The Slow Undoing

"Stephen Lowe shows how citizen activists and their lawyers used direct action and litigation to undermine South Carolina's version of segregation through a careful and detailed examination of what actually happened in the federal courts."—Mark Tushnet, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law emeritus, Harvard Law School

"This is a book of great import, combining first-rate narrative and incisive analysis. Lowe provides the essential details that create the larger discourse of the national fight against Jim Crow. There is elegance and power in this critical story."—Orville Vernon Burton, author of Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court

"Lowe's work makes a powerful case that South Carolina has and continues to be the front line of Black struggles for equality and justice and an exemplar of White supremacy's dogged hold on American life and institutions."—Peter F. Lau, author of Democracy Rising: South Carolina and the Fight for Black Equality since 1865

"In this engaging and deeply researched book, Stephen Lowe explains that in the Palmetto State the federal courts served as the primary field of conflict where Blacks and Whites battled over competing visions of justice and law. Lowe's analysis of how "Freedom of Choice" was dismantled during the mid-to-late 1960s further distinguishes this work."—Andrew H. Myers, University of South Carolina Upstate

"The Slow Undoing is a worthy read for anyone who wants to deepen their understanding of the systemic impediments to civil rights for African Americans."—South Carolina Libraries

"Lowe's primary goal in this book is the important task of reconstructing these struggles. And on this account, the book makes an important contribution to the historiography of the Black freedom stuggle of the South."—Christopher W. Schmidt, Chicago-Kent College of Law, Journal of Southern History

Winner of the 2021 George C. Rogers Jr., awarded by the South Carolina Historical Society