The Bad Old Days isn’t just a recounting of civil rights history, it’s the backstage version. The book traces a decade-long fight for justice in a state still gripping segregation with both hands. Through court cases, local battles, university politics, and plain human stubbornness, Herbert Rothschild Jr. offers a guided tour of Louisiana’s struggle to accept the freedoms guaranteed by law but resisted in practice.

Inside these pages, you’ll encounter the messy reality of school desegregation, the rise of Black political power and the backlash that followed, the absurdity of Louisiana’s racial classification laws, the raw fear behind involuntary psychiatric commitments, the campus conflicts that shaped an entire generation and the everyday people who risked careers, reputations, and safety to push their state into the future.  Its history told with the honesty of someone who lived it.  What this book really reveals is how change happens painfully, slowly, and only because ordinary people decide the old ways can’t stand.