| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Michael J. Klarman. From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality. New York: Oxford University Press. 2004. Pp. xii, 655. $35.00.

Fundamental constitutional change in the United States frequently takes place outside of Article V. At the turn of the twentieth century, racial segregation was a constitutional truism. Only a few libertarian eccentrics questioned very separate but formally equal policies. Fifty years later, in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Supreme Court declared that Jim Crow education was inherently inconsistent with the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Over the next fifty years, the Brown decision acquired sacred constitutional status. Only a few racist extremists presently celebrate formerly unquestioned racial practices. But these constitutional changes are nowhere reflected in the constitutional text. The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, did little to promote racial equality after Reconstruction was abandoned in 1876. Rather, as Michael J. Klarman documents, constitutional law became more egalitarian when American society became more egalitarian. "Constitutional interpretation" in race cases, Klarman details at great length, "almost inevitably reflects the broader social and political context of the times" (p. 5). Brown was a consequence of such liberalizing forces as black migration northward, postwar electoral competition, and the Cold War. No major legal or political decision dismantling separate but equal was a simple consequence of following the rules laid down.

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