Half a decade after the landmark Supreme Court case Brown vs. Board Of Education struck down Plessy vs. Ferguson's poisonous "separate but equal" doctrine, the U.S. remains a nation divided. Legal segregation was outlawed by the court's 1954 decision, but segregation along class and racial lines remains a fact of American life, a point made early and often in With All Deliberate Speed, a cheap-looking but moving documentary about the end of one form of segregation and the beginning of another.
Shot on digital video that renders faces—particularly those seen in archival photographs—as smudgy blurs, the film documents a series of challenges to Plessy vs. Ferguson, from a student strike instigated by an overlooked civil-rights hero to the efforts of a team of Howard University-trained lawyers. These efforts culminated in a legendary legal assault on segregation, championed by future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP. The highest court in the land ruled that segregation had to be dismantled "with all deliberate speed," a toxically vague phrase that gave integration-phobic Southern whites an excuse to hold out as long as humanly possible. The backlash against the court's ruling was swift, fierce, and violent. As the film reveals, one town even went so far as to shut down its public schools rather than acquiesce to court-ordered integration.
At once inspirational and deeply depressing, With All Deliberate Speed, directed by Hoop Dreams producer Peter Gilbert, is too candid and forthright about the current state of race relations to allow for the sort of cheery, unambiguous uplift favored by civil-rights documentaries. In the film, as in life, the fight for racial and social equality isn't a matter of historical record so much as an ongoing struggle that proceeds with palpable urgency today. With All Deliberate Speed takes comfort and inspiration in the heroism of civil-rights crusaders past, but acknowledges that the battle rages on.