1 This term is borrowed from the title of Gunnar Myrdal's famous work documenting the social and economic conditions of African Americans in the United States in the twentieth century and explicating the effect of systematic racial discrimination. See, Myrdal, Gunnar An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1944).Google Scholar

2 Greenberg, Jack Crusaders in the Courts (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 5,6, 56-59; Kluger, Richard Simple Justice (New York: Vintage, 1977), 126-138; Tushnet, Mark “Organizing Civil Rights Litigation: The NAACP's Experience,” in Ely, Bodenhamer and eds., Ambivalent Legacy: A Legal History of the South (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1984), 171-184.Google Scholar

3 Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483, 495 (1954).Google Scholar

4 Sitkoff, Harvard The Struggle for Black Equality, 1954-1992 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993); Patterson, Orlando The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America's “Racial” Crisis (Washington, DC: Civitas, 1997); Powledge, Fred Free at Last? The Civil Rights Movement and the People Who Made It (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991); O'Brien, Thomas V., The Politics of Race and Schooling: Public Education in Georgia, 1900-1961 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 1999).Google Scholar

5 A growing number of studies address how less famous African Americans responded to white resistance. See, for example, the story of Mae Bertha Carter and her family in Constance Curry, Silver Rights (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin, 1995); Dittmer, John Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); O'Brien, Thomas V., “The Dog That Didn't Bark: The NAACP Strategy in Georgia Before Brown,” Journal of Negro History, 84:1 (Winter 1999): 79-88.Google Scholar

6 For a sampling of scholarly and journalistic treatments see, Harlan, Louis R. Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); Lewis, David Levering W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963 (New York: Henry Holt, 2000); McFeely, William S. Frederick Douglass (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991); Nell Irvine Painter, “Representing Truth: Sojourner Truth's Knowing and Becoming Known,” Journal of American History 81:2 (September 1994): 461-492; McNeil, Genna Rae Groundwork: Charles Hamilton Houston and the Struggle for Civil Rights, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985); Williams, Juan Thurgood Marshall, American Revolutionary (New York: Times Books, 2000); Garrow, David J. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: William Morrow, 1986); Branch, Taylor Parting the Waters: America During the King Years, 1954-1963 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988); Breitman, George ed., Malcolm X Speaks (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990); Siegel, Beatrice Marian Wright Edelman: The Making of a Crusader (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995); West, Cornel Race Matters (Boston: Beacon, 1993).Google Scholar

7 For an excellent illustration of the problem, see Davidson, James W. and Lytle, Mark H. After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection vol. 1 3rd ed., (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1992), 148–175.Google Scholar

8 Gutmann, Amy Democratic Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 95–101; Tyack, David B. The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), 129-167; Spring, Joel Conflict of Interests: The Politics of American Education 3rd ed. (Boston: McGraw Hill, 1998), 161-176; Takaki, Ronald A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), 6.Google Scholar

9 For a lively review of demagoguery before and after Brown, see Sherrill, Robert Gothic Politics in the Deep South (New York: Grossman, 1968).Google Scholar

10 See, e.g., McLauren, Melton A. Separate Pasts: Growing Up White in the Segregated South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987); Boyle, Sarah Patton The Desegregated Heart: A Virginian's Stand in a Time of Transition (New York: Morrow, 1962); Ashmore, Harry S. Hearts and Minds: A Personal Chronicle of Race in America (Cabin John, MD: Seven Locks Press, 1988).Google Scholar

11 Discussing the moral choices, triumphs and failures of historical generations and individuals is, admittedly, a tricky business. An historical interpretation of any activity requires an understanding of the context, premises, assumptions and values of a time different from our own in ways that may be only partially evident in the historical record. See Tosh, John The Pursuit of History, 3rd ed. (Boston: Addison Wesley, 2000), 119–122.Google Scholar

12 Ellis, Joseph J. Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000).Google Scholar

13 Jefferson, Thomas Notes on the State of Virginia, excerpts reprinted in Kurland, Philip B. and Lerner, Ralph eds., The Founders’ Constitution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).Google Scholar

