|
|
|
Previews
Kevin Gaines provides an overview of the reassessments of Brown v. Board of Educationand 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.
|
|
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.
|
|
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.
|
|
| 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. . . . |
There are about 804 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
