Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Burning House
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1972?
WEBSITE:
CITY: St. Louis
STATE: MO
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
Phone: (314) 977-7447
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2008066420
Descriptive conventions:
rda
Personal name heading:
Walker, Anders
Associated country:
United States
Associated place: Saint Louis (Mo.)
Field of activity: Law
Affiliation: St. Louis University. School of Law
Profession or occupation:
Law teachers
Found in: The ghost of Jim Crow, 2009: ECIP title page (Anders
Walker)
The burning house, 2018: title page (Anders Walker) jacket
(Anders Walker teaches law and history at Saint Louis
University and is the author of the Ghost of Jim Crow:
How Southern Moderates Used Brown v. Board of Education
to Stall Civil Rights)
Associated language:
eng
PERSONAL
Born c. 1972.
EDUCATION:Wesleyan University, B.A., 1994; Duke University, M.A./J.D., 1998; Yale University, Ph.D., 2003.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. Saint Louis University, MO, Lillie Myers Professor, associate dean for research and engagement.
AWARDS:Junior Scholar Award, Criminal Justice Section of AALS, 2009; Teacher of the Year, Saint Louis University, 2009, 2011; Law & Society Association Article Prize, 2010.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to publications, including the Hastings Law Journal, Florida State University Law Review, Washington University Law Review, Columbia Law Review, and the Wisconsin Law Review.
SIDELIGHTS
Anders Walker is a writer and educator. He is the Lillie Myers Professor and the associate dean for research and engagement at Saint Louis University. Walker holds a bachelor’s degree from Wesleyan University, a master’s degree and a law degree from Duke University, and a Ph.D. from Yale University. He has written articles that have appeared in scholarly journals, including the Hastings Law Journal, Florida State University Law Review, Washington University Law Review, Columbia Law Review, and the Wisconsin Law Review.
The Ghost of Jim Crow
In 2009, Walker released his first book, The Ghost of Jim Crow: How Southern Moderates Used Brown v. Board of Education to Stall Civil Rights. In this volume, he chronicles the actions of governors, J.P. Coleman, LeRoy Collins, and Luther Hodges, in response to the Brown v. Board of Education decision by the Supreme Court. The three were the governors of Mississippi, Florida, and North Carolina, respectively.
M. Greenwald, contributor to Choice, suggested that the author “successfully ties his detailed case studies together with a compelling interpretation of the … legacy of southern moderates’ subversion of civil rights.” Writing in the Journal of Southern History, J. Russell Hawkins commented: “Walker successfully demonstrates that rather than the civil rights movement being a battle against white reactionaries, it ‘could just as easily be framed as a struggle against the rising alliance between national leaders and southern moderates’ (p. 122). This argument alone makes Walker’s book an essential read for historians of the civil rights movement.” Reviewing the volume on H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, Gerald N. Rosenberg asserted that its analysis went beyond other historical accounts of the Jim Crow era, stating: “Anders Walker’s fascinating and compelling account shows that this standard story overlooks the more complex ways in which ‘moderate’ southern political leaders worked to preserve segregation without defying the Supreme Court and, importantly, without provoking violence.” Rosenberg added: “The Ghost of Jim Crow makes a contribution on multiple levels. On one level, it tells the story of the implementation of Supreme Court decisions, particularly, of course, Brown v. Board of Education. On another level, it chronicles the political response to the civil rights movement in the South. On a third level, it presents a political history of three smart and sophisticated politicians.” Rosenberg continued: “Overall, the great strength of Walker’s argument is its focus on the quieter, bureaucratic attempts to preserve segregation in contrast to the massive resistance of white extremists and their political allies. It is well written, extensively documented, and very interesting.” However, Rosenberg also stated: “Despite its many strengths, there are a few areas where Walker is less successful. For example, Walker’s emphasis on strategic constitutionalism is both underdeveloped and overstated. The argument is not fully developed because Walker does not make clear what the boundaries are of strategic constitutionalism.” Rosenberg concluded: “Governors Coleman, Hodges, and Collins understood that they could effectively preserve segregation not by vociferously opposing Brown but by simply interpreting it in such a way that the laws, institutions, and culture of the white South reduced it to little more than a symbolic statement of political theory. In an era in which symbolism too often triumphs over substance, these are lessons worth repeating. Few have done it as well as Walker.”
The Burning House
The Burning House: Jim Crow and the Making of Modern America, released in 2018, finds Walker again discussing the Jim Crow era. However, in this volume, he discusses the views intellectuals had on the topic of integration. Some of the people he profiles were in favor of it, while others were against it. Among those Walker profiles are Harper Lee, James Baldwin, Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston, and Flannery O’Connor.
“Readers unfamiliar with the anti-integration culture might find some of the invective difficult to process, but Walker skillfully presents his interpretations of his subjects’ writing,” remarked a Kirkus Reviews critic. Elias Rodriques wrote a lengthy and mixed assessment of The Burning House in Bookforum. Rodriques described the volume as a “fascinating intellectual history of integration debates.” Rodriques added: “Where lesser historians cover only views that advance their argument, Walker reports on this debate’s racist and antiracist interlocutors.” However, Rodriques also stated: “With no description of Jim Crow’s assaults, Walker’s book denies us the insight of the material conditions undergirding segregation, such as municipal school funding in the South being distributed through white local governments that gave African American schools very little money to purchase textbooks, maintain the premises, and pay teachers. As a result, his call to use these midcentury debates to guide our racial politics going forward cannot explain how we should create autonomous black spaces today.” Rodriques continued: “To this charge, Walker might reply that he is writing an intellectual and legal history, not a manual for organizing. This is true, but a history that argues that culture depends upon material conditions and racist institutions ought to venture to describe them.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, September, 2010, M. Greenwald, review of The Ghost of Jim Crow: How Southern Moderates Used Brown v. Board of Education to Stall Civil Rights, p. 174.
Journal of Southern History, February, 2011, J. Russell Hawkins, review of The Ghost of Jim Crow, p. 217.
Kirkus Reviews, January 15, 2018, review of The Burning House: Jim Crow and the Making of Modern America.
