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"The Whole United States Is Southern!": Brown v. Board and the Mystification of Race
Charles M. Payne
We are not only culturally confused, our confusion makes it difficult for us even to imagine our confusion.
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| —Lawrence Goodwyn |
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To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.
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| —George Orwell |
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| Brown v. Board of Education (1954) is becoming a milestone in search of something to signify. It would be going too far to think of the case as an early example of a media event, as more hype than substance, but even with a half century of perspective, it is difficult to say with confidence just why Brown has seemed to matter so much. School desegregation on a broad scale does not seem to be feasible public policy. In 1962, after eight years of experience with Brown, one writer observed that at the then-current pace, Deep South schools could be completely desegregated in just a bit over seven thousand years. Some of the progress made toward desegregation in the 1960s and 1970s has eroded. When desegregation does occur, the social and academic outcomes are not so uniformly positive as was once hoped. The oft-repeated idea that Brown inspired more civil rights activism is plausible, but no one has made more than an anecdotal case for it. Indeed, a better case can be made for Smith v. Allwright, the 1944 Supreme Court decision outlawing the white primary. In 1940, the percentage of all southern blacks who were registered to vote was estimated at below 5 percent. In 1947 the percent registered jumped to 12 percent, by 1952 to 20 percent. The increase seems directly attributable to the black voter registration drives that occurred across the South following Smith. The decision energized the modern civil rights movement and ended black political exclusion. As for Brown, in perhaps the most important revisionist critique of the decision, the legal scholar Michael J. Klarman argued that strong links exist between the decision and the mobilization of white southern resistance to racial change.1 |
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If the legacy of Brown seems clouded now, its significance seemed perfectly clear to many audiences in 1954. Time magazine called it the most important Supreme Court decision of all time, excepting only the Dred Scott decision; the Chicago Defender saw in the decision the beginning of the end of a dual society, while the more extreme defenders of segregation saw virtually the end of Western society. What does it mean that so many commentators, coming at it from so many different directions, got it so wrong? What does it mean that supporters and opponents of segregation alike overestimated the impact of Brown? What does that imply about the level of understanding of the racial system? Clearly, part of the miscalculation involved a widespread tendency to overestimate the power of the law to make change and to underestimate the degree of racial intransigence outside the South. Those miscalculations, though, may reflect a larger pattern. What the initial misreadings of Brown tell us is that by midcentury, national discourse about race had become thoroughly confused; the nature of racial oppression had been effectively mystified. A part of that mystification process was the reduction of the systemic character of white supremacy to something called "segregation." The historian John W. Cell points out that the term is "profoundly ambiguous and self-contradictory" and contends "that this state of ambiguity and contradiction was skillfully and very deliberately created. Confusion has been one of segregation's greatest strengths and achievements."2 |
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