| Book Review | Law and History Review, 21.2

Book Review

James T. Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. 285. $27.50 (ISBN 0-19-512716-1).

James T. Patterson begins his book on Brown v. Board of Education with a poignant vignette. He tells the story of how Earl Warren, during a trip to Richmond to visit Civil War sites, became outraged to learn that his black chauffeur could not find lodging in the city. This revelation, Patterson explains, provided the Chief Justice with tangible, incontrovertible evidence that Jim Crow had to go.

It also provides an excellent introduction to a nuanced study not only of Brown but its limitations, and in particular its inability to crack deeper structures of racial inequality in the United States. These structures, rather than the product of irrational racial prejudice in the South, were in fact integral components of America's larger social and economic formation. Patterson does much to shed light on this formation and to show that, as much as Jim Crow might have angered liberals like Warren, it did not repel them enough to call for fundamental changes in American society. Indeed, it did not anger them enough to let go of their black chauffeurs.

Just as Patterson deftly captures Warren's limousine liberalism, so too does he convey white America's conflicted stance towards race. Eager to appear reconstructed, America proved reluctant to pay the price necessary for real reform. Eager to make an example of the South, Northern and Western whites proved remarkably conservative, quickly seeking refuge in the suburbs when their racial liberalism started to boomerang back on them.

Relying on an impressive swath of secondary sources, Patterson weaves together parallel historiographies not only of the Supreme Court, but also the civil rights movement, massive resistance, white flight, suburban sprawl, and Republican politics. This sets the stage for an impressive argument, one that focuses not only on struggles to implement Brown in the South, but across the country. Indeed, Patterson's final hundred pages provide a compelling narrative of myriad, subtle rollbacks in civil rights gains during the 1970s, 80s, and 90s at the national level. Not only does Patterson capture the incessant subterfuges of southern segregationists, in other words, ones that lasted well into the 1980s and beyond, but he deftly expands his lens to show how these same segregationists found fervent allies in northern cities like Chicago and in liberal states like California.

Patterson's expansive, national view points the way to new avenues of historical inquiry, and in particular to broader, more expansive understandings of Brown. Not simply a notable Supreme Court case, the ruling constituted something of a battlefield flare, a political event that illuminated a much larger struggle for economic, political, and even cultural resources. This struggle, undergirded by the hegemonic dominance of racial ideology in America, manifested itself in a tension between black activism and white resistance, between the rhetoric of tolerance and the reality of America's racialized social hierarchy.

Patterson makes this case most elegantly in describing San Antonio v. Rodriguez, the Supreme Court's 1973 decision that could have potentially revolutionized the funding of public schools, removing it from the larger matrix of private property. Such a decision, although a radical step towards actually achieving social and by extension racial equality, would have controverted American capitalism by coercing the rich into providing equal education for the poor. This would have challenged the superficial liberalism of many upper middle class whites, the likes of whom, as Patterson shows, supported racial equality as long as it did not detract from the education of their own children, as long as it was cost-free.

Radical history? Not necessarily. In fact, Patterson could go much farther in his critique of Brown. He could draw more heavily than he does, for example, on the scholarship of the Cold War, much of which suggests that Warren was in fact busily whitewashing America's image not out of sympathy for his chauffeur, but in a desperate bid to counter Soviet propaganda. Patterson could also be more critical of men like Daniel Patrick Moynihan who, himself the product of a broken home, blamed black problems on the collapse of the black family. This strategy, although ostensibly well-meaning, was perhaps more complex than Patterson lets on, a tactic that enabled the future senator from New York to retain his credentials as a liberal while blaming blacks for their plight. This feat landed Moynihan, who began his career as an ambitious low-level bureaucrat in Johnson's Great Society, a starring role in the racially conservative Nixon administration.

Patterson's mercy toward Moynihan, as well as his moderation toward the Court, does not detract from his overall argument. In fact, it lends credibility to his critique. By skirting controversial theories, Patterson makes his claim that Brown has left behind a troubled legacy even more powerful. Indeed, his work is a deftly written, judicious analysis of the Supreme Court's difficulties in orchestrating racial equality, one of America's most elusive, and perhaps for that very reason, grandest expectations.

Anders Walker

Yale University

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