|
|
|
Book Review
| James C. Cobb, The Brown Decision, Jim Crow, and Southern Identity, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005. Pp. 93. $22.95 (ISBN 0-8203-2498-1).
|
| James C. Cobb's The Brown Decision, Jim Crow and Southern Identity is the product of his delivery of the Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lectures in 2004, the fiftieth anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. |
1
|
|
At the outset Cobb informs the reader that his assessment differs from the "general negativity and dismissiveness toward the accomplishments of ... the Brown decision" in academia. Cobb pithily argues that those who see the Brown decision as nothing more than the inevitable nail in the coffin of a social system that was at odds with economic modernization have failed on two counts. First, they neglect the historic record that demonstrates that Jim Crow was an integral part of the economic development model of the new south. Second, because of that first error, they fail to understand how remarkable the work of civil rights activists was, a group who made segregation an impediment to, rather than a manifestation of, social order, and therefore untenable. |
2
|
|
In the first chapter he traces the intellectual and social foundations of Jim Crow. The social factors he identifies as contributing to its eventual end are World War II, the Cold War, and the New Deal. However, he cautions that we should not read everything in these contextual elements. For example, he challenges the interest convergence theory of Derrick Bell that accounts for the demise of Jim Crow in the battle of the global powers by arguing that anticommunist hysteria often extended to those who would call for African American rights. Indeed, the civil rights movement was, according to Cobb, unequivocally a socially transformative movement on its own merits. Brown, then, is critically important because it provided motivation, a sense of possibility, and even moral authority for the civil rights activists. Cobb cites both Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr.'s statements about the opinion to make this point. |
3
|
|
What appears to be the greatest weakness of the book, minimal ground level detail, is perhaps merely a framing question. It says little of how Brown impacted economic or educational outcomes for African Americans. (For such analyses the reader would be better off looking to work such as that of legal scholar Sheryl Cashin or educational historian James Anderson.) This book instead reads as an intellectual history. With occasional and nuanced personal reflections, the author immerses himself in the conversations about the ideas and ideals of Jim Crow and the historiography of the institution. He then criticizes the Brown detractors of various stripes, especially Michael Klarman, author of From Jim Crow to Civil Rights (2004), both for their misunderstanding of how we got to Brown, and for their minimization and even mischaracterization of the impact of the opinion. In a phrase, according to Cobb, Brown matters. |
4
|
|
Interestingly, the strongest and most distinctive argument in the book is about the role of the Brown opinion in African American intellectual history. Cobb says that Brown allowed for a reframing of to whom the South would belong and allowed African Americans to recover southern identity. To make this argument he offers a tight literary history of the second half of the twentieth century. Indeed, anyone who reads African American literature from a scholarly perspective will immediately see how his argument illuminates the literary renaissance that occurred from the 1970s to the turn of the twenty-first century in African American letters as the product of social as well as legal history. In concluding the book with a discussion of the debates over southern iconography, in particular the confederate flag, he both presents the ideological conflicts at work over political priorities in the post civil rights era and succinctly provides an example of how deeply intertwined culture and identity are with law and policy. This is no small feat. That it is done with such modesty and subtlety both endanger the book (it may be surpassed in the Brown bibliography) and yet make it an extremely useful model of interdisciplinary legal history. |
5
|
| Imani Perry
|
| Rutgers University |
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|