ONLINE
Anders Walker website, https://www.anderswalker.net (May 31, 2018).
Bookforum, https://www.bookforum.com/ (April 17, 2018), Elias Rodriques, review of Burning House.
H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, http://www.h-net.org/ (April 1, 2010), Gerald N. Rosenberg, review of The Ghost of Jim Crow.
Saint Louis University Law School website, http://law.slu.edu/ (May 31, 2018), author faculty profile.
Anders Walker teaches law and history at Saint Louis University in St. Louis, Missouri. A graduate of Maclay High School in Tallahassee, Florida, he received a BA from Wesleyan University in 1994, a JD/MA in History from Duke University in 1998, and a PhD in African American Studies and History from Yale University in 2003.
Anders Walker
Associate Dean for Research and Engagement
Lillie Myers Professor
Center for International and Comparative Law
Dean's Office
Faculty
Faculty, Dean's Office
Faculty, Full-time
Email
anders.walker@slu.edu
Phone
(314) 977-7447
Room
856
Education
B.A., Wesleyan University, 1994
J.D./M.A., Duke University School of Law, 1998 (MA in History)
Ph.D., Yale University, 2003
Expertise
Constitutional Law
Criminal Law
Legal History
Courses
American Legal History
Constitutional Law II
Criminal Law
Seminar: Legal History
CV
PDF icon walkercv2018.pdf
SSRN
http://ssrn.com/author=862889
Professor Walker’s research and teaching focus on intersections between constitutional law, criminal law, and legal history. His articles have appeared or are forthcoming in the Columbia Law Review, the Washington University Law Review, theWisconsin Law Review, the Hastings Law Journal, and the Florida State University Law Review. He won the 2010 Law & Society Association Article Prize, the 2009 AALS Criminal Justice Section Junior Scholar Award, and was voted Teacher of the Year in 2011 and 2009. His book, The Ghost of Jim Crow: How Southern Moderates Used Brown v. Board of Education to Stall Civil Rights was published by the Oxford University Press in 2009.
QUOTED: "successfully ties his detailed case studies together with a compelling interpretation of the ... legacy of southern moderates' subversion of civil rights."
Walker, Anders. The ghost of Jim Crow: how southern moderates used Brown v. Board of Education to stall civil rights
M. Greenwald
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 48.1 (Sept. 2010): p174.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
48-0487
E185
2008-41066 CIP
Walker, Anders. The ghost of Jim Crow: how southern moderates used Brown v. Board of Education to stall civil rights. Oxford, 2009. 241p bibl index afp ISBN 9780195181746, $34.95
Walker's book features the legal strategies of J. P. Coleman of Mississippi, Luther Hodges of North Carolina, and LeRoy Collins of Florida to sidestep the US Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education to desegregate public schools without violating federal law. These governors discredited extremist groups that violently attacked black citizens, and county sheriffs who turned a blind eye toward such crimes. They circumscribed sheriffs' authority with state police units. In addition, the states adopted student placement procedures based on supposedly neutral criteria concerning academic, economic, and moral factors. These governors also made the problem of integration a black problem rather than one of white discrimination or a state's violation of constitutional rulings. They focused attention on illegitimate births, common-law marriages, juvenile delinquency, and sexual deviance as black problems. This fine book demonstrates how moderates' views of civil rights--especially the principle of local control of schools and the backlash against affirmative action in employment--influenced federal judiciary decisions in the 1960s-70s. Law professor Walker (Saint Louis Univ.) successfully ties his detailed case studies together with a compelling interpretation of the logic and legacy of southern moderates' subversion of civil rights. Summing Up: Highly recommended. *** Upper-division undergraduates and above.--M. Greenwald, University of Pittsburgh
Greenwald, M.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Greenwald, M. "Walker, Anders. The ghost of Jim Crow: how southern moderates used Brown v. Board of Education to stall civil rights." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Sept. 2010, p. 174. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A249057813/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=888864ce. Accessed 20 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A249057813
QUOTED: "Walker successfully demonstrates that rather than the civil rights movement being a battle against white reactionaries, it 'could just as easily be framed as a struggle against the rising alliance between national leaders and southern moderates' (p. 122). This argument alone makes Walker's book an essential read for historians of the civil rights movement."
The Ghost of Jim Crow: How Southern Moderates Used Brown v. Board of Education to Stall Civil Rights
J. Russell Hawkins
Journal of Southern History. 77.1 (Feb. 2011): p217+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Full Text:
The Ghost of Jim Crow: How Southern Moderates Used Brown v. Board of Education to Stall Civil Rights. By Anders Walker. (New York and other cities: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. [xii], 241. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-19-518174-6.)
Sitting in a Birmingham, Alabama, prison cell in April 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. famously reassessed the adversaries of the civil rights movement and came close to reaching the "regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate...." ("Letter from Birmingham Jail," in King, Why We Can't Wait [New York, 1964], 84). In The Ghost of Jim Crow: How Southern Moderates Used Brown v. Board of Education to Stall Civil Rights, law professor Anders Walker persuasively argues that King's suspicion of the moderate rather than the reactionary as the more potent threat to the black freedom struggle of the mid-twentieth century was well founded. In so doing, Walker engages a steadily growing literature on southern white resistance to civil rights initiatives that heretofore has focused "almost exclusively on white extremists" (p. 156). Although better suited for the specialist than general reader, Walker's crisply written book is a welcome addition to white resistance historiography precisely because he draws attention away from the outspoken segregationists, who so often occupy the center of massive resistance studies, and shines a much-needed light instead on white moderates who "sought to counterbalance extremism and manage the desegregation crisis" in the years following the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision (p. 3). Walker argues that it was ultimately moderate white leaders in the South who most effectively championed the goals of massive resistance. Whereas the violence of white reactionaries actually undermined the massive resistance movement by creating public sympathy and provoking federal responses in behalf of black activists, white moderates understood that by employing "strategic constitutionalism," "[m]inor concessions, such as seats on buses and places at lunch counters, could all be granted without overturning the South's social order" (pp. 4, 9).
