Sarah Caroline Thuesen. Greater than Equal

In her new book, historian Sarah Caroline Thuesen offers a meticulously researched and elegantly written examination of the African American struggle for educational equality in North Carolina. Drawing inspiration from previous works by James D. Anderson, Vanessa Siddle Walker, and David S. Cecelski, Thuesen complicates our understanding of black aspirations and white authority during the Jim Crow era. In particular, she shows how black activists pursued various and sometimes contradictory strategies to achieve more equitable school facilities, teacher salaries, and academic curricula. At the same time, Thuesen illustrates how white officials slow-walked or simply obstructed African American reforms in an effort to maintain white supremacy. And, finally, she shows how black activists countered white intransigence by pursuing something greater than equal: “integrated schools that served as models of both material equality and civic inclusion” (p. 2). By the end of World War I, African Americans in North Carolina confronted a fully articulated system of racial segregation. Schools in the state had been segregated by law since 1875, and government-sanctioned discrimination had created obvious inequities between black and white schools. Black school property was worth just one-fourth, per pupil, what white school property was worth. The average black teacher earned only 57 percent of what the average white teacher earned. And, even as late as 1944–1945, black schools held just 16 percent of the state's school library books.

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