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Brown V. Board of Education: a Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy

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Brown V. Board of Education: a Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy Brown V. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy JAMES T. PATTERSON OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS BROWN v. BOARD OF EDUCATION ALSO BY JAMES T. PATTERSON America’s Struggle Against Poverty in the Twentieth Century (Harvard University Press, ) America in the Twentieth Century: A History (Harcourt Brace, ) Great Expectations: The United States, ‒ (Oxford University Press, ) The Dread Disease: Cancer and Modern American Culture (Harvard University Press, ) Mr. Republican: A Biography of Robert A. Taft (Houghton Mifflin, ) The New Deal and the States: Federalism in Transition (Princeton University Press, ) Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal (Kentucky University Press, ) PIVOTAL MOMENTS IN AMERICAN HISTORY Series Editors David Hackett Fischer James M. McPherson This page intentionally left blank BROWN v. BOARD OF EDUCATION A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy JAMES T. PATTERSON 1 2001 1 Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota´ Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris Sa˜o Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Copyright ᭧ 2001 by James T. Patterson Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available ISBN 0-19-512716-1 135798642 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper To my students and colleagues at Brown University, especially my long-time friends Howard Chudacoff, Jack Thomas, and Gordon Wood This page intentionally left blank CONTENTS Editors’ Note xi Preface: Contesting the Color Line xiii 1 Race and the Schools Before Brown .............1 2 The Grass Roots and Struggling Lawyers...........21 3 The Court Decides ................... 46 4 Crossroads, 1954–55 ................... 70 5 Southern Whites Fight Back ............... 86 6 Striving for Racial Balance in the 1960s ..........118 7 The Burger Court Surprises................147 8 Stalemates........................170 9 Resegregation? ......................191 10 Legacies and Lessons...................206 Appendix I: Key Cases 225 Appendix II: Tables and Figures 227 Notes 237 Bibliographical Essay 263 Acknowledgments 269 Index 271 This page intentionally left blank EDITORS’ NOTE his volume is the first in a series called Pivotal Moments in Amer- Tican History. Each book will examine a large historical problem through the lens of a particular event and the choices of individual actors. The design of the series reflects the current state of historical writing, which gives growing attention to the experiences of ordinary people, increasing sensitivity to issues of gender, class, and ethnicity, and deep interest in large structures and processes. We seek to combine this new scholarship with old ideas of history as a narrative art and traditional standards of sound scholarship, mature judgment, and good writing. James T. Patterson’s Brown v. Board of Education is an appropriate choice for the beginning of our series. Much of America’s history has been made in its courts. In this republic of laws, judicial decisions have often become events of high moment—none more so than the two rulings in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that came down from the Supreme Court on May 17, 1954, and May 31, 1955. Few rulings have ever been so extravagantly praised and condemned. The historical literature has also been deeply divided. Richard Kluger’s Simple Justice (1975) and J. Harvie Wilkinson’s From Brown to Bakke (1979) saw Brown as strongly positive. In the 1990s, academic revisionists argued that Brown did more harm than good: the ‘‘backlash’’ thesis. James T. Patterson, one of the leading historians of modern America, looks again at the subject from a longer perspective and in a larger context and sees the story afresh. A theme of our Pivotal Moments is the important of contingency: xi xii • Editors’ Note people making choices, and choices making a difference, often in un- expected ways. The history of Brown is a sequence of contingencies in that sense. It began with Oliver Brown and many other black parents who chose to fight for the education of their children, with high courage and often at heavy personal cost. Many other people made critical choices as the case progressed. Chief among them was Thurgood Mar- shall, head of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, later Solicitor General of the United States, and the first black justice on the Supreme Court. The choices that followed in Washington, local courthouses, and the streets were often surprising. Nobody could have predicted that Earl Warren would have united a broken court, or that Lyndon Johnson would have become the staunchest