The Hardest Deal of All: The Battle Over School Integration in Mississippi, 1870-1980 is a non-fiction book by Charles C. Bolton, published in 2005 by the University Press of Mississippi.

Documents from the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission and oral histories were used as sources.^[1]

The book presents information in historic sequence.^[1]

The establishment of a segregated schooling system in Mississippi is detailed at the first chapter. The white community's opposition to Brown v. Board of Education is detailed in the midpoint of the book.^[2]

Hassan Kwame Jeffries of Ohio State University wrote that the work "succeeds in" explaining the effect discriminatory practices had on the state's government-operated K-12 education.^[1]

• Jeffries, Hasan Kwame (2007). "The Hardest Deal of All: The Battle over School Integration in Mississippi, 1870-1980". Journal of Southern History. 73 (2): 496–497. doi:10.2307/27649461. JSTOR 27649461. - Located at ProQuest
• Sunderman, Gail L (2007). "The Hardest Deal of All: The Battle Over School Integration in Mississippi, 1870 - 1980". Southern Quarterly. 44 (4): 211. ProQuest 222256758.

• Dennis, Michael (2007). "The Hardest Deal of All: The Battle over School Integration in Mississippi, 1870-1980". American Historical Review. 112 (2): 535–536.
• Moye, J. T. (2006). "The Hardest Deal of All: The Battle over School Integration in Mississippi, 1870–1980". Journal of American History. 93 (3): 949–950. doi:10.2307/4486559. JSTOR 4486559.
• Simpson, William M. (2007). "The Hardest Deal of All: The Battle over School Integration in Mississippi, 1870-1980". Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association. 48 (3): 344–346.

• Bolton, Charles C. (2005). The Hardest Deal of All. University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 9781578067176. - On the Internet Archive