The Rhetorical Road to Brown v. Board of Education: Elizabeth and Waties Waring's Campaign by Wanda Little Fenimore (review)

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• The Rhetorical Road to Brown v. Board of Education: Elizabeth and Waties Waring’s Campaign by Wanda Little Fenimore
• Brian Daugherity

The Rhetorical Road to Brown v. Board of Education: Elizabeth and Waties Waring’s Campaign. By Wanda Little Fenimore. Race, Rhetoric, and Media Series. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2023. Pp. x, 240. Paper, $30.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-4397-5; cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-4396-8.)

Scholars and others interested in the Jim Crow era, southern race relations, South Carolina history, political disenfranchisement, school segregation, and Brown v. Board of Education (1954) will find Wanda Little Fenimore’s The Rhetorical Road to Brown v. Board of Education: Elizabeth and Waties Waring’s Campaign of interest. This book examines the judicial rulings of federal district court judge Waties Waring of South Carolina, along with Judge Waring’s advocacy and that of his second wife, Elizabeth Waring, in the years preceding the Brown v. Board of Education decision. The Rhetorical Road argues that scholars have thus far neglected to fully consider the impact of the Warings’ speeches, interviews, and correspondence in the legal campaign to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Fenimore’s account focuses on the Warings’ “rhetorical campaign” to end racial segregation, which spanned from Judge Waring’s involvement in a notable civil rights case in 1949 to his retirement and the couple’s relocation to New York City in 1952 (p. 5). Using the lens of rhetorical studies and the scholarship of speech and communication, Fenimore argues that the Warings carefully orchestrated a campaign of more than thirty public addresses, interviews, and other actions to bring about the end of segregation and racial injustice. The book also analyzes the motivations of Elizabeth and Waties, their personal and historical context, and reactions to the Warings’ actions.

The Rhetorical Road is an easily digestible and a well-researched account of the Warings’ activism and their historical context. The book is composed of eight chapters, along with an introduction and a conclusion, and is arranged chronologically. There is some overlap between chapters and some repetition, especially when the author seeks to reiterate the book’s principal arguments and impact. The story begins with the beating of Sergeant Isaac Woodard Jr. by police chief Lynwood Shull in Batesburg, South Carolina, in 1946, and the subsequent trial of Shull overseen by Judge Waring. Fenimore argues that Shull’s acquittal, and the trial generally, served as Elizabeth Waring’s “‘baptism in racial prejudice’” and as a motivating factor in the determination of both Warings to publicly combat racial inequality (p. 27). The two began a [End Page 655] process of mutual self-education in civil rights issues and started to speak out publicly against political disenfranchisement, segregation, racial violence, racial prejudice, and discrimination generally. The Rhetorical Road concludes with an analysis of the Brown decision and its implementation, along with a brief discussion of race relations and public education in South Carolina today.

Fenimore incorporates a wide range of primary and secondary sources in her analysis. These sources include correspondence to and from the Warings, archival records, newspaper accounts, legal documents and court cases, and a handful of oral history interviews. In addition, the author was able to locate the full text of four of the more than thirty speeches that the Warings delivered during this period. This primary research is complemented by the utilization of previously published examinations of the Warings, recent publications covering the civil rights era in South Carolina, and analyses of the legal road to Brown v. Board of Education.

As is the case with many biographies, Fenimore’s account is largely lauda-tory of the Warings, and it sometimes ascribes influence to the pair that others may question. This is true of her analysis of the Warings’ opposition to Dixiecrats and arguably of Judge Waring’s dissent in Briggs v. Elliott (1952). However, the author points out shortcomings of both Warings, including Elizabeth’s “condescension and anger” and Waties’s “unwarranted and unin-formed” 1951 remarks about African Americans who supposedly “‘benefit[ed] directly’” from segregation in South Carolina (pp. 163, 162). Fenimore also rightly notes the Warings’ privileged position and how it...