Walker supports his thesis by examining the careers of three southern governors who would go on to serve in various capacities in the federal government: Mississippi's James Plemon "J. P." Coleman, North Carolina's Luther Hodges, and Florida's LeRoy Collins. While these men are remembered for their calm in the immediate wake of the Brown decision--eschewing calls for defying the Supreme Court and instead allowing for the possibility of token integration in their respective states, for instance--Walker demonstrates that there was another side to Coleman, Hodges, and Collins's moderation, which sought to maintain the greatest amount of segregation possible even as it formally complied with Brown. Walker argues that white moderates understood that as long as the South avoided violent confrontations over civil rights and made allowances for token desegregation, "circumvent[ing] mass integration indefinitely" remained a viable possibility "precisely because the federal courts lacked sufficient commitment to the black cause" (p. 119). And just as the moderates had predicted, fire hoses in Birmingham and riots in Oxford aroused public support for black civil fights and strengthened the resolve of the federal government, which had remained idle on pursuing egalitarian measures.
While Walker explains how white moderates proposed a sophisticated--albeit largely ignored--alternative for avoiding mass integration before 1965, his most significant contribution is the extension of his study beyond 1965, when moderate policies and strategies for handling racial integration came to the fore. Following the careers of the three moderate governors as they transitioned out of state politics and into the federal government, Walker shows that Coleman, Hodges, and Collins ultimately contributed to forestalling and turning back civil rights gains by working to defuse violent confrontations (one of the movement's most effective tools) and issuing rulings that eventually made de facto segregation in public schools permissible. Walker successfully demonstrates that rather than the civil rights movement being a battle against white reactionaries, it "could just as easily be framed as a struggle against the rising alliance between national leaders and southern moderates" (p. 122). This argument alone makes Walker's book an essential read for historians of the civil rights movement.
J. RUSSELL HAWKINS
Indiana Wesleyan University
Hawkins, J. Russell
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hawkins, J. Russell. "The Ghost of Jim Crow: How Southern Moderates Used Brown v. Board of Education to Stall Civil Rights." Journal of Southern History, vol. 77, no. 1, 2011, p. 217+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A248827845/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=80fc7572. Accessed 20 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A248827845
QUOTED: "Readers unfamiliar with the anti-integration culture might find some of the invective difficult to process, but Walker skillfully presents his interpretations of his subjects' writing."
Walker, Anders: THE BURNING HOUSE
Kirkus Reviews. (Jan. 15, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Walker, Anders THE BURNING HOUSE Yale Univ. (Adult Nonfiction) $30.00 3, 20 ISBN: 978-0-300-22398-9
A law professor takes on the history of racial integration in the United States by focusing on well-known intellectuals who questioned whether integration was wise or desirable for African-Americans.
The intellectuals are primarily writers, black and white: James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Richard Wright, William Faulkner, Harper Lee, Flannery O'Connor, Robert Penn Warren, and Eudora Welty. Walker (St. Louis Univ. School of Law; The Ghost of Jim Crow: How Southern Moderates Used Brown v. Board of Education to Stall Civil Rights, 2009) connects their outlooks about racial integration through Lewis F. Powell Jr., a Virginia lawyer who became a Supreme Court justice. Whether Powell and the white authors Walker discusses were motivated by racism is an unsettled question, but there is no doubt they preferred separate, parallel societies over integration through public schools and other institutions. As for the black writers, they believed their culture benefitted from separateness, and many believed it to be superior to white culture. Baldwin, in particular, became known for reaching white audiences as well as fellow blacks with the message that mandated integration threw the two races together to lose their identities inside a "burning house." Near the end of the book, Walker analyzes the beliefs of the only "prominent federal official [who] seemed to carry the torch for southern pluralism, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas," who has shown a "commitment to black self-reliance." Today, carrying forward a tradition of resistance to integration is not only Alice Walker, but also Between the World and Me author Ta-Nehisi Coates, who "looked back to James Baldwin and Richard Wright for inspiration" and whose arguments have "evoked many of the same debates that southern writers conducted in the 1950s and 1960s."
Readers unfamiliar with the anti-integration culture might find some of the invective difficult to process, but Walker skillfully presents his interpretations of his subjects' writing.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Walker, Anders: THE BURNING HOUSE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Jan. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A522643123/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b004b601. Accessed 20 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A522643123
QUOTED: "fascinating intellectual history of integration debates."
"Where lesser historians cover only views that advance their argument, Walker reports on this debate’s racist and antiracist interlocutors."
"With no description of Jim Crow’s assaults, Walker’s book denies us the insight of the material conditions undergirding segregation, such as municipal school funding in the South being distributed through white local governments that gave African American schools very little money to purchase textbooks, maintain the premises, and pay teachers. As a result, his call to use these midcentury debates to guide our racial politics going forward cannot explain how we should create autonomous black spaces today."
"To this charge, Walker might reply that he is writing an intellectual and legal history, not a manual for organizing. This is true, but a history that argues that culture depends upon material conditions and racist institutions ought to venture to describe them."
Apr 17 2018
The Burning House: Jim Crow and the Making of Modern America by Anders Walker
Elias Rodriques
web exclusive
In 1977, the school district of Kansas City, Missouri, sued the state of Missouri for supporting segregation. Kansas City students were largely black; suburban schools educated significantly whiter populations. The government’s districting policies, the suit alleged, produced de facto segregation. In 1985, the District Court ruled in Kansas City’s favor and ordered, among other things, the construction of magnet schools to attract white students. Ten years later, the Supreme Court overturned the lower court’s ruling, insisting that Brown v. Board of Education applied only to laws mandating segregation. Assuming that a desire for integration implied that black populations impaired schools, Clarence Thomas wrote, in a concurring opinion, “It never ceases to amaze me that the courts are so willing to assume that anything that is predominantly black must be inferior.”
