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June 2004
Volume 91, No. 1
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Round Table: Brown v. Board of Education, Fifty Years After |
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Whose Integration Was It? An Introduction |
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Kevin Gaines provides an overview of the reassessments of Brown v. Board of Education and its legacy that appear in our round table, "Brown v. Board of Education, Fifty Years After." More sobering than celebratory, the essays' critical approaches are occasioned by the decision's limited impact and the persistence of segregation in the nation's housing and schools. The essays recover histories submerged by triumphalist contemporary and historical narratives about Brown, histories that account for enduring inequality and the corrosive impact of racialism on American political culture. Ranging far beyond the courtroom, the essays probe the centrality of race in Cold War-era American politics and society and suggest that integration policy often arose from and served the needs of the state more than those of African Americans.
[Full text available at the History Cooperative] |
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Two Cheers for Brown v. Board of Education |
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Fifty years after the Brown decision, the Jim Crow system of legal segregation has been eliminated, but American public education remains racially segregated. Clayborne Carson finds the post-Brown strategy of seeking racial advancement through integration too narrow. The poor quality of many predominantly black public schools still denies many black students the Supreme Court's ideal of educational opportunity as "a right which must be made available to all on equal terms." Arguments over schools' racial composition addressed only one aspect of the problem of unequal education. Carson argues that the Supreme Court and the lawyers for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, who won the Brown case, should have launched a two-pronged attack on racial segregation and unequal educational opportunity in predominantly black schools.
[Full text available at the History Cooperative] |
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Brown as a Cold War Case |
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American history texts often discuss Brown and the Cold War in separate passages, as if they were unrelated to each other. But Mary L. Dudziak argues that Brown is best understood as part of Cold War history. The Justice Department's brief in Brown argued that school segregation undermined U.S. prestige in other countries, harming U.S. foreign relations. Because the Supreme Court had already been grappling with Cold War concerns in its McCarthy-era cases, such arguments were made to a receptive audience. Formal legal change in Brown improved the U.S. image abroad, whether or not actual desegregation followed. This story helps us see that seemingly "domestic" American histories have international dimensions and underscores the value of internationalizing American legal history.
[Full text available at the History Cooperative] |
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The Costs of Brown: Black Teachers and School Integration |
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Have historians overestimated the popularity of school integration among African Americans in the South? That black teachers often had misgivings about Brown has usually been attributed to self-interested conservatism. Adam Fairclough, in contrast, argues that many blacks regarded segregated schools with pride, as community institutions in which they had invested for nearly a century. Segregated schools were as much a product of black agency as of racial discrimination. From the earliest days of emancipation, black teachers had served as community leaders, and many blacks preferred them to white teachers. When the implementation of Brown caused black schools to close their doors and black teachers to lose their status and their jobs, many questioned whether integration had been worth the price.
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
Image courtesy Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection, LC-USF34-046234-D DLC. |
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The Many Facets of Brown: Integration in a Multiracial Society |
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In the era of Brown, discourse about "race relations" centered on whites and blacks, but the bold demographic changes of the past fifty years compel scholars to make sense of a multiracial social order. The ongoing struggle for integration and social justice increasingly depends on the construction of multiracial coalitions. In a pioneering study of such coalitions, Scott Kurashige highlights efforts to build solidarity between black and Japanese Americans in the overlapping spaces the two groups occupied in postwar Los Angeles. Kurashige urges greater attention to the interactions between communities that are transforming American culture and politics.
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
Image courtesy Security Pacific Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.
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Postwar Pluralism, Brown v. Board of Education, and the Origins of Multicultural Education |
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Viewing multiculturalism as a departure from the vision of race relations inspired by Brown, many scholars have traced today's prevailing racial ideology to the black power movement of the 1960s. True to that origin, critics of multiculturalism believe, it promotes separatism, overwrought group consciousness, the suffocation of individualism, and the decline of class politics. Daryl Michael Scott argues that the tendency to conflate multiculturalism with ethnocentrism ignores the continuity between multiculturalism and postwar racial liberalism. Postwar pluralist, integrationist, and therapeutic ideals, not Afrocentrism, produced a new race relations paradigm that laid the intellectual foundation for the Brown decision and served as a bridge to multiculturalism.