14 Ellis, Founding Brothers, supra note 12.Google Scholar

15 For examples of this scholarship, see Franklin, John Hope From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans, 4th ed., (New York: Knopf, 1974); Harding, Vincent There is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981); Kousser, J. Morgan Dead End: The Development of Nineteenth-Century Litigation on Racial Discrimination in Schools (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Sitkoff, The Black Struggle for Equality; Fairclough, Adam Race & Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915-1972, (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995).Google Scholar

16 Douglass, Frederick “West India Emancipation,“ p. 21–22, The Frederick Douglass Papers at the Library of Congress, Printed Speeches 1857-1859, Series: Addition; accessed on March 6, 2002 at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/doughtml/ Google Scholar

17 Harlan, Booker T. Washington, supra note 6 at 238-265; DuBois, W.E.B. The Education of Black People: Ten Critiques, 1906-1960, ed. Aptheker, Herbert (New York: Monthly Review Press 1973), 77. Also see Butchart, Ronald E. “Outthinking and Outflanking the Owners of the World”: A Historiography of the African American Struggle for Education,” History of Education Quarterly 28:3 (Fall 1988): 333-366.Google Scholar

18 See, for example, Chafe, William H. Civilities and Civil Rights (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982); Kluger, Simple Justice; O'Brien, The Politics of Race and Schooling; Cell, John The Highest Stage of White Supremacy (NY: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Bartley, Numan V. The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South Since the 1950s (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969); McMillen, Neil R. The Citizens’ Council: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971); and the sources cited in note 13.Google Scholar

19 The multi-ethnic dimensions of U.S racial dilemmas are explored in Takaki, Ronald A Larger Memory: A History of Our Diversity, with Voices (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998); Wu, Frank H. Yellow: Race in America, Beyond Black and White (New York: Basic Books, 2001).Google Scholar

20 Klarman, Michael J. “How Brown Changed Race Relations: The Backlash Thesis,“ Journal of American History, 81: 1 (June 1994): 81–118.Google Scholar

21 Closing the achievement gap is important, says Patterson, because of its “long-range social and economic consequences, because academic achievement and credentials have become vitally important in modern American society.” (p. 218). School achievement has been measured primarily through standardized testing. While Patterson correctly sees the school credential as a key to a child's success in later life, he approaches the central instrument to measure school success, the standardized test, uncritically. Although some types of testing have been helpful at improving achievement, other types have been more useful as tools to sort students and limit educational and social mobility. Thus, testing can have negative effects on the school achievement among black children. Patterson's discussion may have been more robust had he included a review of the education literature on testing. For example, works by Oakes, Jeannie Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1985) and Kohn, Alfie The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and Tougher Standards (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), would have been helpful. For uses of tests and other strategies that have improved the achievement of children of color and of poverty, a review of the effective schools research might have helped. See, for example, Ronald R. Edmonds, “Effective Education for Minority Pupils, Brown Confounded and Confirmed,” p. 109-123, in Bell, Derrick ed., Shades of Brown: New Perspectives on School Segregation (New York: Teacher College Press, 1980); Edmonds, Ronald R. “Effective Schools for the Urban Poor” Phi Delta Kappan, 37 (1) (1956): 15-23.Google Scholar

22 Bauman, Mark K. and Kalin, Berkley eds., The Quiet Voices: Southern Rabbis and Black Civil Rights, 1880s to 1990s (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997).Google Scholar

23 We learned little, comparatively, about how liberals, moderates, and conservatives from other minority religions—particularly Quakers and Catholics—reacted to the civil rights movement. A discussion of actions by the Friends Society in Atlanta, for example, would have provided a richer context for understanding Jewish apprehensions and responses to the civil rights movement. We were also left wanting to read more about whether Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox denominations differed in their responses to Brown. Google Scholar

24 Sherrill, Robert Gothic Politics in the Deep South (New York: Grossman, 1968); Talmadge, Herman Segregation and You (Birmingham: Vulcan Press, 1955).Google Scholar