This instance of the unlikely convergence of segregationist policies with a defense of black people provides the story at the heart of the legal scholar Anders Walker’s fascinating intellectual history of integration debates. The Burning House traces Clarence Thomas’s position back to intellectual exchanges between legal professionals like Justices Earl Warren and Lewis Powell and midcentury authors as disparate as Eudora Welty and James Baldwin, demonstrating how the legal history of integration intertwined with literary history. Most of the authors extolled the virtues of the African-American culture that arose under Jim Crow. Some, most notably Robert Penn Warren, argued that African-American art depended upon the separation from white Americans that Jim Crow provided as a means of extolling the virtues of segregation and arguing for its continuation. Others, including Ralph Ellison, praised African-American culture to question what form integration ought to take. If integration required assimilation into white America’s violent culture, they opposed it. But if integration entailed what civil rights activist James Farmer called “unity through diversity”—the peaceful coexistence of various peoples and their separate cultures—they welcomed it.
Walker praises this separatism as a legal and intellectual alternative to what he terms “the assimilationist vision” of Brown v. Board of Education. In so doing, he joins Quincy Mills’s 2013 history of black barbershops, and many other such histories, in arguing for the necessity of racially autonomous spaces for people of color’s safety and liberation. What differentiates Walker’s book is its chronicle of this debate’s transformation into legal precedents. In their opinions and rulings, Justices Lewis Powell and Clarence Thomas, among others, built into constitutional jurisprudence the value of (racial, gendered, and classed) difference. Although they frequently did so to defend educational inequalities, Walker argues that they and the authors he surveys created a worthwhile legacy: “the idea that a house divided might stand after all.”
Where lesser historians cover only views that advance their argument, Walker reports on this debate’s racist and antiracist interlocutors. Rather than read about life under Jim Crow, we read instead about defenses for segregation from white southern authors such as Flannery O’Connor. Walker’s most in-depth of these portraits depicts the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren’s attitudes toward segregation. “Naturally, Warren was prejudiced,” writes Walker of the young poet. “But his prejudice, oddly, made him a pluralist.” At the age of 25, Warren’s Jim Crow sympathies led him to claim that segregation provided an incubator for African-American cultural development. The blues and jazz, for instance, developed in the Jim Crow South. If segregation produced such diverse and valuable cultural forms, argued Warren, Jim Crow was not as bad as Northerners claimed.
While some white Southerners defended racist institutions by glorifying African-American culture, their liberal opponents advocated for integration by denigrating that culture. This strategy was most influential in Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal’s 1944 study, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, which sold over 100,000 copies. There, Myrdal and his contributors painstakingly chronicled the abuses of American racism. Those assaults so stymied African-American development, they claimed, that they made African-American culture a deficient imitation of white culture. The only solution, Myrdal argued, was assimilation and then integration.
Though ostensibly progressive in its unrelenting portrait of racism, Myrdal’s depiction of African-American culture divided black intellectuals. Richard Wright praised Myrdal for accurately capturing the humiliations that Southern racism required African Americans to endure in order to survive. Ralph Ellison, on the other hand, was fiercely critical. “Lynching and Hollywood, faddism and radio advertising are products of the ‘higher’ [white] culture,” wrote Ellison in his review of An American Dilemma. “Why, if my culture is pathological, must I exchange it for these?” Rather than assimilation, Ellison called instead for a measure of autonomy, going so far as to praise the segregated South for producing a “microscopic” yet still meaningful degree of freedom for black culture that had preserved African-American spirituals and folklore. By spurning assimilation, African-Americans would lead the nation forward in healing its “violent, racist, and spiritually bankrupt” past.
Yet the most significant antiracist legal achievement of the postwar era—Brown v. Board of Education’s overturning of segregation in 1954—did so in the name of Myrdal’s assimilationism. Chief Justice Earl Warren cited An American Dilemma in his opinion. Rather than let school segregation stymie African-American children’s and their culture’s development, the Supreme Court argued for integration as assimilation into the dominant culture of white America. This, too, incensed both African-American and white authors. “I regard the U.S. Supreme Court as insulting rather than honoring my race,” wrote Zora Neale Hurston in the Orlando Sentinel after the verdict. She was echoed by James Baldwin, who wrote, in the 1962 essay “A Letter to my Nephew,” later republished in The Fire Next Time, “There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you.”
These radical anti-assimilation positions provided white Southern intellectuals the foundation for defending Jim Crow. In Robert Penn Warren’s 1956 book Segregation: The Inner Conflict, he published interviews with several anti-integrationists, including an African American man who wanted “equality,” not to send his children to white schools. He also recorded an African American scholar who claimed that black Southerners wanted “human dignity.” By omitting advocates for compliance with Brown, Warren suggested African Americans wanted abstract achievements like dignity that the federal government could not offer. Instead, they ought to rely on cultivating good relationships with their neighbors, an inherently small government solution, and the influence of Southern moderates. Nearly ten years later, Warren slightly modified his position in his 1965 book, Who Speaks for the Negro?, arguing there that the federal government ought not mandate a uniform integration policy because African American’s held a variety of opinions on the matter. Of all the interviewed African Americans across the political spectrum, from King to Malcolm X, Warren most lauded Ellison. In his interview, Ellison insisted that African Americans had “achieved a very rich humanity” under the “restrictive conditions” of American racism. Integration, he feared, might destroy that culture through commercialization and assimilation. “The diversity of American life is often painful, frequently burdensome and always a source of conflict,” wrote Warren of Ellison’s views, “but in it lies our fate and our hope.”
This claim that preserving diversity ought to guide America’s future entered the courts through Lewis Powell. An advocate for small government solutions in law journals in the 1960s, Powell transformed a Warrenesque view of diversity into legal precedent when appointed to the Supreme Court in 1971. In the 1973 case San Antonio v. Rodriguez, Powell and the court ruled against the plaintiffs who claimed that tying school funding to local property taxes discriminated by wealth and so violated the equal protection clause. According to Powell, each school district’s ability to “tailor local programs to local needs,” including those created by unequal funds, could overcome wealth discrepancies. The alternative, “national control of education,” threatened to provide the federal government an outlet for propaganda. In the best case, this would homogenize America; in the worst case, it would turn the country totalitarian. Out of Cold War anxieties and Southern pride in local traditions, Powell argued for separate and unequal because it upheld diversity.