[Full text available at the History Cooperative] |
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"The Whole United States Is Southern!": Brown v. Board and the Mystification of Race |
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While its symbolic importance cannot be doubted, Brown v. Board of Education did not transform race relations in the ways its advocates hoped and its critics feared. How is it that so many people on both sides of the issue initially misconstrued the meaning of the decision? Charles M. Payne argues that the initial misreadings of Brown reveal a confused understanding of the systemic character of white supremacy. The national discourse on race at midcentury, which focused on interpersonal relations and law, obscured as much as it revealed, making it difficult to see the similarities between the South and the North. Brown was a strike against segregation as law and ideology, but only a glancing blow against the more tangled problem of racism.
[Full text available at the History Cooperative] |
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From Racial Liberalism to Racial Literacy: Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Divergence Dilemma |
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To understand why Brown has not lived up to its promise, Lani Guinier traces the shortcomings of racial liberalism and calls for a new paradigm of racial literacy. In Brown, racial liberalism triumphed by perpetuating the false belief that integration was possible without significant redistribution of resources and power. Its individualistic, psychological, and prejudice-centered view of the obstacles to equality failed to anticipate the resistance of whites, north and south, who experienced integration as a loss of status. To expose the way racism structures economic and political opportunity, Guinier calls for racial literacy, an ability to read the concept of race as an instrument of social, geographic, and economic control of both whites and blacks.
[Full text available at the History Cooperative] |
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Additional Resources |
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Documents Online:
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Articles |
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Sex, Segregation, and the Sacred after Brown |
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The religious history of the civil rights movement is strangely one-sided. "God was on our side," the activists have said, and scholars have tended to agree. But the opponents of civil rights also used religion in their cause. Jane Dailey argues that historians have underestimated the role of religion in supporting segregation as well as in dismantling it. Viewing the civil rights movement as a contest over Christian orthodoxy helps explain the arguments made by both sides and the strategic actions they took. Dailey examines the connections among antimiscegenation anxiety, politics, and religion to reveal how deeply interwoven Christian theology was in the segregation ideology that supported the discriminatory world of Jim Crow.
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
Image courtesy Special Collections, University of Mississippi. |
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Affirmative Action from Below: Civil Rights, the Building Trades, and the Politics of Racial Equality in the Urban North, 1945-1969 |
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Affirmative action is one of the most controversial legacies of the civil rights era. Thomas J. Sugrue finds the origins of workplace affirmative action in civil rights activists'postwar struggle to break open Philadelphia's white-dominated construction trades. Through antidiscrimination initiatives, protests, and counterprotests in the urban North, local civil rights activists and construction unionists initiated a battle over employment discrimination that eventually made its way onto the national stage. Placing affirmative action into the history of the northern freedom struggle, Sugrue brings together the often artificially separate histories of grass-roots activism and national-level policy making.
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
Image courtesy Temple University Libraries, Urban Archives, McDowell Bulletin Collection. |
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Exhibition Reviews |
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| Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site; Birmingham Civil Rights Institute; and National Civil Rights Museum, by David A. Zonderman
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
"Rivers, Edens, Empires: Lewis and Clark and the Revealing of America;" and "Beyond Lewis and Clark: The Army Explores the West," by John Rennie Short
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
Castillo de San Marcos National Monument, by Robert Lee
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
"The Price of Freedom: Anthony Burns and the Fugitive Slave Act," by Martin Blatt
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
"The Chinese American Experience in Minnesota," by Erika Lee
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
"Remembering Generations: The Greek Immigrant's Journey," by George A. Kourvetaris
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
Texas Prison Museum, by Alex Lichtenstein
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
Image courtesy National Civil Rights Museum. |
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Book Reviews |
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A complete listing of book reviews is available here. |
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Web Site Reviews |
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Web site reviews are also available here.
The Plymouth Colony Archive Project, by John Saillant
[Full text available at the History Cooperative] Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy, 1719-1820, by Aaron Sheehan-Dean
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
Who Killed William Robinson? Race, Justice, and Settling the Land--A Historical Whodunit, by Stephen Robertson
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
The Duluth Lynchings Online Resource: Historical Documents Relating to the Tragic Events of June 15, 1920, by Scott Ellsworth
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
United States Senate Historical Office, by Drew E. VandeCreek
[Full text available at the History Cooperative]
American Memory Learning Page, by Peter Seixas
[Full text available at the History Cooperative] |
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Letters to the Editor
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 On the cover: This photograph appeared in How about a Decent School for Me?, a pamphlet regarding the desegregation of public schools between 1942 and 1957. Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Visual Materials from the naacp Records, LC-USZ62-122614. See "Round Table: Brown v. Board of Education, Fifty Years After," p. 19.
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