists of several essays edited by Peter F. Lau. As indicated in the volume’s introduction, the essays are a “top-down” and “bottom-up” examination of events that led to the Supreme Court’s decision, an analysis of the decision it- self, and explorations of Brown’s influence on events and individuals in the years that followed. Some of the chapters re-examine events that have been described elsewhere. Others examine matters not previously considered. All of the contribu- tions are intended to provide fresh perspectives on Brown and related events and, in large measure, they succeed in doing so. The Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which declared segregation in public education unconstitutional, was the product of the NAACP’s long-range, carefully orchestrated legal campaign against segregation. The organi- zation was established in 1909. After years, lobbying, protest demonstrations, and ad hoc litigation, the organization’s leaders decided in the early 1930s to challenge segregation in the courts. It began by commissioning a study that analyzed segre- gation laws and practices in the southern states. The author of the study, Nathan Margold, concluded the segregation as practiced was unconstitutional because facilities for blacks were separate but never equal to those provided for whites. As explained in Patricia Sullivan’s essay, the NAACP hired Charles Hamilton Houston to lead the litigation campaign. Rather than directly challenging segre- gation as Margold had recommended, Houston developed and implemented the “equalization strategy.” Under this approach, cases would be filed demanding that facilities provided for blacks be made physically and otherwise equal to those reserved for whites, while carefully avoiding a direct challenge to the “separate but equal” doctrine that had been established in Supreme Court’s 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. Houston calculated that the states that enforced segrega- tion could not bear the burden and expense of maintaining systems for blacks and whites that were actually equal. Segregation would eventually collapse under its own weight. A chapter that examines the origins and development of Plessy v. Ferguson in- cludes an interesting analysis of the intra-racial tensions between the mixed-race, Afro-Creole community that took the lead in organizing and promoting the case and the other blacks who resided in New Orleans and turn-of-the-century Loui- siana. Another chapter describes the pressures that African-American educators endured in the teacher salary cases that were an important aspect of the NAACP’s pre-Brown equalization strategy. The cases required local school boards to raise the salaries of black teachers to match the levels of their white counterparts. The