Powell’s valuing of diversity over equality motivated his rejection, in the 1978 case Regents v. Bakke, of the argument that affirmative action ought to repay the debt “whites owed blacks for slavery.” The plaintiff sued the University of California, Davis, arguing that quotas reserving positions for minorities discriminated against white candidates. Powell and the other conservatives ruled in Bakke’s favor. Rather than reserve some number of positions for minorities, Powell argued that school admissions offices could consider race “a relevant attribute of a student’s identity” akin to educational experience. (Much of our current legal support for affirmative action still depends upon the precedent set in this case.) In so doing, Powell transformed earlier defenses of Jim Crow by Warren and other white Southerners into constitutional jurisprudence, envisioning America not as a melting pot but as a series of small plates.
Regardless of these prejudiced roots, which are of course not the only roots, Walker argues against multicultural politics and claims that investing in identity-separated institutions, such as black businesses, ought to guide American race politics going forward. Supporting this claim, he cites Ta-Nehisi Coates’s praising of black colleges and the black viewpoint’s ability to insightfully critique America in Between the World and Me. He also refers to The Movement for Black Lives’s platform, which called not for integration but for investment in black businesses and other such institutions. Reparations in this form, Walker writes, would put African Americans “on the same economic plane, but not necessarily in the same classroom, as whites.”
Walker insightfully ties the benefits of these spaces to the unequal conditions that necessitate them. In doing so, he ventures into territory long populated by African-American intellectuals. W. E. B. Du Bois, for instance, described spirituals as deriving from slavery in Souls of Black Folk. In his 1947 introduction to An Appeal to the World!, he elaborated that African American “cultural gifts to America” were “born of slavery, of common suffering, prolonged proscription and curtailment of political and civil rights; and especially because of economic and social disabilities.” This intellectual strain has been revived today, particularly in the work of Fred Moten. “Exhaustive celebration of and in and through our suffering,” writes Moten in his most recent book, Black and Blur, “is black study”: black music, black literature, and black culture. The abuses of racism, from this perspective, are inextricable from and yet subordinate to black culture. The greatest contribution of Walker’s book is its charting of this intellectual tradition’s interrogation of Jim Crow, which is no less bound up in black culture than any other anti-black abuse.
Yet unlike Du Bois and Moten, Walker treats this violence as a premise rather than as a topic worth discussing. This is a shame because Moten’s recent book is most intellectually stimulating when he tries to account for anti-black violence, to describe its relationship to our culture, and to celebrate that culture without either downplaying or valorizing that violence. With no description of Jim Crow’s assaults, Walker’s book denies us the insight of the material conditions undergirding segregation, such as municipal school funding in the South being distributed through white local governments that gave African American schools very little money to purchase textbooks, maintain the premises, and pay teachers. As a result, his call to use these midcentury debates to guide our racial politics going forward cannot explain how we should create autonomous black spaces today. To this charge, Walker might reply that he is writing an intellectual and legal history, not a manual for organizing. This is true, but a history that argues that culture depends upon material conditions and racist institutions ought to venture to describe them.
QUOTED: "Anders Walker's fascinating and compelling account shows that this standard story overlooks the more complex ways in which 'moderate' southern political leaders worked to preserve segregation without defying the Supreme Court and, importantly, without provoking violence."
"The Ghost of Jim Crow makes a contribution on multiple levels. On one level, it tells the story of the implementation of Supreme Court decisions, particularly, of course, Brown v. Board of Education. On another level, it chronicles the political response to the civil rights movement in the South. On a third level, it presents a political history of three smart and sophisticated politicians."
"Overall, the great strength of Walker’s argument is its focus on the quieter, bureaucratic attempts to preserve segregation in contrast to the massive resistance of white extremists and their political allies. It is well written, extensively documented, and very interesting."
"Despite its many strengths, there are a few areas where Walker is less successful. For example, Walker’s emphasis on strategic constitutionalism is both underdeveloped and overstated. The argument is not fully developed because Walker does not make clear what the boundaries are of strategic constitutionalism."
"Governors Coleman, Hodges, and Collins understood that they could effectively preserve segregation not by vociferously opposing Brown but by simply interpreting it in such a way that the laws, institutions, and culture of the white South reduced it to little more than a symbolic statement of political theory. In an era in which symbolism too often triumphs over substance, these are lessons worth repeating. Few have done it as well as Walker."
Anders Walker. The Ghost of Jim Crow: How Southern Moderates Used Brown v. Board of Education to Stall Civil Rights. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. 256 pp. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-518174-6.
Reviewed by Gerald N. Rosenberg (University of Chicago)
Published on H-Law (April, 2010)
Commissioned by Christopher R. Waldrep (San Francisco State University)
Preserving Segregation and White-Washing Racism
The standard story of the battle to implement Brown v. Board of Education (1954) in the South is one of drama and courage, protest and violence. Played out on television screens across the nation and in the national media, the conventional account pits peaceful civil rights demonstrators against repressive southern police and reactionary, racist, white vigilantes. Southern governors and political leaders engage in massive resistance and take dramatic actions to block even token integration. It is an epic tale, with heroes and villains.
Anders Walker's fascinating and compelling account shows that this standard story overlooks the more complex ways in which “moderate” southern political leaders worked to preserve segregation without defying the Supreme Court and, importantly, without provoking violence. Concerned about attracting industry to their states, Walker argues, moderate southern governors “rejected massive resistance and worked hard to assemble a response to Brown v. Board of Education that was peaceful, legal, and attuned to northern sensibilities” (p. 3). Walker’s study examines in some detail how this was done by three southern governors, why it was successful, and how each of the governors moved on to national positions in which they continued to undercut the movement for racial equality. While massive resistance and white violence captured the headlines, Walker argues that segregation and white privilege were more effectively protected and preserved by the quieter actions of so-called moderates. As Walker writes, “the real struggle over civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s might therefore be said to have taken place not between black activists and white extremists, but between black activists and white moderates” (p. 7).