presidential supporter of integration, or that the conservative Burger court would have decided to give strong support to Brown, or that the second black justice on the Court would have invoked the Brown case in opposing affirmative action. The book is also about the consequences of this long chain of events: a backlash of unimagined power, and yet strong evidence of sweeping change—the end of Jim Crow, a revolution in attitudes toward race, and a great expansion of opportunity for American children. James T. Patterson shows that the legacy of Brown has been fiercely contested from the day it was handed down. That it continues to be contested today shows us just how pivotal a moment it was. David Hackett Fischer James M. McPherson PREFACE Contesting the Color Line hortly before the Supreme Court announced Brown v. Board of Ed- Sucation of Topeka on May 17, 1954, the historic decision that struck down state-sponsored racial segregation of America’s public schools, Chief Justice Earl Warren decided to spend a few days visiting Civil War sites in Virginia. His black chauffeur drove him south out of Wash- ington, D.C. At the end of the first day Warren checked into a hotel where he had made advance reservations. He assumed that his chauffeur would locate lodgings of his own. The next morning, however, he realized that his chauffeur had spent the night in the car. Warren asked why. ‘‘Well, Mr. Chief Justice,’’ the chauffeur replied, ‘‘I just couldn’t find a place—couldn’t find a place to...’’ The Chief Justice had heard enough: it was obvious that there were no decent accommodations to be had for a black man in that racially segregated region. ‘‘I was embarrassed, I was ashamed,’’ he said later. He cut short the trip and returned immediately to Washington.1 Warren recalled this experience as evidence of the formidable edifice of racial discrimination in the United States in 1954. He identified Brown, a unanimous ruling, as a huge stride in the direction of knocking it down. Many contemporaries agreed that the Court had courageously contested America’s durable color line. Thurgood Marshall, chief at- torney for the black families who launched the litigation, had fought against racist school practices for many years. When Warren delivered the decision, Marshall could not restrain his joy. ‘‘I was so happy,’’ he xiii xiv • Preface said of his feelings during a long night of celebration, that ‘‘I was numb.’’2 Marshall, however, had struggled long enough against racial discrim- ination to know that Brown would arouse furious controversy. That it did—no ruling in the twentieth century was more hotly debated. The complicated issues that Brown tried to resolve in 1954 still torment Amer- icans half a century later. This book explores these issues and tries to identify the most important legacies of the decision in our own times. Many black people shared Marshall’s elation in 1954. ‘‘The Supreme Court decision is the greatest victory for the Negro people since the Emancipation Proclamation,’’ Harlem’s Amsterdam News exclaimed. ‘‘It will alleviate troubles in many other fields.’’ The Chicago Defender added, ‘‘this means the beginning of the end of the dual society in American life and the system...of segregation which supports it.’’ The writer Ralph Ellison captured the sentiments of many when he wrote a friend, ‘‘The court has found in our favor and recognized our human psycho- logical complexity and citizenship and another battle of the Civil War has been won. The rest is up to us and I’m very glad....What a won- derful world of possibilities are unfolded for the children.’’3 People like Marshall and Ellison had ample grounds for expressing grand expectations such as these, for many other ‘‘possibilities’’ already seemed ‘‘wonderful’’ to Americans by 1954. Only recently the United States had helped to defeat militaristic enemies and had marched to the forefront of the ‘‘Free World’’ in the Cold War. It was by far the most powerful country on the planet. Though it had failed to win the Korean War, and though a Red Scare soured political life, America—that is, white America—was in most respects a stable, optimistic culture, and it was becoming an ever more fantastically prosperous nation. Its boister- ously confident experts, predicting wonders in science, technology, and economic growth, seemed capable of conquering all frontiers. In a cul- ture of high expectations, the considerable betterment of race relations, too, appeared not only possible but probable. For hopeful liberals in 1954, Brown promised to become only the first step toward reaching that long elusive goal. Brown did seem likely to have huge social consequences. In 1954, seventeen southern and border states required the racial segregation of public schools, and four others—Arizona, Kansas, New Mexico, and Signs at an ice cream parlor and a bus station, Durham, N.C., 1940.
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