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Brown as a Cold War Case
Mary L. Dudziak
| "The United States Supreme Court has given a new definition to unAmericanism," Roscoe Drummond wrote in the European edition of the New York Herald Tribune on May 21, 1954, following the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. "It has ruled that segregated public schools are un-Constitutional—and therefore un-American." The Brown decision was timely, he argued, "because it comes at a moment when our leadership of the free peoples demands the best ... of what America is and can be." Drummond was not alone in calling segregation un-American. When the Topeka, Kansas, Board of Education, whose policies were before the Court in Brown, voted to abandon segregation before the Supreme Court ruling came down, a board member commented, "We feel that segregation is not an American practice." By 1954 many Americans had come to that conclusion about segregation, a widely practiced American institution.1 |
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Hearing speakers in 1954 call segregation "un-American" helps situate the school segregation cases within their cultural context. It was during the first decade of the Cold War, the era of Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, during the heyday of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, that Brown was decided. American history texts often cover the McCarthy era and the Brown case in separate passages alongside each other, as partners in chronology alone, rather than as part of the same story. The case may seem to sit uncomfortably in the trajectory of the legal history of the 1950s. During the McCarthy era, after all, individual rights were restricted, but in Brown, individual rights were powerfully expanded. The Supreme Court decided Dennis v. United States in 1951, upholding prosecution of members of the Communist party based on evidence that they read the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and talked about them. The Court decided Harisiades v. Shaughnessyin 1952, upholding the deportation of immigrants for past Communist party membership. Those cases sit alongside a case thought to be a highlight of American constitutional history. How can Brown and the Cold War be understood as part of the same story, the same historical moment?2 |
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The standard way American legal history texts treat Brown and the Cold War is illustrated by a leading coursebook, Melvin I. Urofsky and Paul Finkelman's A March of Liberty. This excellent text covers the Cold War in one chapter, with readings on Dennis v. United States and other anticommunist cases from the 1950s and related matters. Race is not mentioned at all in the Cold War chapter. The Supreme Court's race cases are discussed in the next chapter, entitled "The Struggle for Civil Rights," which covers the landmark cases leading up to Brown, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) legal effort, and other developments in civil rights law. The federal government appears in the story of Brown in the form of the Supreme Court. The struggle is one by lawyers to change an unjust legal regime. Its denouement is the Court's simple opinion in Brown. That treatment is consistent with a consensus narrative in American lawbooks: Brown is a straightforward story of the triumph of a progressive Court and a progressive Constitution, after a hard-fought battle by lawyers and litigants.3 |
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A dichotomous narrative about 1950s cases flows from this characterization: McCarthyism on one side and civil rights on the other. The anticommunist cases had to do with national security issues, after all, something apparently not at stake in the civil rights context. On closer reflection, however, that categorization will not hold up. |
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