Walker compactly organizes the book into an introduction, four substantive chapters, and a conclusion. The first three substantive chapters are devoted to each of three southern governors, J. P. Coleman of Mississippi (chapter 1), Luther Hodges of North Carolina (chapter 2), and Leroy Collins of Florida (chapter 3). In chapter 4, Walker traces the national careers of the three men subsequent to their serving as governors. Governor Coleman was appointed by President Johnson to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, becoming its chief judge. President Kennedy chose Governor Hodges as his secretary of commerce. And Governor Collins became the first director of the “Community Relations Service,” created by Section 10 of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and designed to mediate local disputes about civil rights. Walker argues that each of these former governors used their national positions to moderate demands for change.
The theoretical framework of Walker’s argument is what he calls, in several places, “strategic constitutionalism” (pp. 51, 72, 111). By this term he means an approach to Supreme Court decisions that seeks to subvert them from within rather than defy them from without. Employing this framework, he understands “moderate resistance to Brown as a distinct type of constitutional politics” which “sought not simply to resist the Supreme Court, but to provide it with a series of opportunities to bow out of the political thicket ... by modifying its Brown holding, thereby influencing its civil rights jurisprudence” (p. ix). In terms of resistance, the argument appears to be twofold. First, moderate governors fully understood the difference between the announcement of abstract constitutional principles by the Supreme Court and the implementation of concrete programs and plans by state and local bureaucracies. For example, Walker finds that Governor Coleman understood that “‘all the Supreme Court can do’... is lay down a rule’ [sic] from within the interpretation of a case, something that did not lend itself to particularly aggressive enforcement” (p. 25). Second, the three governors also believed that without public support, judicial decisions were unlikely to change behavior, and that the white public supported segregation. For example, in a speech in August 1955, Governor Hodges stated that, “when the law runs up against human nature and the popular will, something has got to give, and not infrequently it is the law which is changed or modified” (p. 83). Governor Collins made a similar point, writing that acceptance of “non-segregation” must be “developed in the hearts and minds of the people, and, in spite of the Supreme Court’s great power, these hearts and minds are beyond its reach and control” (p. 95). The governors understood that unless there were changes in white public opinion, segregation could be preserved.
Along with resistance based on the difficulty of implementation and the white public’s belief in racial segregation, moderate governors worked hard to craft laws that would both preserve segregation and pass constitutional muster. As Governor Coleman put it in December 1955, “We can’t preserve segregation by defying the federal government. We must do it by legal means” (p. 12). It turns out that this was a lot easier than it might at first appear. Each of the governors established legal advisory committees to help craft these laws. The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, established in 1956, was charged with using “any lawful, peaceful and constitutional means” to prevent implementation of Brown (p. 29). Governor Hodges, who “took notes” on what Coleman was doing in Mississippi, “worked with the Pearsall Committee, a committee of legal experts charged with devising legalist strategies for circumventing Brown” (pp. 49, 8). And in Florida, Governor Collins “organized a committee of lawyers and judges to recommend ‘any legally sounds steps or any lawful means which may be utilized at any level of government for the maintenance of segregation in the state of Florida [the Fabisinski Committee]’” (p. 99). In all three states, the governors acted on committee recommendations to introduce legislation designed to preserve segregation.
In terms of legislation, governors did two things. First, they encouraged their states to adopt facially neutral laws that would both withstand constitutional challenge and result in the maintenance of segregation. Second, they used the “threat” of integration to strengthen state control over local law enforcement.
Pupil placement laws were among the first legislative acts adopted to preserve segregation. Under these acts, students were assigned to attend schools based on “neutral classifications that could be used as substitutes for race, such as academic performance and moral background” (p. 13). Because black children had been systematically undereducated, and because segregation kept most southern blacks in poverty, these race “neutral” requirements could be relied on to maintain racial segregation. In addition, since the laws never mentioned race, presumably they could meet constitutional requirements. As Governor Hodges explained, the student assignment plan he introduced in January 1955 was a way to prevent “the mixing of the races” and, at the same time, “‘meet the requirements’ of Brown” (p. 49).
All three governors combined this approach with a focus on what they argued were moral deficiencies in the black community that made integration unacceptable. On the one hand, they enacted legislation incorporating the moral standards on which pupil placements laws were based. For example, Mississippi abolished common law marriage hoping it “would bolster the state’s attempt to keep black children out of white schools based on questions of moral background” (p. 41). On the other hand, all three governors worked to change the focus of civil rights from white repression to black inadequacies, “particularly illegitimacy rates” in the case of Governor Hodges (pp. 8, 50). In Florida, Governor Collins advocated “shifting attention away from decades of white repression and onto detailed accounts of black shortcomings, or low ‘standards’” (p. 87). He “framed the problem of integration as a fundamentally black problem [of low standards, morality, etc.], not a symptom of white discrimination or noncompliance with constitutional rules” (p. 95). In sum, Walker argues that in “transforming the legal criteria for segregating students from overt racial classifications to facially neutral, standards-based criteria,... Collins, Coleman, and Hodges all sought to lay the foundations for a new legal idiom through which racial inequality could be maintained in the post-Brown era” (p. 7).
Moderate southern governors believed that the image of the South held in the rest of the country mattered critically to the extent of federal action on civil rights, be it Supreme Court interpretations of southern laws or potential federal legislation. Violence generated by civil rights disputes, either from civil rights protesters or racist white vigilantes, increased the likelihood of northern intervention. Thus, all three governors took steps, sometimes extraordinary, to reduce the likelihood of violence. For example, in North Carolina, Governor Hodges “worked hard to rein in white extremism, particularly the Ku Klux Klan” (p. 51). In both Mississippi and Florida, Governors Coleman and Collins used informers and infiltrators in both black and white groups to keep them informed and lessen the chances of violence (p. 105). While preventing violence is a good thing, Walker stresses that moderate governors were most interested in protecting segregation.
Violence also threatened the success of an important goal of moderate southern governors to improve their states’ economies by attracting industry to them. For example, in 1958 the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission “mailed more than 200,000 letters outside the state to advertise Mississippi as an attractive frontier for business investment” (p. 37). Governor Coleman also “invited a group of newspaper editors and publishers from New England to tour Mississippi in hopes of changing their opinions about the state” (p. 36). Similarly, Governor Hodges believed that “industrialization was the South’s best chance for improving the lots of its [North Carolina] citizens, black and white” (p. 53). As Walker notes, both governors were “deeply interested in drawing northern investment to the South” (p. 83). And in Florida, Governor Collins had “risen to power largely with the support of voters interested in modernizing Florida and attracting business to the state” (p. 113).
