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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 February 2017
Although it is obligatory to mark the anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, why it deserves to be commemorated is not necessarily obvious at a distance of fifty years. The decision itself, Richard Kluger made clear in Simple Justice, was unprepossessing and unassertive. Delivered in pedestrian language, “the only soaring sentence,” he rightly pointed out, claimed that segregation could affect Black children's “hearts and minds in a way unlikely to be ever undone” (p. 705). The decision, in fact, emphasized the psychological damage African Americans putatively experienced rather than exposed the hypocrisy of Plessy v. Ferguson's contention that racial classifications were not designed to impose an inferior standing on Black people. Additionally, this emphasis on psychological damage was supported by social science citations which gave top billing to Kenneth Clark, whose dubious research on African-American children's doll preferences had been persuasively critiqued by opposing counsel John W. Davis, and, according to Kluger, had even been “the source of considerable derision” among some of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) lawyers (p. 321). Finally, an implementation decision was deferred until Brown II, which a year later required that desegregation proceed “with all deliberate speed,” limited relief to plaintiffs in the offending districts, left the nature of that relief to the district judges who had ruled against desegregation, and unleashed vigorous white resistance across much of the South.
1 Kluger, Richard Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality (New York: Knopf, 1975); rev. and expanded ed. (New York: Knopf, 2004).Google Scholar
2 According to MacKinnon, Catherine A. “The equality injury… lies not in these children's response to the state practice but in the practice itself.“ MacKinnon, “Concurring in the Judgement,” in Balkin, Jack M. ed., What Brown v. Board of Education Should Have Said: The Nation's Top Legal Experts Rewrite America's Civil Rights Decision (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 137.Google Scholar
3 For a powerful critique of the emphasis on psychological damage in the Brown decision, see Scott, Daryl Michael Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880–1996 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), Chapter 7.Google Scholar
4 State-level suits, however, to some extent have moderated funding inequalities. See Hochschild, Jennifer and Scovronick, Nathan The American Dream and the Public Schools (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), Chapter 3.Google Scholar
5 Board of Education of Oklahoma City v. Dowell (1991), Freeman v. Pitts (1992), and Missouri v. Jenkins (1995).Google Scholar
6 See Frankenberg, Erica Lee, Chungmei and Orfield, Gary A Multiracial Society with Segregated Schools: Are We Losing the Dream? The Civil Rights Project, Harvard University, 2003.Google Scholar
7 Carter, Robert L. “The Unending Struggle for Equal Educational Opportunity,” in Lagemann, Ellen Condliffe and Miller, LaMar P. eds., Brown v. Board of Education: The Challenge for Today's Schools (New York: Teachers College Press, 1996), 26.Google Scholar
8 Tushnet, Mark “Brown v. Board of Education,” in Annette Gordon-Reed, Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 175.Google Scholar
9 Interestingly, while the book received extended reviews in a number of major legal journals, it was not reviewed in the top history journals. It did receive passing and positive notice, however, in both the Journal of American History and Reviews in American History. The movie version of Simple Justice would later receive a relatively long review by Lawson, Stephen F. in the Journal of American History 80 (December 1993): 1194–1196.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
10 See, especially, Patterson, James T. Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
11 Inequalities were especially glaring in rural areas. Kluger, for instance, provides Charles Houston's notes on film he took of schools in South Carolina that poignantly document this. See pp. 164–165.Google Scholar
12 See Tushnet, Mark The NAACP Legal Strategy against Segregated Education, 1925–1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987).Google Scholar
13 Payne, Charles M. I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 392.Google Scholar
14 This does not mean that the relationship between the NAACP and the grassroots was always seamless, however. The organization, for example, tried to discourage the student boycott in Washington, D.C.Google Scholar
15 An especially valuable discussion of Brown II can be found in Wilkinson, J. Harvie III, From Brown to Bakke: The Supreme Court and School Integration: 1954–1978 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), Chapter 4. Wilkinson himself acknowledges the merits of the critics, but in the end concludes that “Brown II can be justified, but just barely” (p. 77).Google Scholar
16 See Balkin, Jack “Brown as Icon,” in Balkin, ed., What Brown v. Board of Education Should Have Said, 8–14.Google Scholar
17 Litwack, Leon F. Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim, Crow (New York: Knopf, 1998), 106.Google Scholar
18 Tushnet uses this phrase a little differently, however. He sees it as limiting resistance to the civil rights movement rather than directly encouraging it. See “The Significance of Brown v. Board of Education” Virginia Law Review 80 (1994): 182.CrossRefGoogle Scholar