ABSTRACT
In the decade or so before the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision, the South as well as the United States experienced broad social, economic, and political changes. By 1945, the American creed was in the ascendancy as exemplified by Gunnar Myrdal’s best-selling An American Dilemma (1944). The democratic rhetoric of World War II sparked the beginning of a growing aversion to the South’s crude racialism (Myrdal 1944) as part of the U.S.’s “democratic revival” (Sosna 2003). During the war, African Americans were buoyed by the “Double-V” campaign for democracy abroad and at home.1