What does this have to do with segregation and Brown? A great deal because violence generated by civil rights disputes, either from civil rights protesters or racist white vigilantes, threatened to undermine attempts to attract industry to the South. To make matters worse, local officials, particularly sheriffs and police, had a great deal of autonomy. Thus, all three governors worked to increase central state control at the expense of localities. In other words, Walker argues that “Brown contributed to a modernization and expansion of state power in the South” (p. 4). In Mississippi, for example, Governor Coleman wanted to “‘leave no doubt’ that Mississippi was ‘an outstanding, safe, place,’ where outside investors would feel comfortable ‘to locate and operate’” (p. 27). Believing that one of the “weakest links in Mississippi’s law enforcement machinery was the local discretion of elected sheriffs,” Coleman made “reforming the state’s criminal justice system a central part of his administration” (p. 27). Thus, among other changes, Mississippi reduced the power of local sheriffs, expanded the power of the state highway patrol, and made “innovations in the state’s law enforcement and criminal justice system” (p. 27). Similarly, in Florida, Governor Collins “sought to control unrest by centralizing the state’s police power, coordinating law enforcement agencies, and tracking potential agitators, both white and black” (p. 88).
In sum, moderate southern governors adopted a multi-prong strategy to maintain segregation. The three governors Walker studies “used popular anxiety over integration to expand their executive influence over the state legislative process ... to centralize, and perhaps even modernize, certain aspect of their states’ governmental structure” (p. 160). Along with pupil placement laws, the changes they made in “welfare law, adoption law, marriage law, police jurisdiction, and judicial administration formed interlocking pieces of a complex puzzle aimed at preventing violence, preserving as much segregation as possible, and complying, formally, with the Supreme Court” (p. 4). With an eye to history, Walker concludes that “even as white extremists brought down a Second Reconstruction on the American South, white moderates helped cobble together a Second Redemption” (p.157). In “taking a legalist, moderate path of resistance to the Supreme Court,” moderate southern governors “saw the South as guiding constitutional jurisprudence in favor of a new era of segregation, animated not so much by Jim Crow’s legal body as by its ghost” (p. 15).
The Ghost of Jim Crow makes a contribution on multiple levels. On one level, it tells the story of the implementation of Supreme Court decisions, particularly, of course, Brown v. Board of Education. On another level, it chronicles the political response to the civil rights movement in the South. On a third level, it presents a political history of three smart and sophisticated politicians. Overall, the great strength of Walker’s argument is its focus on the quieter, bureaucratic attempts to preserve segregation in contrast to the massive resistance of white extremists and their political allies. It is well written, extensively documented, and very interesting.
A main thrust of the book is how judicial decisions can be interpreted and given meaning by the larger political process. In great detail Walker shows that Governors Coleman, Hodges, and Collins understood that the meaning of the Constitution is not so much determined in the Supreme Court of the United States as it is in voting booths, legislative and executive offices, and institutions and practices of everyday life. These governors understood that Supreme Court opinions are always malleable and that the Supreme Court has little, if any, ability to change public opinion, to win the hearts and minds of citizens who are opposed to its rulings. Indeed, one lesson of the book is how easy it was to evade the Court’s ruling and preserve segregation, at least until the Congress and the president stepped in with the legislation of the mid-1960s.
Another main argument focuses on politics and three shrewd elected officials who understood much better than the extremists the connections between state and national affairs. They understood that violence was the enemy of segregation, not its supporter. They also understood that while a rhetoric of resistance was doomed to fail, a rhetoric of black inadequacy would resonate with a national white population only weakly committed to civil rights. Finally, all three governors saw the civil rights crisis as an opportunity to expand and consolidate state power. One of Walker’s more interesting findings is how they used the challenge civil rights brought to segregation as a fulcrum for legislation in areas seemingly remote from school segregation and racial equality. Overall,The Ghost of Jim Crow is a very good book.
Despite its many strengths, there are a few areas where Walker is less successful. For example, Walker’s emphasis on strategic constitutionalism is both underdeveloped and overstated. The argument is not fully developed because Walker does not make clear what the boundaries are of strategic constitutionalism. For example, what is the distinction between politics and “constitutional politics”? Is any political action responsive to civil rights considered strategic constitutionalism? What if the governors were responding to political demands generated by the civil rights movement rather than legal ones generated by the Supreme Court? In other words, what kinds of political behavior aimed at maintaining or changing law are an aspect of strategic constitutionalism? In the case of civil rights, to the extent that southern legislators and governors were reacting to the civil rights movement and not the Supreme Court, why were they engaged in strategic constitutionalism rather than good old-fashioned conservative politics? To take a more recent example, are politicians who support or oppose marriage equality in 2010 engaged in constitutional politics or in conservative morality politics? Without further development the category “strategic constitutionalism” lacks critical bite.
Walker’s argument about strategic constitutionalism is also overstated because there was nothing new about using laws neutral on their face to enforce racial discrimination. From so-called grandfather clauses (limiting voting to those who could prove that their grandfathers had the right to vote) to literacy tests to the infamous separate-but-equal laws, adopting neutral laws was a long-established and effective tool of southern legislatures intent on preserving racial segregation in the face of hostile Supreme Court decisions. Southern governors had a well-stocked bag of tools from which to choose. While it is interesting and important to learn which tools they chose, they were acting less creatively than Walker suggests.
By labeling Governors Coleman, Hodges, and Collins “moderates,” Walker, perhaps inadvertently, gives credit where none is due. He runs the risk of downplaying the lengths to which they went to maintain segregation and deny African Americans equality. There was nothing moderate about the legislation they supported and the actions they took. They only looked moderate because they were nonviolent and because they were compared to violent groups like the KKK and governors who supported massive resistance. A more accurate description might have been “nonviolent segregationists.” So, while Walker’s claim that some governors were “animated not so much by Jim Crow’s legal body as by its ghost” is eloquently written, it is substantively overstated. Jim Crow’s ghost was pretty frightening and quite effective at maintaining segregation. Southern “moderate” governors, such as Coleman, were clearly enamored by Jim Crow in all his evil glory.
