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Web Site Review
| Separate Is Not Equal: Brown v. Board of Education, http://americanhistory.si.edu/brown/. Created and maintained by the National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Reviewed June 2–11, 2006.The University of Michigan Library Digital Archive: Brown v. Board of Education, http://www.lib.umich.edu/exhibits/brownarchive/. Created and maintained by the University of Michigan Library, Ann Arbor. Reviewed June 2–11, 2006.
Brown@50: Fulfilling the Promise, http://www.brownat50.org/. Created and maintained by Howard University School of Law, Washington, D.C. Reviewed June 2–11, 2006.
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| When Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the landmark school desegregation case, approached its fiftieth anniversary in 2004, many wondered if the commemoration would be an occasion for collapsing Brown into a consensus symbol of racial progress, rather than a moment to reflect on the persistent state of American inequality. The same challenge attends Brown-related Web sites, many of which were constructed with the anniversary in mind. The three sites examined for this review celebrate Brown as a critical moment in civil rights history, but also provide avenues for exploring the limits of American civil rights reform. |
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Photographs of segregated schools were one of the tools used in the litigation campaign that resulted in Brown. Separate Is Not Equal is the place to start for such images. The "History" section of the site is constructed as a series of essays that briefly takes the reader through the history of segregation and details the legal campaign. In addition to having compelling photographs of Charles Hamilton Houston, the original architect of the NAACP's (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) legal strategy to attack the constitutionality of segregation, the site also reproduces some of Houston's original photographs. |
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The Supreme Court consolidated cases from five communities when it decided to hear the Brown appeal. Separate Is Not Equal examines grass-roots civil rights history by following the story through these five communities. It includes images of black and white schools in Clarendon County, South Carolina, Wilmington, Delaware, and elsewhere, and the stories and photographs of local activists. For example, the site tells the story of Barbara Johns, an eleventh grader in Farmville, Virginia, who organized a student strike at her segregated school in 1951 to challenge overcrowding and educational inequality. One hundred and seventeen students sued the school board, and, at the request of NAACP lawyers, changed their case to demand desegregation. Meanwhile, Johns was sent by her family to live with out-of-state relatives for her safety. |
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Since Brown is, in part, a legal story, one of the challenges for sites that wish to serve a broad audience is making the legal story accessible. Because Web sites can allow readers to engage the material at different levels of detail, depending on their interests, they have a better capacity to make the story accessible than do traditional texts. But that capacity is not always exploited. Separate Is Not Equal provides short narrative descriptions of cases, but no links to court opinions. The site's depiction of the history of the five cases consolidated into Brown is superb, if brief, but the site provides no avenues to pursue related topics: for example, it provides little information on cases dealing with segregation of Asian and Latino children, with the exception of a very brief mention in a timeline. |
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