| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Science for Segregation: Race, Law, and the Case against Brown v. Board of Education. By John P. Jackson Jr. (New York: New York University Press, 2005. xii, 290 pp. $45.00, ISBN 0-8147-4271-8.)
Academic arguments, according to the aphorism, are so vicious because the stakes are so small. But occasionally, the stakes can be quite high, as John P. Jackson Jr. demonstrates in his study of scientists who used their research to give intellectual cover to racist ideologies.	1
Although not as well known as the social scientists who helped dismantle legalized segregation—and whose work Jackson has previously chronicled—the scientists working against them were no less important, if ultimately less successful. In the early chapters, the author focuses on individual racial theorists, eugenicists, and scientists, chronicling their individual careers in intricate, if occasionally dry, detail. He links the early work of notorious "Nordicists" such as Madison Grant and Earnest Sevier Cox with more respectable postwar scientists such as Carleton Putnam and Carleton S. Coon. In so doing, Jackson demonstrates how the early racialist work, which many assumed had been discredited during World War II, lived on in the postwar era. Indeed, in his strongest chapters, Jackson chronicles how racialist scientists sought to counteract both Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and the science that supported it, by doing battle in the courts of law and public opinion. Although both efforts would ultimately prove to be fruitless, their persistence testified to the lasting power of theories of racial inequality.	. . .

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