This concern is more than one of labeling. It goes to the heart of a tension in Walker’s work between viewing moderates as racists or as paternalists who sincerely believed in black progress. Walker never fully reconciles this tension and his argument too often lacks critical distance from what can fairly be called, at best, the governors’ apologist position. For example, in describing the views of the three governors, Walker writes that “they did not perceive Jim Crow to be repressive so much as protective, a bulwark against social ills endemic to black communities” (p. 6). This is a blindness on the governors’ part that is best understood as a deeply ingrained racism that is the product of slavery and the apartheid system of the South. What they were “protective” of was white privilege and deep inequality. Similarly, Walker writes that to understand “southern moderates, and arguably southern resistance to integration generally,” one must understand that “opposition to Brown was not simply based on hate, but also, ironically, on hope--hope that the races could continue to grow, side by side, in a separate, synergistic manner” (p. 6). This is an evil hope, a belief in inherent separateness and difference. It denies African Americans their dignity and humanity and falls back on the belief that somehow apartheid is good for those excluded. If the governors were committed to equality, then they would have worked hard to improve opportunities for African Americans. They did not. As far as Walker documents, the only steps a few of the governors took was to try to co-opt middle-class blacks. And when they, too, demanded, equality, the overtures typically ended. Indeed, Walker documents how the moderate governors placed legal barriers in the way of black advancement. He notes that in addition to all the steps the governors took to maintain segregation, Governors Coleman and Hodges “endorsed relatively punitive legal measures” against the black community as well (p. 111). As for Governor Collins, “not only did he demolish black homes [slum clearance] but also he endorsed a general tightening of welfare restrictions on unwed mothers” (p. 111). These three moderate governors worked hard to maintain segregation and the centuries-old denial of basic rights and humanity to African Americans. The only differences between the actions of these moderate governors and their reactionary brethren was in their condemnation of violence and their less inflammatory rhetoric. If this was the belief of moderates then they were both racist and deeply insensitive. Walker sometimes gives them much too much credit.
Throughout the book Walker stresses the creative stance taken by moderate governors. Rather than resorting to demagogic appeals to interposition, massive resistance, and “never-say-die” segregation, moderate governors worked to lower the political temperature and head off violence. In addition, he documents how they took actions to modernize state criminal justice systems and further develop state power. What difference did any of this make? In terms of preserving segregation, in the short run, moderate governors were about as effective as reactionary segregationist governors. For example, in “moderate” Florida during the 1963-64 school year, approximately 1.5 percent of black school children were in a public school with white students, compared to approximately 1.6 percent of black students in “massive resistance” Virginia. In North Carolina, substantially fewer than 1 percent of black school children were in a public school with white students in the 1963-64 school year, similar to the percentage in violent Georgia. In “moderate” Mississippi, there were no black students in public school with whites that year, in comparison to a whopping nine black students in public school with whites in South Carolina with its call to interposition (Gerald N. Rosenberg, The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change? [1991; repr. 2008], appendix 1, pp. 433-435). These data suggest that in the short run moderate governors were successful at preserving segregation without the violence found in states with extreme governors.
However, in the long run, none of this mattered. By the 1972-73 school year, 80 percent or more of black children in the public schools in the eleven southern states of the old confederacy were in a school with whites. In the three states in Walker’s study, North Carolina (99.4 percent), Mississippi (91.5 percent) and Florida (96.4 percent), the percentages were over 90 percent. In contrast, the percentages in massive resistance Virginia, violent Georgia, and recalcitrant South Carolina, were similar, 99.3 percent, 86.8 percent, and 93.9 percent respectively (See Rosenberg, Hollow Hope, appendix 1, pp. 433-435). Thus, the strategic constitutionalism of moderate governors made little difference in the end.
What about the state-centered reforms of the moderate governors? Here it would be useful to know what was happening in non-southern states at roughly the same time. I suspect that modernization of the criminal justice system, expansion of state power, and reform in general was a nationwide trend. The commitment of all three governors to attract outside industry to their states alone might have provided the impetus for reform.
Finally, the last chapter of the book is the least persuasive. Walker gives too much credit to Collins and Coleman in particular for influencing future events and interpretations of law rather than reflecting a growing reluctance on the part of white America to confront systematic discrimination and inequality. He qualifies his position in places but falls back on it at the end. For example, Walker shows how Collins in effect “sabotaged” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s planned Selma to Montgomery march for voting rights (pp. 137-140). However, it did not much matter because just a week after Collins engineered King’s “turnaround” on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, President Johnson committed his administration to the passage of what became the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (p. 140). Similarly, the course of civil rights was much more deeply influenced by the election of Richard Nixon, his Supreme Court appointments, and anti-bussing events in northern locations, like South Boston and Michigan, than it was by Judge Coleman’s decisions on the Fifth Circuit.
In the concluding pages of his book, Walker reflects on why the conventional history of the civil rights movement in the South overlooks the crucial role played by so-called moderates in maintaining segregation. It does so, Walker suggests, because that serves to bury their segregationist role. “By pushing for a dramatic, almost fictional account of civil rights--one in which nonmanipulative black leaders led a crusade against violent racists,” Walker writes, “moderate whites in the post-civil rights era could endorse the symbolic moral victory of the movement, while erasing their own role in the larger story of resistance to integration” (p. 156). Similarly, the conventional history can also be read as telling a story that celebrates judicial victories while ignoring the difficulty of implementing them. Governors Coleman, Hodges, and Collins understood that they could effectively preserve segregation not by vociferously opposing Brown but by simply interpreting it in such a way that the laws, institutions, and culture of the white South reduced it to little more than a symbolic statement of political theory. In an era in which symbolism too often triumphs over substance, these are lessons worth repeating. Few have done it as well as Walker.