25 See, for example, Glen, John M. Highlander: No Ordinary School, 2nd ed. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996); Teel, Leonard Ray Ralph Emerson McGill: Voice of the Southern Conscience (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2001); Smith, Lillian E. Now is the Time (New York: Viking, 1955); Waldron, Ann Hodding Carter: The Reconstruction of a Racist (Chapel Hill: Algonquin, 1993); Henderson, Harold P. The Politics of Change in Georgia: A Political Biography of Ellis Arnall (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991); Parsons, Sarah Mitchell From Southern Wrongs to Civil Rights: The Memoir of a Civil Rights Activist (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000); Nasstrom, Kathryn L. Everybody's Grandmother and Nobody's Fool: Frances Freeborn Pauley and the Struggle for Social Justice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000).Google Scholar

26 Harris, Cheryl L. “Whiteness as Property,“ in Crenshaw, Kimberle Gotanda, Neil Peller, Gary and Thomas, Kendal Critical Race Theory: Key Writings that Formed the Movement (New York: The New Press, 1995), 276–291; Ladson-Billings, Gloria & William Tate, IV “Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education,” Teacher College Record 97:1 (Fall 1995): 47-68; Mcintosh, Peggy “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” Peace and Freedom, 1988. For a discussion on southern whiteness see Cash, W. J. The Mind of the South (New York: Knopf, 1941). For a discussion that links minority status to being southern and white see Killian, Lewis W. White Southerners, 2nd ed. (New York: Random House, 1985).Google Scholar

27 Bass, Jack Unlikely Heroes: The Unlikely Story of Southern Judges of the Fifth Circuit Who Translated the Supreme Court's Brown Decision into A Revolution for Equality (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), page 81, quoting Woodward., C. Vann Also see Woodward, C. Vann The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 164-166.Google Scholar

28 Gray, Fred Bus Ride to Justice: Changing the System by the System: The Life and Works of Fred D. Gray, Preacher, Attorney, Politician, Lawyer for Rosa Parks (Montgomery, AL: Black Belt Press, 1994), 347.Google Scholar

29 Johnson ruled against black plaintiffs in Gomillion v. Lightfoot, 167 F.Supp. 405 (M.D.Ala. 1958) (dismissing a challenge to the legislative gerrymandering of city boundaries to exclude black voters); Dixon vs. Alabama State Board of Education, 186 F.Supp. 945 (M.D.Ala. 1960)(allowing school officials to expel college students who participated in lunch counter sitins); and National Association for Advancement of Colored People v. Alabama, 190 F.Supp. 583 (M.D. Ala. 1960)(refusing to exercise federal jurisdiction to enjoin the state from refusing to register the N.A.A.C.P. as a corporation). The Gomillion and Dixon cases raised issues that had not been addressed by the U.S. Supreme Court. In each case, the Supreme Court ruled for the black plaintiffs on appeal. Gomillion v. Lightfoot, 364 U.S. 339 (1960); Alabama State Board of Education v. Dixon, 368 U.S. 930 (1961). Johnson, Frank also ruled against civil rights protesters in a case in which plaintiffs sought to enjoin the building of an Auburn University extension campus in Montgomery, Alabama State Teachers Association v. Alabama Building and College Authority, 289 F.Supp. 784 (M.D. Ala. 1968).Google Scholar

30 See Bass, Jack Taming the Storm: The Life and Times of Frank M. Johnson, Jr. and the South's Fights Over Civil Rights (New York: Doubleday, 1993); Peltason, Jack Fifty-Eight Lonely Men: Southern Federal Judges and School Desegregation (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961).Google Scholar

31 Johnson, Frank M. “The Attorney and the Supremacy of the Law,“ 1 Georgia Law Rev. 38 (1966), reprinted in Defending Constitutional Rights. Google Scholar

32 Johnson, Frank M. “Civil Disobedience and the Law.“ Tulane Law Review XLIV (1969), reprinted in Defending Constitutional Rights. Google Scholar

33 Garrow, David J. “Visionaries of the Law: Judge Minor Wisdom & Frank M. Johnson.“ 109 Yale L.J. 1219, 1231 (2000).Google Scholar

34 Ibid.; Garrow, David J. Protest in Selma: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (New Haven: Yale University Press 1980).Google Scholar

35 “School Desegregation Problems in the South: An Historical Perspective.” 54 Minnesota Law Review 1157 (1970), reprinted in Defending Constitutional Rights. Google Scholar

36 Brown v. Board of Education, 349 U.S. 294 (1955).Google Scholar