With the focus so much on Florida in the days and weeks following November 7th last, it is understandable that some of the more minor issues decided in the US on that day at individual state level should have received little attention. Of these there was none more bizarre, perhaps, than the proposal that appeared on Alabama ballot papers to delete the section of the state constitution prohibiting the passing of "any law to authorize or legalize any marriage between any white person and a Negro or descendent of a Negro". It must be said that the US Supreme Court ruled as long ago as 1967 that such state bans were unenforceable, and there are in fact at least 1,600 mixed race couples in Alabama today. What is interesting, nevertheless, is the voting breakdown on this largely symbolic matter: four out of 10 Alabamian voters - and a majority in some rural white counties - voted to retain the ban, even in the absence of any serious "No" campaign. As one "No" supporter, Mike Chappell from Montgomery, put it, opposition to inter-racial marriage is "some sort of Southern cultural thing. You know just as good as I do that Southern people don't want their children to marry inter-racial. The black people feel that way, too."
Just what exactly this Southern cultural thing is makes for much of the historical background of Douglas Brinkley's excellent biography of Rosa Parks, the black Montgomery seamstress who, one day in 1955, refused to give up her seat on a city bus, as required, to a white passenger and quickly found herself a powerful symbol of the cause of desegregation as it began to enter its most visible and highly mediated phase.
White Southern culture - for all its pretensions to gentility and old world charm - cannot be seen by the outsider in any other way than through its well-documented record of vicious oppression of black people. Having lost a battle over slavery, the South was determined not to lose the long war which was destined to be fought over race equality. Its methods were both constitutional (rigging state laws to ensure blacks would remain a permanent proletariat without political representation) and terrorist (sending the message, through intimidation and murder, that this situation would never change and struggle against it could be costly).
The broad outlines of that terrorism - lynching, Klan burnings, a partial and often corrupt law enforcement and justice system - are well known, mostly through a series of campaigning Hollywood films from the 1960s onwards. What is less well known is the long tradition of black organisation and agitation, going back in fact many generations before Martin Luther King Jnr ever had a dream. At the apex of this movement were inspiring leaders like Sojourner Truth, a mid-19th century emancipationist and feminist, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, and later Ralph Abernathy, King and hence on to Jesse Jackson; behind the leadership was an extensive network of activism based on the black churches and on individual chapters of the main campaigning organisation, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
And then there was Rosa Parks herself. An individual heroine though deeply collectively involved in NAACP politics, she was chosen as the symbol of the desegregationist struggle for her strong personal qualities of dignity, moral uprightness and quiet resolve.
Douglas Brinkley tells Parks's story and that of the wider movement in a measured and balanced way, with proper regard to the interdependence of each with the other. If the modesty and reticence of his subject dictate that the traditional voyeuristic pleasures of the biography are largely absent, Brinkley compensates with the breadth of his view and the soundness of his judgments.
Rosa Parks's great struggle against segregation was successful and she has now, in her late 80s, been accorded a certain celebrity and even sanctity which is respected across most - if not all - borders. And yet, as she poses with a grinning Bill Clinton or gently chides Pope John Paul for his church's sexism, one is sure she knows that the game is not yet exactly over, that over there not far away in Jeb Bush's Florida it is still apparently a far from simple thing for a black man to vote and, yes indeed, that old "Southern cultural thing" may have a little life in it yet.
Enda O'Doherty is an Irish Times journalist